The Fog (1980)
First screened and reviewed in October 2025
Director: John Carpenter. Cast: Adrienne Barbeau, Hal Holbrook, Tom Atkins, Jamie Lee Curtis, Janet Leigh, Nancy Loomis, Ty Mitchell, James Canning, Charles Cyphers, John Houseman. Screenplay: John Carpenter and Debra Hill. In Brief:
I get the difficulty in dramatizing vaporous evil, but very little is actually brought off well, lighting mostly excepted.
VOR:③
I'm willing to extend some generosity: Carpenter was carving out a unique, promising, consistent style on little money. But this is middling.
I can easily envision this story, this color palette, and the defining leitmotif of irradiated fog insinuating themselves more powerfully in a cinema—the forum for which they were all clearly intended. The best passages gin up some credible suspense and exploit future Roger Rabbit and Jurassic Park cinematographer Dean Cundey's enthusiasms for brilliant hues and for synthesizing live action with foregrounded effects work. But many passages of The Fog are pedestrian, even by the standard of its budget. A number of scenes and even a couple entire threads, especially the Janet Leigh/Nancy Loomis subplot, play too close to Ed Wood in jewel tones. The performances, save for John Houseman's overqualified oratory in the three-minute prologue (despite repeatedly insisting it's five minutes??), never rise above the level of mediocrity. More consequentially, the script, direction, and editing all feel desultory and at not-infrequent odds with each other, especially for a 90-minute horror flick that should benefit from compression and from its admittedly bold experiment in slow-walked dread. Grade:C+
(I originally wrote this capsule on Letterboxd, where you can comment.)
