The Carpenter Kick continues.
Three years after John Carpenter set the night on fire with Halloween, The Fog, his return to the horror genre, earned lukewarm reviews and is generally considered one of his lesser efforts.
People forget that Carpenter came up helming made-for-TV movies with micro budgets, like Someone’s Watching Me, and Elvis, a surprisingly good Presley biopic from 1979 starring a young Kurt Russell, who was nominated for an Emmy.
Carpenter’s theatrical movies, which tend to feature desperate characters trapped together against unearthly enemies, are similarly economical affairs with superior practical effects by master technicians.
The Fog once again forces his cast indoors as vengeful spirits from a doomed sailing ship descend on a coastal California town on the night of its 100th anniversary.
Speaking of master technicians, makeup and effects whiz Rob Bottin even gets to step in front of the camera as Blake, the leader of the ghostly mariners.
Antonio Bay, California is the setting, as citizens excitedly prepare for the upcoming centennial celebration. Sad-sack sermonizer Father Malone (Hal Holbrook) discovers a diary written by his grandfather, detailing a treacherous deal offered by town founders a century earlier.
It seems that Blake, a well-to-do leper and his flaky followers, were determined to settle near the still-undeveloped Antonio Bay, even sealing the deal with a generous amount of gold.
Instead of welcoming their new neighbors with casseroles, locals lured the leprous crew’s ship onto the rocks with a false campfire, sending the scabrous sailors to a watery grave.
Once the founders lifted the lepers’ loot from the wreck, they had sufficient capital to incorporate and become an actual spot on the map.
To no one’s surprise, this original sin results in sword-wielding spooks rolling into town via a glowing fog bank on founders’ day to slay six unlucky souls to match the number of drowned crew.
The Fog isn’t exactly scary, but it’s got a ton of atmosphere, the 44-year-old effects are decent, and Carpenter keeps the action—and heads—rolling while notching the tension with minimal dialogue and unforeseen events, such as dissonant symphonies of car horns going off at night.
Carpenter’s cast is filled with reliable talent, including, Holbrook as the guilt-ridden Father Malone, Adrienne Barbeau (his wife at the time) as sexy DJ Stevie Wayne, Jamie Lee Curtis as a free-spirit hitchhiker, and her mom, Janet “Psycho” Leigh as the town mayor.
As is par for the course, Carpenter crams everyone into a church in the final scene to keep the spectral swabs at bay, but they only leave after Father Malone returns most of their gold and gets beheaded for his trouble.
And so, order is restored, because you can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs.
This is definitely a case that calls for an enhanced re-release with better picture quality, because The Fog is a very dark movie, and I don’t mean thematically.
Note to auteurs: If you plan on a lengthy career don’t use cheap film stock. It can can dim the enthusiasm of the newly curious.
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