n 1871, off the coast of Antonio Island, Ore., four men board a mysterious ship. Maritime disaster strikes, perhaps caused by the ship hitting a reef of bad film editing. The clipper sinks, and somebody drops a burlap sack. Flash-forward to 2005. The town of Antonio Island is about to stage a major ceremony commemorating the town's founding that's intended to really haul in some serious tourist dollars, despite the fact that the ceremony is scheduled to take place in the middle of the night when it's freezing.
Meanwhile, fisherman Nick Castle (Welling) is having trouble: The industrial anchor winch on his boat gets caught on burlap that's been rotting on the ocean floor for 134 years, causing his ship to nearly capsize. Local DJ Stevie Wayne (Blair) spins tunes so rocking and righteously cool, only a cynic would think they should be crammed onto the soundtrack of a movie to pander to an anticipated youth market demographic.
Elizabeth (Grace) comes back to Antonio Island after spending time in New York. She's been having dreams about sinking ships and bad film editing that compel her to return home. She hooks up with Nick. While sitting alone in Nick's darkened living room, even though she suspects supernatural evil is afoot, she wisely investigates ghostly footsteps thumping about, as well as mysteriously thunderous poundings on the door. Which she answers. Then she goes outside to investigate. In her underwear.
A fog bank that looks like a sinister CGI cloud of whipped mint jelly bears down on the lamb roast that is Antonio Island. Can a Sunday dinner of terror with mashed potatoes of shock be far behind?
Well "billow" average
When writers paint themselves into a corner, they rely on the old "found diary" trick to lay down clunky exposition and backstory. There are many variants of the "found diary" trick, including: the post-Blair Witch "found camcorder" trick (used notably in Feardotcom); the "drunk guy raving cryptically" trick; the "prophetic dream" trick; the "truncated web search" trick (in which Google provides just enough info to move the plot forward, but not enough to really inform anybody); and the "creepy librarian" trick, in which a spiritual descendant of Star Trek's Mr. Atoz provides a whiff of information to nudge the plot just a teeny bit, because the character consulting the archivist is too thick to ask the right questions.
Cooper Layne's rat-gnawed script for The Fog uses all of these lame tricks, plus a new lame trick: the "town history laid out in antique photos on the wall of a pub" trick. And despite these dump trucks of exposition, one character at the end of the movie says: "We'll never really know what happened!"
Director Wainwright, who used endless slow-motion shots of water in Stigmata, has grown exponentially as an artist, filling The Fog with endless slow-motion shots of water ... and fire! To be fair, there are some creepy shots of ghosts in the flick, and one or two evocative shots of a beach location. While this is nominally a remake of John Carpenter's 1980 film The Fog, the only glimmer of Carpenter's touch is to be found in Graeme Revell's score, which seems to quote some of the scores Carpenter has done for his own films.
Despite these desperate flickers of quality, The Fog is a film such of towering stupidity, Welling and Grace think it's a great idea to remove evidence from a crime scene, believing that keeping said evidence from the cops, which they're sure will exonerate a friend of theirs under suspicion, will actually help the guy. Guess what? It doesn't.
