The Fog Details

[Highly rated reviewer]

A poor movie, watch the original instead!

A poor movie on the whole, but not as terrible as many reviews have made it out to be. John Carpenter’s original wasn’t a classic itself, and left room for improvement (as well as an interesting story to work with), but this ultimately unnecessary remake does nothing to improve on or add to the original. If you have seen the original film, then there is no reason to watch this largely uninteresting and lifeless remake. There is very little tension, no scares, and no real horror (and any attempt at tension or scares can be easily telegraphed in advance). The special effects are somewhat better than the original, but that is to be expected given the bigger budget and new technology and techniques available. The characters are 1-dimentional, and are not developed enough for the viewer to care about any of them. You don’t feel the relationship between Tom Welling and Maggie Grace’s characters, or any real connection between any of the characters really. Tom Welling does what he can with what little he is given to work with., Maggie Grace and Selma Blair are just going through the motions for alot of the film, DeRay Davis is poor (and you soon begin to hope his character will die), and Tom Welling and Maggie Grace look lost at times and look like they wish that they were making another film! Tom Welling(Smallville), Maggie Grace(Lost & Oliver Beene), and Selma Blair(Hellboy) are all capable actors, but the Fog just doesn’t give them anything interesting to work with! The movie takes about an hour to get going and for something interesting to happen, but at that point it is too little too late really (as you have been bored senseless in the first hour)! The remake attempts to give more of an explanation of what is going on and more of a background story than the original did, and it has an interesting (if unexplained) ending, but in the end the movie is just so slow and uninteresting for the most part that it is really not worth watching – watch the original Fog movie instead.

Worth the attempt but poorly realised

The horror scenes were almost completely lifted from the original. This meant no real 'jump out of your seat moments' if you were familiar with the 1980 version. Horror bits that have been updated fall a bit flat. The additional 'plot' was interesting but poorly realised. The characters lacked substance and struggled from plot point to plot point - though I'm not convinced this was the actors fault. All this said I watched the whole thing - not quite poor enough to be funny and not atmospheric enough to be great - but it entertained me.