Rating of
2/4
"The Mist" by Yojimbo
Yojimbo - wrote on 03/02/12
A strange mist descends over a small town and a motley band of its inhabitants seek refuge in the local supermarket. Based on a *sigh* Stephen King novella (is it that time of year again?) The Mist was written for the screen and directed by Frank "The Shawshank Redemption" Darabont, and his skillful eye and feel for narrative pacing means that The Mist has a sense of quality missing from many King adaptations. Some of the sequences have just the right amount of tension and some of the encounters with the creatures are genuinely creepy and suspenseful in a way that reminded me of John Carpenter in his hay day. But once again, the Achilles hell is Stephen bloody King himself. The story is shit. The talents of the director and a decent if slightly uninspired set of performances are the only things that obscure the fact. All the ideas are rehashes of familiar old cliches and you can never escape the fact that the creatures are nothing more than badly designed computer generated cartoons. I can enjoy a daft creature feature as long as it has a sense of humour, but King's dour self importance once again means that the film takes itself painfully seriously despite the clearly ludicrous premise. And as far as the famous ending goes, I would also have to point out that if horror is an allegory or has an intelligent sub-text then a comment about futility can be very powerful (as we see in Romero's films) but when its done purely for shock value it is nothing short of empty and meaningless. Kudos to the technical side of things, but Stephen King is nothing but a hack churning out second hand junk and this is yet more proof of the fact.
