Gut-wrenching horror--one of the best of recent years.

Rating: 10/10 (13 December 2007)

BING-O! After sitting through some mediocre Stephen King adaptations this month, I wasn't expecting much from this. Well, holey dooley! "The Mist" is easily my favorite movie of the year, and maybe my favorite horror of the 00's. I cannot remember the last time I left a movie theater feeling so depressed, emotionally exhausted, and just plain drained (127 minutes long!) because I was so invested in the movie I was watching--and a horror movie to boot! "The Mist" is R-rated horror for grown-ups: no shaky came here, no annoying teen TV stars, no bad dialogue, and no obnoxious music. At the half hour point, I was turned off by some Sci-Fi channel caliber CGI and I wasn't sure I was going to like where the movie was headed. But it was only uphill from there. I wish that scene was shot differently, but the FX throughout the rest of the movie were impressive and really it's just a perfect horror apart from that. Thomas Jane is flippin' awesome as always, but Marcia Gay Harden is the real star here. She takes a role that anyone else would turn into an irritating caricature and she NAILS it. It's really one of the most brilliant genre performances I've seen in a long time. Too bad "The Mist" appears to be a bomb at the box office. It could have set a precedent for well-written and mature scary movies filling our multiplexes. Oh well. It'll be a cult classic in a few years time.