THE FOG (1980)
Reviewed by Jerry Saravia
Following the coattails of "Halloween," writer-director John Carpenter delivered an atmospheric ghost story called "The Fog." What he forgot to do was inject a story of some semblance and weight. It is a ghost story all right, largely transparent.
The movie begins with John Houseman telling a campfire story to a group of kids. His tale is of a ship known as the Elizabeth Dane that shipwrecked in the town of Antonio Bay 100 years earlier. Apparently, there were lepers aboard and they were lured away by the townsfolk, causing them to crash the ship among some rocks. This was not enough for the townsfolk - they stole all the gold on board. Now it is 100 years later and something wicked this way comes. An illuminated fog bank moves in to the town that causes glass breakage, car alarms to go off, gas stations to malfunction, TV sets to turn on by themselves - in short, hysteria has moved in to the town. Nothing is explained and the next day, life moves on. Only the night before, the local priest (Hal Holbrook) finds his grandfather's journal behind a broken rock formation in his church! A local worker (Tom Atkins) picks up a wandering girl (Jamie Lee Curtis) and suddenly their car windows break! And the local deejay (Adrienne Barbeau), who works at a radio station in the lighthouse, starts seeing a fog bank settling in and then disappearing! Her son finds a coin that turns into a wooden block with a written warning!
I was definitely compelled by the first half-hour of "The Fog." But then it is all much ado about nothing. We discover there are ghosts that travel by fog and they were the lepers that were killed a century earlier. Their purpose is to kill the descendants of the town's founding fathers, the ones who stole the gold, yet they randomly kill unrelated citizens of Antonio Bay. And most of the movie centers on that endlessly glowing, rolling fog bank, and watching people prepare for the inevitable. And we get to hear Jamie Lee Curtis scream once, thanks to one of the oldest cliches in the book - a corpse toppling over from nowhere! There are the customary unseen loud knocks on wooden doors! And we get endless scenes of Adrienne Barbeau staring out into the horizon from her lighthouse, watching the fog getting closer and closer. Boo! And Janet Leigh is on hand as the mayor of the town, along with cast members from Carpenter's "Halloween" such as Nancy Loomis as Leigh's secretary/aide and Charles Cyphers as a lonely meteorologist. These actors flow in and out of the narrative without a registering an ounce of personality. Looks to me like everyone is in a foggy state of mind.
"The Fog" has all the hallmarks for a frightening ghost story, but none of the soul or the spirit. I barely cared about any of the paper-thin characters, and when Jamie Lee Curtis can't even keep me awake in a John Carpenter film, you know you're in trouble.
