The Fog Remake – Horrible!
By stephanie - Friday, December 8th, 2006
In watching the DVD extras after the film, I couldn’t help but wonder why the dorky screenwriter, wearing amber-shaded glasses indoors during his interview, got paid some sort of insane 6-figure amount for this botched remake. This has to rank up there with one of the worst remakes ever, built upon one of the worst screenplays ever.
And it’s not even bad in a good way.
It’s been a while since I’ve seen the original version of The Fog, but it starred a young Jamie Lee Curtis, and that already gives it a huge thumbs up.
The original was creepy and spooky and left stuff to the imagination in a good way. The remake – starring “Shannon” from Lost (Maggie Grace) and that guy who plays young Clark Kent in Smallvile – was a bloated, over-the-top piece of crap. The story was redone, and not for the better. The acting was just…eeehhh…why is that Maggie Grace a star anyway? A piece of cardboard would have had better delivery than she did in this film.
The end result? It wasn’t scary. Not one bit. Most of the film involved shots of green and white fog rolling around (which was sadly the better part of the film), while our heroine pieces together the story of the origins of the spooky death fog.
We are subjected to endless flashbacks to the original “crime,” which removed any mystery and made the film seem like a bad trip through the Pirates of the Caribbean ride.
The special effects detracted from – and did not add to – the horror in any way. Modern filmmakers need to learn that a softer touch is often better when it comes to horror. (Try The Sixth Sense. That film scares the crap out of me. That’s because it’s actually kind of realistic. A ghost I can’t see could be standing right behind me as I type this…)
The ending was just the worst – not that this will ruin an already awful film for you – but it was The Fog meets The Shining. In a bad way.
In order to wipe my memory clean of this travesty, I will be renting the original soon and watching it again. If you haven’t seen the remake or the original, save yourself the time and see the 1980 version. It is a zillion times better.
December 14th, 2006 at 1:35 pm
I thought the original was rather dumb and annoying, but at least, it WAS creepy! I wouldn’t have minded a remake to make it BETTER, but clearly, this didn’t do that.
Mir
April 4th, 2007 at 1:09 pm
Couldn’t agree more about the remake. The worst of the worst. The original is a minor classic because its just SCARY. Every time I see that scene of the fog ghost knocking on the guy’s bay door with his MEAT HOOK (eeep!) I instantly think of my own dorr and what I would do if there was a rap on the door in the middle of a foggy night. It works because its played straight, you can relate to it, and everything isn’t explained to you in bite-sized pieces. Its so much scarier when bad things happen and there’s really no explanation. No explanation means no defense, and that’s scary.