Great concepts are wasted on mediocre and subpar films more than anyone would like to think. And this could happen even to the great film masters who are supposed to know better. One example is John Carpenter and his disappointing 1980 horror film The Fog.
The plot is set in Antonio Bay, a small town on the coast of Northern California, which is about to celebrate the centenary of its founding. Unbeknownst to most of its inhabitants, the town owes its existence to a shameful crime committed by six men who deliberately sank a ship carrying lepers on the way to a colony in order to plunder their gold and use it to build the town. Father Malone, played by Hal Holbrook, the local priest and grandson of one of the town’s founders, discovers this terrible secret after a piece of masonry falls from the wall. This is one of many strange and increasingly disturbing events preceding the celebration, which also include the brutal killings of three fishermen on a trawler caught in a strange fog. These events spark the interest of Stevie Wayne, played by Adrienne Barbeau, a DJ and owner of a radio station operating from the local lighthouse. The night before the anniversary, a strange fog begins to approach the town, and something within is determined to avenge a hundred-year-old crime at the expense of its perpetrators’ descendants.
Fog is a natural phenomenon tailor-made for the horror genre. It is fascinating and frightening at the same time, especially to an audience that likes to project its fear of the unknown into something shapeless, omnipresent and seemingly unstoppable. To have fog as the actual adversary the protagonists must fight is a good idea, especially for a horror genre master like John Carpenter. In this film, however, it is reduced to a simple gimmick in a rather classic ghost-revenge story where the actual villains turn out to be zombie-like lepers. Much of the mystery is revealed before the finale, which feels like an uninspired rehash of Night of the Living Dead. Even worse is the script, which, among other things, adds an unnecessary hitch-hiker character only to include Jamie Lee Curtis – star of Carpenter’s previous ground-breaking film Halloween – in the cast. The action in the finale is split between two locations, with the fate of the characters rather predictable to anyone who can count.
Not everything about The Fog is bad. Carpenter is a superb director, and he skilfully uses the 2.35:1 anamorphic format to make his rather low-budget film feel grander than it actually is. His wife Adrienne Barbeau is also good in the unusual role of a Final Girl who uses radio broadcasts to explain what is happening to the audience. However, The Fog, with its predictable and underwhelming finale, still gives the impression of a wasted opportunity. This view, partially accepted by Carpenter himself, has in recent years been abandoned by many hardcore cinephiles and horror fans who have ‘rediscovered’ it as a great film. This reappraisal was mostly driven by comparisons with the truly awful 2005 remake, which made this 1980 disappointment look unjustifiably better.
RATING: 4/10 (++)
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