|
On
a sandy beach, as the moon rises and the
tide ebbs, an old salt (John
Houseman) entertains a group of
kids gathered around a campfire with
spooky ghost tales of the sea. (And
do I believe Houseman just reading the
phone book in these surroundings would be
sufficiently spooky.) He
checks his watch; it’s five minutes to
midnight. Time for one more story:
Soon
it will be the 21st of April --
a date that will live in infamy we’ll
soon find out. For on that date,
exactly 100 years ago, a clipper ship, the
Elizabeth Dane, got lost in an unearthly
fog. And when the crew spotted what they
thought was a signal fire to lead them
safely in, it was only someone’s
campfire. Terminally off course, the ship
cracked up on the rocks off Spivey Point,
just over yonder, and sank -- with all
hands lost to the cold and dark,
unforgiving sea. (Not very scary,
but wait, it gets better.) And as
the Elizabeth Dane settled to the bottom,
seemingly having served its unnatural purpose,
the ethereal fog disappeared. But! All the
old sailors agree, when the fog returns,
the doomed and drowned men will rise up
out of the water and seek revenge on
whoever lit that misleading campfire.
The
story ends with ominous portent as the
church bells strike midnight on Antonio
Bay. It's April 21st...
...OOoooOOoOooOooo…scary...
...At
the old church, the janitor (Carpenter)
finishes his work for the night and
checks in with Father Malone (Hal
Holbrook) before he leaves. (We
gather the man of the cloth enjoys his
spirits as he pours himself a drink from a
half-empty bottle.) The
priest sends the janitor on home and takes
another swig before things turn sinister.
First comes some funny noises, and then a
large chunk of masonry breaks loose from
the study wall, revealing an old book
secreted inside a nook. It’s the journal
of his grandfather, Patrick Malone, and as
the grandson thumbs through it, he comes
upon a cryptic entry that reads:
"Midnight to one belongs to the dead.
Good Lord, deliver us from the evil."
Over
the radio airwaves, Stevie Wayne (Adrienne
Barbeau) welcomes
everyone to the Witching Hour from KAB,
the town’s radio station located in the
tower of the old lighthouse. Her words
prove prophetic as the entire town appears
hexed. A few townsfolk stare dumbstruck as
TV reception goes screwy and glass starts
to crack on windows and gauges; phones
start ringing, gas pumps start pumping,
and everyone’s car alarm goes off.
Outside of town, on a lonely road, Nick
Castle (Tom
Atkins) listens to Stevie’s
broadcast as she wishes Antonio Bay a
happy 100th birthday. When he
picks up a hitchhiker (Jamie Lee
Curtis),
they barely get a mile down the road when
his truck windows implode. Back at KAB,
Stevie takes a call from Dan the
weatherman (Charles Cyphers),
who says to warn the crew of the Sea Grass
that a fog bank is headed their way.
During the next commercial break, the DJ
gives the sailors on the fishing boat a
friendly "heads up" and looks
out over the ocean, sees the fog bank, and
notices it’s giving off a strange glow.
On
the Sea Grass, the sailors are below deck,
listening to the broadcast and lusting
after the sultry sounding DJ. One of them
takes a look topside but reports he didn’t
see any fog. With that, the captain states
they’re all finally drunk enough to head
back in. The grumbling lookout is
surprised when he looks outside again and
sees a pea-soup thick fog roll in out of
nowhere. Two of them go out on deck while
the other heads to the bridge. Uneasily
eyeing the fog, and the strange glowing
lights in it, the crew watches as the Sea
Grass is engulfed, and as the mist fouls
the ship’s generator and engines, an
ancient galleon comes out of the fog and
moves toward them. They
hear what sounds like an anchor being
dropped as the ghost ship pulls up along
side of them, and then some ghostly
figures appear on the deck -- but
they’re just to distract them from the
ones sneaking up behind them! As the two
sailors are skewered and keelhauled with
long swords and metal hooks, inside the
cabin, while the fog seeps in under the
door, the last man calls for his friends;
but the only answer he gets are a pair of
metal spikes right through the eyes.
