 Tagline: What you can't see won't hurt you... it'll kill you! Lock your doors. Bolt your windows. There's something in The Fog! The FOG brings with it the souls of the dammed. When the fog rolls in... the terror begins! This moody horror classic from master of terror John Carpenter (The Thing) and producer Debra Hill (Escape from L.A.) stars Adrienne Barbeau (Swamp Thing), Jamie Lee Curtis (Halloween), Tom Atkins (Halloween III: Season Of The Witch), Hal Holbrook (Creepshow) and Janet Leigh (Psycho). Don't get lost in the fog... -- They seaside village of Antonio Bay is about to learn the true meaning of the word "vengeance." This seemingly perfect town masks a guilty secret... a past steeped in greed and murder. Exactly 100 years ago, a ship was horribly wrecked under mysterious circumstances in a thick, eerie fog. Now, shrouded in darkness, the long-dead mariners have returned from their watery grave to exact a bloody revenge. Storyline: The centenary of the small seaside town of Antonio Bay, California is approaching. One hundred years ago, the wealthy leper Blake bought the clipper ship Elizabeth Dane and sailed with his people to form a leper colony. However, while sailing through a thick fog, they were deliberately misguided by a campfire onshore, steering the course of the ship toward the light and crashing her against the rocks. While the townsfolk prepare to celebrate, the victims of this heinous crime that the town's founding fathers committed rise from the sea to claim retribution. Under cover of the fog, they carry out their vicious attacks, searching for what is rightly theirs. Written by Mark Harding Reviewer's Note: Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, July 25, 2013 John Carpenter relays an anecdote about what sparked his idea for The Fog in the commentary ported over from the previous DVD release included on this new Blu-ray release. Carpenter and producer Debra Hill recount having visited Stonehenge on a blustery day filled with the famous English mists, at which point Carpenter turned toward Hill and asked, "What if there were something in that fog?" Having just returned from a visit to Stonehenge myself, on a crystal clear blue day where the iconic monument was in fact overrun with so many different avian species I felt I had wandered into a traveling road show version of Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds, I have to assume that this only goes to show that while Stonehenge will invariably suggest the horror genre to different visitors, the particulars may well be dependent on that day's weather. This is obviously said in jest, but it provides a nice insight into how a transitory moment of observation can be woven into such an unlikely film. Carpenter and Hill might have used that moment to craft a film of zombies emerging from the British mists and marauding through Salisbury Plain (hey, I need to patent that concept), but instead that seminal idea was fleshed out (no pun intended) to become a fun little ghost story that takes place not in England but on the similarly fog enshrouded coast of Northern California. The Fog combines the fanciful spark of inspiration of "killer fog" with some quasi-historical accounts of an intentionally scuttled ship and the after effects of the wreck on nearby inhabitants who arranged for its demise in order to plunder its gold. The Fog crept out in the wake of Carpenter's overwhelming success with Halloween, and so expectations were perhaps unreachably high for the film. The Fog has not enjoyed quite the reputation that Halloween has, but looking back on it now from the vantage point of some 30-plus years, it holds up surprisingly well and delivers a number of significant chills along the way. Like any good ghost story, The Fog purports to be a tale told around a campfire (with a brief cameo by John Houseman as the yarn spinner), and Carpenter and Hill also further hedge their bets by including a brief quote from Edgar Allan Poe which talks about "dreams within dreams". Considering the carnage which is about to follow, that might be amended to "nightmares within nightmares", but in fact The Fog has a rather playful ambience to it even as it doles out its scares. Hill mentions in the commentary how around $200,000 extra had to be spent on the film after principal photography had wrapped in order to generate more scares, since it's undeniable that The Fog, unlike Halloween, relies much more on mood than graphic blood and guts to achieve its thrill ride. The (fictional) coastal community of Antonio Bay is about to celebrate the centennial anniversary of its founding when a number of mysterious things start happening. All sorts of inanimate objects start taking on lives of their own and the town's local priest, Father Malone (Hal Holbrook) is almost killed in his office when a large piece of stone falls from the ancient church walls and lands right where he had been sitting a moment earlier. Malone notices the dislodged stone has revealed a cubby hole that he never knew existed, and in that hideaway he finds an old journal from his grandfather revealing some unseemly facts about Antonio Bay's founding. There's also an ominous warning about vengeful spirits that quickly lets us know that all these bizarre phenomena afflicting the town do indeed have a malevolent intent. As with many tiny coastal communities, Antonio Bay has a number of colorful inhabitants. Aside from Father Malone there's local disc jockey Stevie Wayne (Adrienne Barbeau), who broadcasts from a scenic lighthouse, trucker Nick Castle (Tom Atkins), who picks up comely hitchhiker Elizabeth Solley (Jamie Lee Curtis), and town doyenne Kathy Williams (Janet Leigh), the force behind the centennial celebration. Stevie has a young son Andy (Ty Mitchell) who provides an important but initially unrecognized clue to the shenanigans when he brings home a piece of driftwood inscribed with the word Dane on it. Only slowly do the town's residents come to discover that their town was founded by a bunch of literal gold diggers who intentionally sank a ship named the Dane, killing its crew and taking its gold. It may have taken a little time, but there are some very angry spectral entities back for a visit, and they're not in a good mood. "An eye for an eye" then plays out (in one case kind of literally), as the six former crewmen of the Dane decide to kill a half dozen of Antonio Bay's residents as just desserts. In a way that single fact is The Fog's single biggest problem, for if the ghosts are only going to kill six people, it simply becomes a numbers game once the carnage starts, as the audience counts down to "revenge achieved". The fact that the film starts out with a trio of gruesome murders means there really aren't that many more killings in store, one way or the other. What does work in the film is a stifling mood of isolation, along with some admittedly hoary but still pretty effective chills, including a supposed corpse coming alive on an autopsy table (with, of course, the first signs of life occurring in the back half of the frame while Elizabeth, who's also in the room, has her back toward the table). What sets The Fog apart from its typical ghostly kin is the fact that film is as much a morality tale as it is a traditional thriller. There's a karmic element to The Fog that actually provides at least as much suspense as the "who's going to die next?" subtext does. The Fog is probably a tad cheesier than Halloween, which may account for its less lustrous repurtation, but it's a fun ride nonetheless, one that weaves a well wrought story out of a moment's observation. The Fog has never quite attained the cultural cachet that Carpenter's Halloween has, but it's a very entertaining and often fairly spooky entry in Carpenter's filmography. There's an undeniably silly aspect to some of the scares, but the moral fiber of the film is where it derives some unexpected power from. This new Collector's Edition features excellent video and audio and comes jam packed with great supplements. Highly recommended. Cast Notes: Adrienne Barbeau (Stevie Wayne, KAB station's DJ), Jamie Lee Curtis (Elizabeth Solley), Janet Leigh (Kathy Williams), John Houseman (Mr. Machen), Tom Atkins (Nick Castle), James Canning (Dick Baxter), Charles Cyphers (Dan O'Bannon), Nancy Kyes (Sandy Fadel, Kathy Williams's helper [as Nancy), Loomis]), Ty Mitchell (Andy Wayne), Hal Holbrook (Father Malone), John F. Goff (Al Williams), George 'Buck' Flower (Tommy Wallace), Regina Waldon (Mrs. Kobritz), Jim Haynie (Hank Jones), Darrow Igus (Mel Sloan). IMDb Rating (04/09/16): 6.8/10 from 45,075users IMDb Rating (11/29/05): 6.8/10 from 4,034 users
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