The Fog (1980)

Year 15, Day 281 - 10/8/23 - Movie #4,563

BEFORE: It's the time of year to train new people to work at the theater, so after two years there it seems like I might know what I'm doing after all - by comparison, anyway. Sort of. So, time to pass along that knowledge to other people, younger ones who might just end up replacing me.  Today (Saturday) is a rare day off from both jobs, but tomorrow I'm back at it, guiding the young Padawans on their path.  Just not too well, because then my services may no longer be required.

I spotted a couple guys at the theater Thursday night who were freeloaders of a sort, the kind of people who probably get the college newsletter to learn about upcoming events, then attend those that are both open to the public and also serving free food.  Or maybe they just REALLY love thesis presentations, but I have a feeling that's not a thing.  Anyway, I spotted the same two guys in June, putting plates together to hold food from the buffet and then stuffing those plates into their tote bags.  I've heard that some people attend art gallery openings just for the free wine and cheese, but come on, please don't be so obvious about it.  Besides, eating the food leftover from the events JUST before it gets thrown away is kind of MY thing, and these guys are interfering with that, so they must be stopped. JK. Maybe.

Adrienne Barbeau carries over from "Swamp Thing", and it feels like at one point in the 1980's you just couldn't make a horror movie without hiring her or Jamie Lee Curtis, or both.  Case in point, tonight's film, from legendary director John Carpenter. (It was Wes Craven yesterday, forgot to mention...).  You might think from here I'd link to the "Halloween" series, but not this time around, I've got another agenda in mind.  The linking kind of tells me to go in a different direction, after all I am the "Movie Whisperer".  Nah, that's hella stupid. 

THE PLOT: An unearthly fog rolls into a small coastal town exactly 100 years after a ship mysteriously sank in its waters.

AFTER: Well, I haven't had a ghost story in a while, and that's essentially what this is, as it starts with a ghost story told around a campfire on a beach.  And that makes sense because the story is about a bunch of crewmen on a ship who died because somebody mistook their campfire for a lighthouse light, and well, you can see how that might cause a navigation problem.  But the story's told this way for a reason, to tell the people in front of THAT campfire that there are a bunch of angry undead who want revenge on the people who built that other campfire, but they're confused and OH MY GOD, here they come!  Ha ha, just kidding, man, you should have seen the looks on your faces, I think you all lost control and peed your pants!

Only, well, the storyteller here kind of forgets to do that, and that really takes the wind out of the ghost story's sails, so to speak.  To illustrate my point, watch the scene from "Club Dread" where there's a similar campfire on the beach, and the spooky story also starts with, "It was a night just like this one, right here on this beach" only it's a story about a resort worker named Phil Colletti who got his Johnson cut off and now roams the island with a machete, looking for the people who mutilated him, but basically attacking everyone in sight.  And of course he now goes by the name of "Machete Phil", which becomes a bit more hilarious when you think about what he could have been called instead of that.  

Don't get me wrong, this story IS going to get there, but the thing about a ghost story told to kids sitting around the campfire is that you're supposed to scare them THEN and THERE, not a few hours later when the fog rolls in.  Well, the storyteller is old and maybe he thought the story was strong enough as is, that he didn't need to scare the crap out of the kids immediately, but it just strikes me as a bit odd.  But I guess "There is an art to the building of suspense" as Tom Stoppard once wrote.  

Instead there's a slow build here as the fog rolls in, along with those ghosts who for some reason waited exactly 100 years to take their revenge, despite the fact that whoever built that campfire in 1880 and caused their ship to sink is no longer around.  But let's roll with it - it's also a bit weird that these are ghosts who can carry weapons, and kill the sailors on the trawler named Sea Grass, who were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.  They weren't even doing any night fishing, they just sailed out into the water from Antonio Bay just to drink some beers and have some bonding time together in the hammocks.  Umm, OK, guys, don't ask, don't tell.