Back
at KAB, Stevie gives the time as 12:45 and
takes another call from Dan, who reports
the fog is now moving inland. Stevie
assumes he’s drunk because that would
mean the fog is moving against the wind; a
meteorologically impossibility. At
Nick’s place, he and the hitchhiker have
spent the last forty-five minutes getting
to know each other in the sack. (Well
that didn’t take very long.) We
also find out her name is Elizabeth, and
she’s an artist trying to make her way
to Vancouver. When the fog surrounds his
house, someone -- or something, starts
knocking at the door. Inside, as Nick
approaches the door, ready to open it, the
zombies raise their steel to strike. But
just as he opens it, the glass on the
grandfather clocks shatters as it strikes
one o'clock, and when he steps outside, no
one is there. At
the radio station, Stevie watches the fog
dissipate, bids adieu to the Witching Hour,
and signs off for the night.
The
next morning, as a young sprout runs along
the beach, he spots something metallic,
glinting in the sun along the rocks. He
sees it’s some kind of gold coin, but
when the surf rushes over it and recedes
again, the coin is gone, leaving a piece
of driftwood in its place. Digging it up,
he sees the word Dane carved into
it and takes it home to show his mom --
none other than
Stevie Wayne. Telling Andy (Ty
Mitchell) to
tone down the volume and slow down with
his story, he takes a breath and says how
it changed from a coin to wood, and then
leaves to scour the beach for more coins
leaving his befuddled mother behind. At
the docks, Nick is concerned over the
missing Sea Grass and decides to go
looking for her and her crew. Elizabeth
decides to stick around and tag along. Meanwhile,
Kathy Williams (Janet
Leigh), the wife of one of
the missing sailors, is slowly losing her
mind. Seems she has enough worries being
in charge of Antonio Bay’s Centennial
Celebration without adding her husband’s
probable all night bender to her problems.
Her
assistant, Sandy (Nancy
Loomis), drives
her to the old church to see Father
Malone. Along the way, Sandy comments on
how, for 100 years, nothing happened to
this town, but then, in one night, it all
falls apart. They both pray Malone
hasn’t been drinking, but when he
doesn’t answer the door, they don’t
take it as a good sign.
Stevie
returns to KAB, and while preparing to go
on the air, she
does an air-check on a series of bumpers
for the station. For some reason, she
brought the piece of driftwood along with
her. (Why? Because it’s important
to the plot, that’s why.) Unbeknownst
to her, the board starts leaking water
onto the tape deck, causing it to short
out. She
turns and watches in horror as the tape
slows and slurs, then a monstrous voice
says something about wearing an albatross,
or a millstone around your neck, and other
general pirate curses; she see the
inscription on the board now reads
"six must die" and then it
catches fire! Grabbing a fire extinguisher,
Stevie puts the fire out, but, when the
smoke clears, the board is back to normal
and the tape player resumes it’s happy
tune. Badly rattled, Stevie immediately
calls Mrs. Kobritz (Regina Waldon),
Andy's babysitter, and asks to talk to her
son. Wanting to know exactly how he found
the board, Andy recounts his story for her
one more time. After he's done, she warns
him to stay off the beach and not to go
outside tonight. He reluctantly agrees.
Meanwhile,
Nick finds the Sea Grass. No one’s on
board, but there is bizarre evidence of
foul play everywhere: The deck is bone dry,
but the engine and generators have been
socked with salt water; the interior of
the ship is coated with rust, and all the
equipment is shattered on the bridge. When
they go below, they find more rust and
beer cans filled with saltwater.
Completely baffled, all they can do is
wait for the Coast Guard. Nick passes the
time by telling Elizabeth a strange tale
from his childhood that the empty boat has
stirred up:
Seems
Nick’s father was a fisherman, who,
while lost in a fog, came upon an empty
boat just off Spivey Point. When his
crew boarded the ship, they found it in
just about the same condition as the Sea
Grass. Only this time, he found a gold
coin and put it in his pocket. The fog
eventually cleared, but when he got home,
the coin had mysteriously disappeared. (OooOOooOooOoo…)
Almost
on cue, the corpse of the de-eyed
fisherman falls out of a locker, right on
top of Elizabeth.
Back
at the church, Kathy and Sandy find Malone,
and he has been drinking. A lot. And he
has something to show and tell them. He
reads from the journal: One
hundred years ago, a man of wealth named
Blake contracted leprosy, and he wanted to
use his money to establish a Leper Colony.
The plan was to buy Tanzier Island, just a
mile from the fledgling town of Antonio
Bay. Six men, including Malone’s
grandfather, conspired to steal Blake’s
gold. For with the money, they could build
a church and establish the town and
prevent the leper colony from scaring
people away. Unaware of this treachery, Blake
and his fellow lepers boarded the
Elizabeth Dane and headed for Antonio Bay
where the six conspirators, aided by a
thick fog, built a false signal fire and
lured the ship onto the rocks, killing all
on board, with a plan to salvage Blake’s
gold later...
