The Fog - R
Common Sense Note
Parents need to know about the violence, as ghostly sea zombies slash into living folks with their cutlasses. This happens in quick, "shock" edits, which are careful to leave the worst of it to your imagination. Still the director's favorite trick seems to be a nice, shiny blade suddenly popping out of a victim who's been run clean through. The movie is still too violent for kids and tweens.
The murders are supernatural retribution for a terrible crime committed 100 years ago. Revenge is a common theme in horror movies (heck, in any movies. And in most of life), but here the victims seem particularly innocent and remote from the foul deed of their ancestors. You could talk about this and the Biblical idea of `the sins of the fathers' and apply it to real events. Putting aside the killer undead lepers for a while, should people a century in the future be held accountable for such atrocities as Pearl Harbor? The Holocaust? September 11? Slavery?
Common Sense Review
Reviewed By: Charles Cassady, Jr.
If it had a little less violence, sex, and profanity, THE FOG could pass for a "Goosebumps"-style chiller strictly for youngsters, like the campfire ghost story that opens the narrative.
An old sailor (esteemed thespian John Houseman) in the California coastal town of Antonio Bay tells spellbound boys of a shipwreck 100 years earlier, and the restless dead mariners at the bottom of the sea. The yarn turns out to be a whitewash of what really did happen here, with the terrible truth revealed as the community looks forward to celebrating its hundredth anniversary.
At the stroke of midnight, glass breaks all over town, and walls tremble. Out at sea a trawler is surrounded in weird, glowing fog. Fishermen on board see a ghost ship and are slain by its ragged, shadowy crew bearing cutlasses. At the town church, hard-drinking Pastor Malone (Hal Holbrook) inspects a new hole in the wall and finds a diary from the milestone year of 1880. It says an island colony plagued with the dreaded disease leprosy was planning to move to the shore and paid the founders of Antonio Bay in gold for the privilege. However, six prominent townspeople treacherously lit a false signal-fire on the beach and lured the ship to wreck on the rocks instead.
Now, as night falls, the dead men are back for revenge, to claim the lives of six locals -- or whomever they can just get their clutching claws on. Those chiefly menaced include hitchhiking artist Elizabeth (Jamie Lee Curtis), Nick (Tom Aktins) the older man who picks her up (and sleeps with her), and area socialite Kathy Williams (Janet Leigh, real-life mother of Jamie Lee Curtis).
The ghouls -- never clearly seen -- lurk in a luminous fog that can move against the wind. Stevie (Adrienne Barbeau), a single mother running her one-woman radio station from a scenic lighthouse, stays on the air during the attack. Like some ghost-buster Weather Channel, she warns her listeners which way the malevolent fog is turning next.
Fog of a different sort seems to have muddled the shapeless script, co-written by director John Carpenter, who was considered a wonder-worker of suspense and unease when this was made thanks to the success of his previous feature, the 1978 Jamie Lee Curtis shocker HALLOWEEN. Though THE FOG has a few bona fide jump-out-of-your-seat moments, it's also got ridiculous and logic-defying details viewers of any age should see right through. Sometimes the living dead materialize wherever the fog seeps in, sometimes a locked door or window stops them (kids especially don't like it when the rules of the fantastic are flagrantly violated). And the stolen gold that supposedly built the town is still all stashed in one place. At least campfire ghost stories are generally shorter and don't give wide-eyed kids much time to ponder such irregularities.
In-joke character names are derived from horror movies/literature and John Carpenter's moviemaking associates (Arthur Machen, Dr. Phibes, Dan O'Bannon), but the talented cast, in thinly-sketched roles, plays things entirely straight-faced, unlike later horror movies (the NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET series being a good example) where dark humor was abundantly added to the terror. THE FOG ends on a rather grim note of inevitable fate that's like the slam of a coffin lid. There are horror books (especially those of Stephen King) that bother to question the morality of a revenge-curse, but very few movies do. One pretty intense horror film from ten years later that did, in a limited way, is PUMPKINHEAD. THE FOG was remade in 2005.
Rate It!
| Content | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| CS | adults | kids | ||
Sexual ContentHitchhiker Elizabeth and motorist Nick are shown in bed together the morning after they meet. Other men make mildly suggestive remarks about their attractions to Stevie. |
 |
 |
|
|
ViolenceIndiscriminate killing by swords and gaffing-hooks, and victims including a grandmotherly old-lady babysitter. One dead body seems to have had its eyes poked out. No extreme blood-spatter gore, at least. |
 |
|
|
|
LanguageThe F-word is uttered once. |
|
|
|
|
Message |
|
|
|
|
Social BehaviorThere's no one you would want your kid imitating. |
 |
 |
|
|
Commercialism |
 |
|
|
|
Drug/Alcohol/TobaccoLots of beer consumed, and Pastor Malone is an alcoholic. |
|
|
|
|
