After assessing the situation, movie poster artist David Drayton (Jane) and his young son Billy (Gamble) drive into town to buy food and supplies at the local supermarket, and David agrees to take with him his neighbor, Brett Norton (Braugher), a lawyer with whom he's long been at odds. At the supermarket, the townsfolk go about their business as that strange mist envelops the area and military vehicles zip on by.

Suddenly, a man (DeMunn), freaked out and covered in blood, bursts into the supermarket, ranting that there's something in the mist. And there is something—something terrible, something deadly and something perhaps otherworldly—lurking in the mist.

As the hideous creatures in the mist reveal themselves, the people trapped in the store display their true colors. There's the mild-mannered yet gun-savvy store manager, Ollie (Jones); the Bible-spouting churchgoer, Mrs. Carmody (Harden); town newcomer Amanda (Holden); a spunky old lady (Sternhagen); the not-so-bright mechanic (Sadler); and so on.

Who's a coward? Who's a hero? Who's a religious zealot? Who'll crack under the stress? Who simply refuses to accept what's going on right before his or her eyes?

Supermarket special

Back in the '80s, Darabont scripted or co-wrote such lean and mean horror flicks as The Blob, A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: The Dream Warriors and The Fly II, and The Mist is a low-budget, down-and-dirty affair that's more reminiscent of those films than the elegiac, classy, painterly likes of the pictures—and King adaptations—that put him on the Hollywood map: The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile. Here, Darabont builds on King's borrowing of story elements from The Lord of the Flies and the "Monsters Are Due on Maple Street" episode of The Twilight Zone by capitalizing on the freedoms of the film's R rating to throw in plenty of coarse language and oodles of gore, using hand-held cameras to create a claustrophobic feeling and relying on a stellar cast to elicit empathy and distaste for the assorted characters.

The Mist delivers most of the goods most of the time. For starters, it's scary as hell, especially an ill-fated, spider-ific dash to the pharmacy nearby. The monster attacks are vividly depicted, and the digital FX are plenty convincing. The script is smart and thought-provoking, if a little too talky. After a while, it's variations on a theme, and they grow repetitious. More problematic is the stock nature of several of the characters. The doomed girl (Alexa Davalos) and the soldier boy (Sam Witwer) are hoary horror clichés, and their moony, out-of-place scenes ring false. Most absurd is the Norton character. Granted, in pressure-cooker situations there's always someone who'll deny the obvious, but Norton is laughably closed-minded, to the point where he thinks the goings-on around him are an elaborate ruse meant to embarrass him. Not even the great Braugher can make Norton even remotely believable.

As for other performances, Jane carries the picture with his steady, no-frills turn as its family man/everyman hero, while Holden, DeMunn, Jones and Sternhagen complement Jane as the film's voices of reason. For the record, Darabont wisely makes Drayton less of a jerk and drops the off-putting sex scene between him and Amanda. Gamble is a real find, a child actor with acting chops. Harden, meanwhile, brilliantly ratchets up her performance as Mrs. Carmody as the tension mounts. The character's a nuisance at first ("It is time to take sides, the saved and the damned"), but she gains influence among those in the store as the body count rises, and she transforms much of the terrified lot into her very own flock. By the time she declares, "We want the boy!," she's far worse than any of the so-called monsters outside banging against the glass.

King purists may hate the film's ending frames. The novel left matters wide open for interpretation, whereas Darabont wraps up the proceedings with a brash, decisive and startling conclusion. Truth be told, Darabont's finish is the better of the two, by far.