Malone
closes the book and says he can read no
further. In his stupor, he rages that the
Centennial Celebration must be stopped
because they’re honoring murderers. When
Kathy asks where he found the journal, he
says he found it in the wall just after
midnight -- and Sandy ominously points out
that's when everything started going all
to hell in Antonio Bay. Shaken but not
completely sold, they leave Malone, but
promise to send the doctor to talk to him.
Speaking
of doctors, the local medical examiner
examines the corpse Nick brought back from
the Sea Grass. (The
other two men were never found.) Asking
to talk to Nick privately, they leave
Elizabeth alone with the corpse. The cause
of death was the trauma to his eyes, but
the body appears to have been underwater
for months. (His lungs are filled
with salt water, and he has silt under his
fingernails.) While
they talk, the room is filled with an
eerie music -- the corpse rises, snatches
a scalpel, and lunges at Elizabeth! She
screams as it missed and falls to the
floor. That brings Nick and the others
running, who find the body lying
motionless with the scalpel still clasped
in his hand. (OoOOooOOooo…)
Later,
as the sun sets on Antonio Bay (physically
and literally),
the foghorn sounds ominously.
After
Nick and the Sheriff break the news to
Kathy about her husband’s disappearance
and presumed death, Sandy offers to take
her home; but she’s determined to see
the celebration through.
Okay,
even though the town is unaware of the
treachery, the catalyst for Antonio
Bay's founding is the boat wreck where
we assume dozens of people were killed.
Whether it was an accident or not, does
anyone else find this strange and more
than a little morbid? Quick! Back to the
review -- the fog is coming!
Nick
hears Stevie’s latest radio bulletin
about the Sea Grass and she mentions how
it was lost in a fog. The quarter drops
for Nick, and he calls the station and --
to make a long story short -- they swap
gold coin stories and want to meet to
discuss it further. Then Dan
the weatherman calls Stevie with the
weather report: another large fog bank is
rolling into the bay. She asks where
exactly; he says it’s right outside his
door. Out the window, she sees the glowing
fog swamping the weather station and
rolling inland. Her fear grows as she
breaks into a song and reports that a
large fog bank is moving inland toward the
weather station. Nick hears this and flips
a U-turn toward the fog. Stevie picks the
phone back up and warns Dan to stay inside
because there’s something not right with
the fog. He accuses her of being on drugs
as the fog begins to seep under the door,
then his equipment starts going haywire,
and when the lights go out, someone starts
banging on the door. Ignoring Stevie's
warnings, Dan thinks someone is playing a
joke. Stevie pleads for him not to open
the door, but he does anyway and gets
hacked to death. Stevie hears his squishy
death over the open phone-line while watching
helplessly from her window. With the
deadly fog still moving inland, she goes
back on the air and asks for the sheriff
to call her at the radio station immediately.
At the celebration, he gets word of it,
but just as he puts the call through, the
fog knocks out the phone lines; then the
fog overruns the power plant, plunging the
town into darkness.
At
the lighthouse, Stevie realizes that the
fog is now moving toward her house -- and
Andy. She frantically fires up the
stations generator and puts out a
desperate call over the air to her son and
Mrs. Kobritz to get out of the house and
move away from the fog; but they can’t
hear her because the power is out. By
this time, the fog bank has passed beyond
the weather station and is cleared off
when Nick pulls up. All he and Elizabeth
find is nothing but violent wreckage. At
the Wayne house, Mrs. Kobritz tells Andy
not to worry about the black out. But when
she spots the heavy fog rolling in, and
the unearthly glow as it enshrouds the
house, she thinks they’d better seal the
house up. After shutting and locking all
the doors and windows, someone starts
knocking on the door. Mrs. Kobritz sends
Andy to his room before she opens the door
-- but no one is there. She turns and sees
Andy is spying on her. She scolds him to
do as she says, but, as soon as he closes
and locks his door, ghostly hands seize
the old woman and pull her into the fog --
and though we
don’t see her demise, we most definitely
hear it.
As
Stevie continues her on-air pleas for
someone to save her son, Nick and
Elizabeth hear it and head that way. Where
Andy sits and frets, and calls for Mrs.
Kobritz as something approaches his door
and starts knocking. When he doesn’t
answer, the impatient knocker starts to
break through the door. But Nick arrives
in the, heh, nick of time and pulls
Andy out a window. They retreat to his
truck where Elizabeth takes the wheel, but
the truck gets stuck in the mud. Trying to
rock it out as the fog creeps closer, to
their horror, ghostly figures appear --
armed to the teeth -- and march toward
them. And they are almost upon them when
the truck finally rocks free and roars off
to safety.
