The short of it is, Marcia Gay Harden ruins it. But it's still pretty good.

Rating: 8/10 (4 November 2010)

Another Stephen King story, this one about a group of people in Maine (of course) who hold up in a grocery store when a mysterious mist, possibly obscuring something dangerous, descends upon their town. The first twenty or thirty minutes of this movie promise one of the best horror movies of the past decade. And there's a lot afterward that would lend to that assessment, too. Unfortunately, The Mist has a couple of fatal flaws that nearly make it a bad movie. First and foremost, Marcia Gay Harden's ultra-religious nutbag character. You know exactly where they're going with this right away, but you don't hope it takes up too much screen time. But, lo and behold, it becomes a major plot point, maybe THE major plot point, and you're just praying for it to end with a bullet in her forehead. And then there's the unintentionally hilarious ending. I'm guessing that in the Stephen King novella, the characters stranded in the out-of-gas car wait for maybe more than thirty seconds before they decide to do something drastic (ETA: apparently the final image of the book is the characters driving off into the mist, the reader never learning what happened to them). These are, after all, people who have fought for their lives for the previous hour and fifty-five minutes. And then the predictable irony, with one character on his knees shouting like a dufus while gas-masked Army guys stroll on by. Yeah, sue me, I laughed. Still, I'd recommend it for the awesome set-up and a handful of excellent sequences.