Summary:
In a small town off the coast of Oregon, terrible things happened in the past.  The main characters are all direct relatives to the founders of the town (we know this because the movie tells us for no apparent reason within the first four minutes).  Nick Castle (great name, huh?) stirs up some shit on the ocean floor, and then ghosts start showing up in the fog during the night.  The token black guy freaks out, and of course is the only survivor of the first night's invasion to have experienced it firsthand.  Oh, and there's a little boy in it, too, who speaks some words of wisdom about what the ghosts want, but no parents are around to hear it.

Review:
I knew this movie was pretty much going to suck. What I didn't know was that it was going to suck this much! I would laugh if it wasn't for the fact that movies like this should never be made, and they typically make their money back, which warrants more movies just like it. I'm a fool, and I watch them anyways, but there are times when I'm pleasantly surprised, which is why I go and see them with low expectations.
Honestly, I don't even know what to say about this remake of the somewhat quaint John Carpenter movie The Fog. That wasn't any legendary movie, either, but at least it was an original. Sadly, this new version had material to work with, but still managed to be utter and complete shit. Imagine that. First of all, the exposition in the first ten minutes of the movie is so painfully out of place that I couldn't help but already feel antsy sitting in my theater seat. Then, we are introduced to The Token Black Guy, who brings the 'comic relief', meanwhile posing an affront to the human race, and inducing groans in a tidal wave of synchronosity with the poor unfortunate souls in the theater. They should have killed him when they had the chance, but they didn't do it, because... well, no reason, really. I mean, if he DID die - if he wasn't in the movie at all - it wouldn't have changed the sequence of events. It just would have saved the extra headache of his time onscreen.
After the first night, the fog goes away, because there can't be a fog during the DAY! Oh, no! Even though a fog can be just as dangerous and frightening during daytime, it seems like these moviemakers think otherwise. Horror only happens at night, don't you know that? Since we only see a badly backlit quote unquote "GHOST SHIP" the first time around (did you not also wonder why the ghosts had a floodlight shining so prominently to illuminate the ship? Silly, I say! Silly!) that wreaks havoc on Nick's boat where Token Black guy and Nameless White Friend had a couple ho's gettin' ready to do the jiggy with, there just HAD to be another NIGHT when the fog returns.
Why is the fog with ghosts terrorizing the town, you may ask? Hell, I don't really know for sure. They're not too clear on that. They tried so hard to tell us that the main characters are direct descendants of the founders of the town, and then there are some artifacts found on the seashore by a seemingly homeless beach bum who has knowledge of the sea and the city's history beyond even the movie's script can allow. "If you touch this watch, things will never be the same," he says to one of the actresses. She touches it, and it starts ticking again. OooohHhhHHH, that's FREAKY! What DOES this guy know, huh?
Same goes to the preacher who also has a slight penchant for the spirits (haha, I kill me), but he doesn't drink much onscreen. This is a PG-13 movie, after all. The funny thing is, many of the supporting characters seem to know exactly what's going on, and even though people are dying left and right, they refuse to say what it is that's the cause, or how to stop it. Instead, they act morose and fold into themselves, causing further frustration for the movie viewer.
The real kicker was when Elizabeth so oddly (must have been a supernatural force) slips on a plank, drops a camera containing evidence of Token Black Guy's innocence - which no one spent the time to look at themselves over the past few hours, which I find to be wierd - into the water, almost drowns, and as she pulls herself up out of the water, she pulls away the loosest bricks on the wall to reveal an old diary. She clings to this diary with the cryptic intuition of answers being in the book. In fact, when night time comes around and the fog starts stirring shit up again, she says "the answers are in this book." The real kicker is, they aren't in the book!
All of this silliness finally comes to an end. The ghosts look kinda neat. We get many a superfluous flashback to 1860, where all this shit started in the first place. There's an ending that at first made me go "what the FUCK is going on?!", but then I realized that the answer was more simple than I was expecting. I was expecting a very simple and moronic conclusion, but this was even more ridiculous than I was asking for. Plus, all of the diary entries, the artifacts, the fog killing people - everything was basically worthless fluff that has virtually no relevance to anything except a series of puzzle pieces that have no connection to anything. Well, there IS a connection, but it's like a blind man with a cover over his eyes throwing darts in every direction imaginable in a room with no lights on, but has furniture in it. Eventually, shit is gonna stick. So, take all the shit from frame one up until the end, and somewhere along the way you can fill the empty holes with the aforementioned shit, and there you will be able to connect the dots and put the puzzle pieces together.
The answer will look like a preschooler's first day with fingerpaints, but there WILL be an answer to the reasoning behind the movie's conclusion. It's just not pretty.

So, what did I really think about The Fog? I think it's one of the worst movies I've seen all year, and I want my ten dollars back. It should be against the law to concoct such a worthless movie as this, and then to make people pay to see it.

GRADE: F

Reviewed: 10/17/05