Common Sense Note
Parents should know that this horror movie includes several jump scenes, lots of spooky darkness, and ghosts. None of these are especially effective, but as they are accompanied by a pushy soundtrack, they might make some viewers start. Characters drink, smoke, and make lewd comments; girls in bikinis dance provocatively for a young man with a video camera; and a pretty girl in her underwear is troubled by ghosts in a dark house. A young couple showers together (close-ups of golden wet body surfaces, not particularly explicit) and then has sex, in similar soft golden light and facial close-ups. Victims in flashback scenes are lepers, and their faces are disfigured; their ghost versions are skeletal and ghastly. Violence is mostly penetrative, by glass shards and knives (one character is stabbed in his eyes). Characters are also drowned or nearly drowned; a car tumbles off a cliff into the sea; the fog seeps and creeps; buildings, ships, and bodies burn; and one of the ghosts keeps pounding thunderously on doors.
Families can compare THE FOG to other horror movies and ask their teens why these types of movies have such appeal. Why do most horror movies follow a predictable pattern?
Common Sense Review
Reviewed By: Cynthia Fuchs
"We gotta go!" Poor Nick (Tom Welling) says this a few too many times in THE FOG, and every time he does, you're likely to be thinking the same thing. Rupert Wainwright's dull remake of John Carpenter's spare 1980 version maintains a steady, slow pace, never building to a climax that matters. Though the flesh and blood characters' primary opponents are vengeful 19th-century ghosts, they're more egregiously inconvenienced by the clunky script, which explains too much plot and leaves out too much characterization.
Nick lives on Antonio Island off the Oregon coast, where self-important local mucky-mucks -- including the mayor (Kenneth Welsh), Mrs. Williams (Sara Botsford), and the miserable, perpetually drunk Father Malone (Adrian Hough) -- are inaugurating a memorial to the town founders. An early, misty flashback reveals that these founders were in fact dastardly sorts, the precise and grisly nature of their crime to be revealed anon (though not anon enough -- the saga grinds on for an hour and 40 minutes). The use of flashbacks counteracts the low-budget creepiness of Carpenter's film, which left explanations of the ghosts' vengefulness to viewers' imaginations. Here, the founders' brutal murders of a company of lepers who pay them for use of their land leads to one of those "Indian burial grounds" set-ups that cheesy horror movies so love to exploit: the lepers' ghosts are unleashed by a wayward anchor, and come to kill the founders' descendants.
This anchor belongs to Nick, who runs a tourists' fishing business, handed down from his dad, who is, of course, a founder's descendent. Also in this unlucky group, Nick's erstwhile girl Elizabeth (Maggie Grace), rolls back into town after an apparently hasty departure; "You left without a note," complains Nick after he picks her up on a lonely cliffside road (this parallels Elizabeth as unrelated hitchhiker in the first film). Turns out that she's been plagued by nightmares that connect her with the founders' crime; her efforts to decipher the mystery include Googling, interviewing craggy town elders, and near drowning by grabby seaweed.
Elizabeth's story should be connected with everyone else's, but she spends much time alone (her painfully limited performance consisting of reactions to noises and effects). Nick's involvement is even more passive, except when he valiantly drives through the assaultive fog to rescue the young son of his sometime lover, DJ Stevie (Selma Blair, whose restrained reaction to the fog seeping into her car only demonstrates that she profoundly outclasses this movie).
No surprise, the film closes with a big confrontation between townies and ghosts, framed by the somewhat antic commentary by the one outsider, Nick's first mate and best friend Spooner (DeRay Davis), the only black character in sight. Though Spooner initially works overtime to "fit in" with the white folk, whooping and drinking and training his video camera on bikinied girls during a nighttime cruise with Nick's dead-meat cousin, he's eventually quite eager to dissociate himself. When the townies are informed, "The sins of the fathers are visited upon the heads of the children," Spooner rightly shouts, "Keep my father out of this. I'm from Chicago!"
Teens would be better off watching the 1980 original or a creepy thriller like The Ring.
Rate It!
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Sexual ContentGirls in bikinis and underwear attacked by ghosts; brief, golden-lit shower-then-sex scene. |
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ViolenceAssaults involve penetrations (knives, glass shards); the ghosts kill a dog, leaving its mangled body on a pier. |
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LanguageMild, including "hell," "damn," and "ass." |
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Social BehaviorBrutal murders in the past lead to angry ghosts' return, in search of revenge. |
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Drug/Alcohol/TobaccoSmoking and drinking (a priest is drunk every time he's on screen). |
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