In
town, as the shortened powerless
celebration winds down, Sandy again offers
to take Kathy home. This time she agrees.
Back at the radio station, Stevie hopes
Andy can hear her apology for not coming
for him. She then starts to warn the town
of the fog’s progress, warning everyone
to stay away from it and to lock all their
doors and windows. By now, the entire town
is now engulfed and the only clear road
left is the one leading to the old church.
Sandy and Kathy heed the warning and head
that way. In the church’s parking lot,
they meet up with Nick and his party.
Entering the church, they find Malone,
drunker than before, who claims they
can’t escape, and whose convinced that
the ghosts are coming for him. With all
the stained-glass windows in the church,
the refugees hole-up in the study where
Malone babbles on and on about Blake’s
bloody revenge. Nick wants to know what
he’s talking about, so Kathy tells him
about the journal. Nick wants to see it
but Malone left it out in the church, and
when he goes after it, Blake and his men
start to break in.
Back
at the radio station, Stevie slowly
realizes that she was so busy warning the
others that she didn’t notice the fog
bank has now reached the lighthouse and
something is starting to break in! At the
church, Nick manages to retrieve the journal
without getting skewered. If what Malone
says is true, and six must die to appease
this malediction, the tally up the score
and realize five have already died. While
the others barricade the room, Kathy takes
up the book and continues to read: Turns
out Malone's grandfather pulled a double-cross
on the other conspirators and that the
church is the tomb of Blake’s gold. As
the barricades fall, Malone and Kathy dig
into the crumbling wall and discover an enormous
cross, cast from Blake's treasure.
While
the others try to hold off the zombie
hoard, Malone and Kathy dig into the wall
where he found the book and discover an
enormous golden cross. Malone takes up the
cross -- a lot of literal and spiritual
symbolism going on in this, here, movie --
and heads back into the church proper. The
aisles and pews are filled with the fog
and the undead lepers. Calling for Blake,
Malone confesses that he is the last
conspirator and wants to return the gold.
Blake moves toward him, his eyes glowing a
deathly red, and seizes the cross, which
glows white hot, and wrestles it from
Malone. Nick pulls the priest away, there
is a small implosion, a rush of air, and
then the zombies are all gone and the fog
slowly recedes from the church.
Back
at the radio station, wounded badly,
Stevie has retreated to the top of the
lighthouse. With nowhere left to go, the
ghosts closing in for the kill, Stevie
closes her eyes for the end -- but when
nothing happens, she reopens them and
finds the ghosts are gone. Looking down at
Antonio Bay, she sees the fog retreating
back towards the sea. Crawling back into
the station, she then does her best Ned
Scott impersonation -- Carpenter was
always a big fan of The Thing --
broadcasting a warning to "All ships
at sea to watch out for the fog. Keep
looking. Keep watching for the fog."
But
we are not quite done with our ghostly
tale yet.
At
the church, after everyone leaves, Malone
wanders and wonders why there was no sixth
victim. He turns to his study and we pan
down to see the fog seeping back in under
the door of the church. Malone hears
something, turns around and faces the
drowned men once more. We crash-pan around
again, and see that Blake is behind him
with sword drawn. He takes a big hack as
the screen goes black -- but we hear the
sword's lethal impact before...
The
End
I
remember back when I was about four or
five and saw The
Ten Commandments
for the first time on TV. Now, the one
thing that always stuck with me from that
first viewing was the last plague that
Moses sics on the Pharaoh when the
Almighty sent his Angel of Death to kill
all the first born sons of Egypt. (Well,
that and that whole parting of the Red Sea
thing.) This
was realized in the film with an unearthly
fog, creeping and seeping through the
streets, and to even touch the fog meant
instantaneous death. -- and to
me, it seemed regardless of your birth
order. That scene gave me the
willies, and, I can honestly say, I had
the same feeling the first time I sat
through John Carpenter’s The
Fog;
and that film left one heck of an
impression on me, too:
Several
years later, while driving home from work,
on a lonely country road, I crested a hill
-- and in one of those bizarre barometric
twists of nature, a small fog bank, barely
three-feet high, devoured the road ahead
of me as I dipped down into a small
valley. As the low fog broke in a wake
around the car's hood, I slowed down,
kicked the hazards on, and pulled over
onto the shoulder. I got out, the moon was
full and bright, and lit it up like white
liquid under a black-light. Wading into
the mist, the vapor whipped up in my wake.
