13 Nights of Hallowe'en 2010: Night #3 The Fog (2005)

It's Thursday and our movie is the 2005 remake of The Fog. The first question you must be asking is why the remake? Don’t get mewrong, the original is classic John Carpenter, but it was so random overall. As far as storyline goes I prefer this remake with its solid back-story to explain the ghosts. It has a little bit of randomness and of course a modern aesthetic, but Carpenter himself seemed congenial to the film in the extras, so what the hey. The remake stars Tom Welling from Smallville and his love interest is Maggie Grace from Lost. The iconic radio host played by Adrienne Barbeau in the original is now played by Selma Blair from Hellboy and seems much more peripheral to the story. The director, Rupert Wainwright, also directed Stigmata and the episode "Echoes" of the TV horror series Fear Itself.

Remakes are a touchy subject, but I'm always of the mind that a movie should be watched on its own merits. Not on the original version, not on previous movies in a franchise, not even in comparison to other work by the same director. When it comes to discussing them it's okay to compare, but I don't think a strict comparison is fair either, something softer is required. Reviews on the other hand fit in with watching. The best remakes don't either try to outdo the original or just copy it; they go their own direction. That's why I like this The Fog too and why it's here. Now about the actual fog. It looks great here, but it doesn't exactly get the same importance. I don't know if it has more screen time or not, but it wasn't as powerful a point of tension. It's kind of like the radio host, there, has its place, but isn't the show runner it could have been.

Mood: obscure.

Music: Fear Of The Dark by Iron Maiden. MP3s

Liar Liar, Script on Fire

Welcome back to Horror on Hump Day at R.G. Male’s Dark Corners. It was a good hiatus, but like any vacation all too short. I may ease back into it this week. Next week I should resume with the magical setting discussion. For now I want to talk about a terrible trend that sometimes plagues movie, maybe horror movies in particular. The title says it all. Sometimes the scriptwriter lies to us, and the director is usually implicit for going along with it. There is a specific example I’m thinking of and I’m going to go ahead and name names!

I’m looking at you Victor Salva of Jeepers Creepers fame. I am speaking of the TV show “Fear Itself” airing this summer, and the episode ”In Sickness and in Health”. What we have here in this episode is a perfect of example of a lie being perpetrated upon the audience. Not a misdirection, not a blurring of reality, not a matter of interpretation, not a taint from a character’s perspective, but an out and out lie. Looking at the IMDB entry for this episode, Salva is the listed as writer and the director is “An American Werewolf in London” director John Landis. Doubly heinous that two famed people are involved.

Since actors have little say in these things I can only hope William B. Davis who played a short part in the episode is ashamed of having been attached to this calamity. Perhaps as Cancer-man/The Smoking Man of X-files fame he got perverse enjoyment out of such a non-useful conspiracy as lying to a TV audience. So, what happened in this episode to raise such apathetic ire? The plot is set up to make us believe the premise of the story and all of its tension. Everything points to one conclusion and one conclusion only. However, when it comes to the climax of the plot that conclusion is entirely false. This in and of itself is not a bad thing necessarily.

What is bad is that all of points forming this conclusion make absolutely no sense, what so ever, in light of the actual truth. If this were intended to make the audience go, “Oh, I get it now”, then it is an ‘epic fail’. There is nothing to get. It’s claptrap, meaningless gobbledygook, and a total waste of an hour better spent on a different hour of this otherwise decent new horror mini-movie series. This of course is not the first story to plain lie to the audience and sadly it likely won’t be the last in the history of the genre. Frankly, I would rather much approve of a story that attempted to mislead and misdirect that failed, than one of this kind of story where there is no attempt to try for any sort of believability.

Mood: lethargic.
Music: Travel In Stygian by Iced Earth and One Tin Soldier by Me First & The Gimme Gimmes.

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The Greatest Fear

This series of blogs has been a blast and I've said some interesting things I think and asked some good questions. Like all good things it must come to an end. However I think I've left the best for last. There is always one thing that will forever cause more fear than anything else. It may be trite, but it definitely nails things right on the head. There is nothing to fear but fear itself.

Another one is, "Fear is the Mind Killer". Perhaps a great example of that is the anecdotally backed belief that if you were to dream that you died, by whatever means, that you would indeed die. In story terms this is a wonderful idea. The idea goes that the brain cannot tell the difference between reality and a dream, and that when it thinks the body should be dead it sends out the signal, stop everything, we're dead. Then real death comes when the brain no longer gets enough oxygen.

In a similar vein there is the idea that indeed fear can kill you. If you fell from a cliff and panicked all the way down the "story" goes that you could give yourself a coronary and die. Mind you, for people with definite heart conditions it's not hard to imagine that emotion can lead to a full failure. The idea that someone in good health with a strong heart can die in such a manner needs a little something more added to make scared to death work, something like a supernatural effect.

Lastly we come to maybe the best part in fiction about death caused by fear. We have the wonderful tales of actual physical manifestations or incarnations of fear as a being. As strange as this may sound my favourite example of such a thing has to be a pseudo incarnation, and it comes from a fairly unlikely source. My favourite comes from Star Trek: Voyager where Captain Janeway faced off against a computer program/entity that believed itself to be Fear incarnate. It all came down to, "What does Fear fear?" The answer? Fear fears being conquered, it fears when the fear is passed. Fear fears no one to push around. Fear fears the end.

Mood: down.
Music: Teo Torriatte (Let Us Cling Together) by Queen and Big Man With a Gun by Nine Inch Nails.

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