But I have to wonder (NITPICK POINT #1) why the ghosts would attack the town exactly 100 years later TO THE DAY after their horrible deaths?  Why not one year, three years, ten years later if they're so keen on getting revenge?  Nobody would understand better than, say, a dead person that the longer they wait, the more likely that the people who caused their deaths are no longer alive?  And after 100 years, well, it's almost a certainty that they'd be killing the wrong people.  Which is more important, marking the centennial anniversary of that dreadful day or making sure that the right people pay the horrible price?  Or, if the people who lit that bad campfire died, why didn't the dead sailors find them in the underworld and get their revenge them?  Probably would have been a lot easier, although there might be millions of dead souls to sort through, and maybe they tried for 99 years and couldn't do it, so they naturally thought to try back in the land of the living?  That doesn't make much sense, and now I feel that I've already put more thought into this than the screenwriter did. 

Oh, yeah, somebody had leprosy, as revealed by the journal written by Father Malone in 1800 and read by another Father Malone in the present day. (Put a pin in that for a second...)  So maybe the leprosy affected the brains of the dead seamen and that caused them to not think rationally once they were dead / undead?  OK, now NITPICK POINT #2, is one Father Malone supposed to be the grandson of the other Father Malone?  Because that's kind of not how priests work, they usually take a vow of celibacy.  So why not just give the present-day priest another last name to avoid any confusion, like I'm having now?  

Really, this is kind of about how we celebrate our American history and notable anniversaries of historic (historical?) events but a great many of them have a dark side, whether that's connected to slavery or sexism or xenophobia or war or genocide.  But unfortunately the film kind of glosses over all that, just like most of us tend to do when we think about history.  But it's there, man, and if it were to manifest itself in the physical world it would probably stab you with a fishhook or a cutlass, too.

It turns out that the founders of the town set the campfire on purpose, because they didn't want the owner of the ship to establish a leper colony nearby, and so it was considered the lesser evil to sink the ship and kill the lepers, then use the riches found on the ship to establish the town.  Because only that way could they create a town that would have its own AM radio jazz station and also be free of lepers. You know, I think I'm on the ghosts' side here.  Just saying. 

NITPICK POINT #3, why couldn't the kid just find a piece of driftwood with the name of the ship, and that's it?  What was all that nonsense about the rock turning into a coin, catching on fire and then being a piece of wood again?  Sometimes it's best to keep things simple. While we're at it, NITPICK POINT #4, what are the ghosts going to do with that gold, anyway?  You can't spend it in the afterlife, isn't that what people always say, "you can't take it with you"?  I get revenge, but ghosts coming back for their gold hardly makes anything close to sense.  

NITPICK POINT #6, why does the DJ need to send the call out to her listeners to help save her son from the vengeful ghosts?  Can't she just put on a long Miles Davis album or something and go save him herself?  It's called being a responsible parent, but I get it, it's hard for anyone to balance their career and family.  But we really don't need a DJ to announce what time it is every three minutes between songs, because most people also have clocks, sometimes right there on their radios.  This is kind of why terrestrial radio died and Pandora and Spotify took over, right? 

Big surprise, the local weatherman has the hots for the female DJ, who he's apparently never met in person.  But NITPICK POINT #7, he keeps calling her to tell her when the fog is rolling in, but I have a sneaky suspicion that you just can't track fog on the radar, not even the Doppler 3000.  Because you know, it's FOG.

Also starring Tom Atkins (last seen in "Bob Roberts"), Jamie Lee Curtis (last seen in "Everything Everywhere All at Once"), Hal Holbrook (last seen in "Spielberg"), Janet Leigh (last seen in "The Automat"), Nancy Loomis, Ty Mitchell, Charles Cyphers (last seen in "Coming Home"), James Canning, John Houseman (last seen in "Ghost Story"), John F. Goff, George "Buck" Flower, Regina Waldon, Darwin Joston (last seen in "Eraserhead"), Rob Bottin (last seen in "Rock 'n' Roll High School"), Darrow Igus, John Vick (last seen in "The Dead Pool"), Jim Jacobus, Fred Franklyn, Ric Moreno, Lee Socks, Tommy Lee Wallace, John Strobel (last seen in "Escape from New York") with a cameo from John Carpenter.

RATING: 4 out of 10 broken stained-glass windows