THE MIST (Frank Darabont, 2007) ***

Rating: 7/10 (23 April 2008)

Of the 108 Stephen King adaptations for film or TV, I am only familiar with a handful of them – 16 to be exact (counting also the film under review). Frank Darabont joins a list of remarkable past alumni (Brian De Palma, Stanley Kubrick, David Cronenberg, John Carpenter) with this well-crafted monster movie with pretensions. Actually, Darabont is no newcomer to Stephen King territory – having already based three of his four feature-length movies on his work! – but this is the first movie I’ve seen from the director and, perhaps significantly, the only one of the three which is horror-related.
Frankly, I wasn’t even aware of the film at all before reviews of its DVD release started cropping up on the Internet. As far as I can recall, it has not yet been released theatrically over here but, perhaps the name Stephen King (because of rampant overexposure over the years) nowadays no longer enjoys the same crowd-pulling effect as it did during his heyday. Still, judging by that modest crowd of actors assembled for the film and its clearly intentional “realism” (read a flat, made-for-TV look and relatively restrained gore), the film-makers hardly endeavored to boost its box-office chances any. Besides, we have lately been literally invaded by monster/alien movies so that it isn’t hard for one (even as solid as this one is) to get lost in the shuffle.
A small seaside American town wakes up one morning to find itself enveloped in a mysterious cloud of thick mist. Soon enough, it becomes abundantly evident that this houses a barrage of slimy, unnaturally-enlarged and very deadly creatures of the bugs variety. To this tried-and-tested formula, Darabont and King add other much-used elements (religious fanaticism, military incompetence, scientific experimentation, impending apolcalypse, etc.) but take them beyond their bleakest and most ironic possibilities. The last half-hour, in fact, is where the film gets all choked up in message-mongering – complete with an overwhelmingly melancholic score which seemed more appropriate accompaniment to a depiction of Christ’s Cruxifiction (or something heavy and solemn like that). Indeed, learning that Darabont has even “presented” his own original black-and-white vision (as opposed to version) of this film on DVD only adds smoke to the fiery theory that this was intended from the start to be much more than a mere monster movie. Despite good work all around and the best intentions, THE BIRDS (1963), it certainly ain’t...
Anyhow, the festering tensions between the diverse factions trapped (for most of the film) inside a supermarket and the inherent suspense present in the group’s generally unsuccessful excursions on the “outside” are skillfully handled and, despite the anonymity of the actors involved, some of the townspeople are blessed with full-blooded characterizations, most prominently Marcia Gay Harden (as the unbalanced, ultra-religious spinster who, after being derided for the longest time, manages to whip the crowd into a veritable frenzy when things start to go very badly for the heroic few) and William Sadler (as a bigoted redneck who cracks up after having a close encounter with the bugs and witnessing the extensiveness of their devastation).