I ran my hands over the top of it, like I
was wading in a pool of water, and then on
a whim, got down on my hands and knees
where I saw, to my surprise, about a
six-inch gap between the ground and the
fog bank. I waded around for awhile, just
my chest, head and shoulders, some
fence-posts, a nearby windmill, and the
top of the car visible. It was as cool as
it sounds, and my words don't do it
justice, but then, just like when you’ve
been in the water for a while and that
stupid shark music starts playing in your
head -- curse you John Williams -- I
smiled to myself and wandered if Blake and
his men were out there waiting for me...
It’s
been documented that Carpenter has a
framed copy of Variety
that says The
Fog
was
the biggest moneymaker for a certain time
period in 1980. He says he keeps it to
remind himself how close he came to a
complete disaster. Co-writing the film
with his Halloween
collaborator, Debra Hill, it seems to be a
ghostly homage to Lovecraftian themes of
terrible family secrets and curses and
evil-squishy things hell bent on killing
people. Unlike his other films, The
Fog
is a
straight-up ghost story designed to
titillate, creep-up, and scare you. And
one of the main things that surprised me
about The
Fog,
is that we don’t have to close our
eyes for the scary parts. Here, Carpenter
does that for us by cutting away before
people get killed. We hear a lot of
death in this movie, but we rarely see
it.
They
brought the film in for $350,000, and then
John turned it over to the editors and
began working on the film’s soundtrack.
When the editing and music was complete,
he tried to splice it all together but
didn’t like the results at all. Finding
it too plodding and too slow, Carpenter
thought about biting the bullet and
letting it ride -- but then decided to try
and salvage it. He
took a month, rewrote and re-shot some
scenes, and redid the film’s score, then
spliced it back together with the old
footage into something that he could live
with. When the film was released, it
didn’t receive as much acclaim as Halloween,
but it did do very well at the box office.
The
beginning sequence with Houseman on the
beach is brilliant, sucking you in, and
this continues right through the opening
credits as the town is overrun with bad
phenomenon. Most shots have a clock in it,
somewhere, showing the Witching Hour
slowly passing. If there is no clock,
Stevie gives the time over the air. It's a
very subtle -- yet very satisfying,
sequence. But, the film just cannot
sustain. There are a few flashes of
brilliance later, but the film loses its focus
somewhere in the middle, switching back
and forth between characters and plot
threads so fast you'll get whiplash. I had
to doctor the synopsis, compressing a few
scenes or it would have been about 100
one-sentence paragraphs, each one
beginning with Meanwhile... Halloween
had a small, set group of characters, and
it took the time to let you get to know
them, something sorely lacking here. And
after the scattershot middle, we're left
with a disappointing ending where
Carpenter resorts back to his Howard Hawks
roots with another hole-up for the siege
scenario similar to Assault
on Precinct 13
only this time with water-logged zombie
sailors. (I
don’t know, that scenario’s just
getting old.)
There
are also a few interesting subplots that
are brought up, like the reanimated corpse
in the morgue, but they're never resolved
and left to wither on the vine and die.
Are the other two sailors, Dan the
weatherman, and Mrs. Kobritz now among the
dead assaulting the town? Were they direct
descendants of the six original
conspirators like Malone? or random
victims? The main plot is fine, but it
wraps up rather quickly with everyone’s
favorite 11th hour revelation;
the
last journal entries.
Despite
the complaints, I do
like the film quite a bit. Most of the
problems I have can probably be blamed on
its patchwork origins. And as I put this
review to bed, I also wonder if the few
gore shots in the film were tacked on in
the re-shoots for the emerging slasher
crowd. But I do
think the film works better without them. Rob
Bottin, who did the groundbreaking F/X
work for Carpenter's
remake
of The
Thing,
also
did the effects for The
Fog.
And that’s him playing Blake's ghost.
John
Carpenter might not be the King of Horror,
but he deserves to be called the King of Economical
Horror. (His
track record proves out slightly better
than Romero.) He can make a truly
scary film with a little amount of money.
He is a minimalist, like his hero Howard
Hawks, and borrows ideas from him quite
frequently. His films are streamlined,
lean and mean with a lot of bit, and his
musical scores a amazing in there
simplicity (the man has got a thing
for staccato.) Despite
it’s flaws, The
Fog
is definitely worth the rental and it has
moments that still give me the willies
today.
|
