BEFORE: If you want to feel like time is not a constant at all, by all means start up a project where you watch a bunch of old (and new) movies but not in chronological order, make sure they're all mixed up together and organized by a completely arbitrary system. Or, as an alternative, start going through all your old photos and posting them on social media, but like all out of order and stuff. These are the kinds of things that will mess with your head, and I can confirm this based on recent personal experience.
Consider this, this remake of a 1980's horror film is now 20 years old, but compared to the old one, it feels more like new - well, sure, it's 20 years newer than the film it's based on, so does that make it an old film or a new film? Maybe it's both, but how can that be? The original version of "The Fog" came out in 1980, so that's 45 years ago, but I only watched it TWO years ago for the first time, so it's a very old film, but to me it feels more recent. And now here, two years later, I'm watching the remake made 20 years later, so time is definitely all out of whack, and therefore not a constant by any means.
Rade Serbegzija carries over from "The Eye". We have another Birthday SHOUT-out today, have not had one since August, but celebrating today is actress Meghan Heffern, a Canadian actress known for her roles in "Chloe" and the TV series "Wynonna Earp" and, well, a bunch of those Lifetime romance/Christmas movies.
FOLLOW-UP TO: "The Fog" (1980) (Movie #4,563)
THE PLOT: A thick mist full of vengeful spirits haunts a prosperous island town off the coast of Oregon, as its inhabitants try to learn their town's dark secret in order to stop it.
AFTER: Well, at least this time I know what's IN the fog, I know the back-story about the ship and what happened back in the 1800's, how the ship full of lepers captained by the wealthy man (who also had leprosy) got screwed over by the founders of Antonio Bay, who promised him an island where he could establish a leper colony - those were all the rage back then, I wonder why they fell out of fashion. The men who gave him a contract for the island went back on the deal, kept the land, took all of his money and used it to jump-start the town. Yeah, that's probably enough to make the vengeful ghosts from the flaming ship come back and start killing people. Really, what they need is a good ghost lawyer to enforce their contract, except, darn the luck, all the lawyers went to hell and are being tormented for all eternity. Yeah, that tracks.
The themes here are revenge and revisionist history, with an emphasis on not trusting the government, which I think is something we can all get behind these days. You've got a deal with politicians? They're not going to honor it, they're even worse than lawyers. Why should we be surprised about this, given the way that our country was founded, which was only made possible by screwing over the indigenous peoples while also taxing the populace to keep things running. Maybe we should be shutting it all down, not that we've got a better system to replace it all, but we should at least try re-booting it. You can try unplugging it for a while and then starting it up again, but honestly I don't expect that to fix anything, but it may keep it working again for a while until we can order a new one.
The film starts with the current mayor (descendant of one of the town's founders) unveiling a statue of the town's founding fathers, but the sculptor apparently got things wrong, the wrong one is holding the spyglass and also they're not depicted as the lying weasels that they were. Oh well, we'll update it after the town's anniversary celebration, I guess. Meanwhile, during a boating trip, the anchor of the Seagrass gets stuck on a bag lying on the ocean floor, containing items from the shipwrecked Elizabeth Dane, and apparently that's enough to wake up the ghosts. The boat's captain, Nick Castle, has a couple upset tourists because the anchor problems caused their fish to fall back into the ocean. Shouldn't they have put those fish in the well or the cooler or something?
NITPICK POINT: The items in the bag fall to the sea floor, but then they also start to wash up on the beach, which doesn't make sense, both of things can't be possible, it's one or the other. I mean, things can be spooky and unexplained, but they still need to follow the laws of physics.
Meanwhile, Nick's former girlfriend, Elizabeth has returned home after six months away, and she comes in contact with an old man who found an antique watch on the beach. He warns her that "If you touch it, things will change." and maybe THIS is the thing that wakes up the ghosts? I don't know, it's all a bit unclear, what is the formula for setting ghosts on their course for revenge? It's like five different unlikely things, apparently. Then we get power outages across the town, and a whole LOT of broken glass as the ghosts attack the Seagrass (Spooner and Nick's cousin have turned it into a night time party boat) and then the weather station. Ghosts really hate weather reports, apparently, and also night-shift radio DJs with sexy voices. Also meanwhile, the drunken priest Father Malone (another descendant of the town's founders) keeps walking around and moping, somebody has sprayed graffiti in the cemetery and it's literally "the writing on the wall" as depicted in the Bible. So he desperately wants to leave the island, it's too bad the ferry's not running so late at night - well, he knew the risks of living on a remote island, he could have left any time, but now it's too late.
NITPICK POINT #2: The old beach-comber sees that there's a whole dining room table and chairs set up on the beach, and that doesn't seem at all weird to him? This is not how items get washed ashore, the waves don't have a way to push the chairs upright and set the damn table.
Elizabeth has managed to research the markings on the watch, and this leads her to the history of the trading colony up north and somehow this leads her to the buried journal of Patrick Malone, so everyone learns what happened to the Elizabeth Dane, but it's too late, the ghosts are already in town and they've killed Machen and weatherman Dan and Aunt Connie, and that's like half the people on the island gone. The few that are left are holed up in the Town Hall, which would only be a problem if four of them were descended from the town's founders. The ending's a bit weird, for reasons I can't get into here - but the ghosts kind of give up and go away once they kill all the people with certain last names. And the survivors toss the journal into the ocean, because why should everyone else learn the truth about the town that they worked so hard to uncover?
Directed by Rupert Wainwright
Also starring Tom Welling (last seen in "Cheaper by the Dozen 2"), Maggie Grace (last seen in "Love, Weddings & Other Disasters"), Selma Blair (last seen "A Guy Thing"), DeRay Davis (last seen in "Imagine That"), Kenneth Welsh (last seen in "Undercover Grandpa"), Adrian Hough (last seen in "Jennifer's Body"), Sara Botsford (last seen in "Eulogy"), Cole Heppell, Mary Black (last seen in "Hope Springs"), Jonathon Young (also last seen in "A Guy Thing"), R. Nelson Brown (last seen in "Say It Isn't So"), Christian Bocher, Douglas H. Arthurs, Yves Cameron, Charles Andre, Matthew Currie Holmes (last seen in "Firewall"), Sonja Bennett (last seen in "Catch and Release"), Meghan Heffern (last seen in "What If"), Alex Bruhanski (last seen in "Bird on a Wire"), Dan Shea (last seen in "The Cabin in the Woods"), Rick Pearce, Robert Harper, Eric Breker (last seen in "Walking Tall"), Caley Honeywell, Stefan Arngrim (last seen in "Strange Days") with archive footage of Alex Trebek.
RATING: 4 out of 10 references to "Gilligan's Island" (because aren't we all stranded on an island after a tour shipwreck, if you think about it?)
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