Mist, The

• USA • 2007 • 126m •

• Directed by: Frank Darabont. • Starring: Thomas Jane, Marcia Gay Harden, Laurie Holden, Andre Braugher, Toby Jones, William Sadler, Jeffrey DeMunn, Frances Sternhagen, Nathan Gamble, Alexa Davalos, Chris Owen, Sam Witwer, Robert C. Treveiler. • Music by: Mark Isham.

A violent storm hits a town in Maine, then an approaching cloud of mist appears the next morning. As the mist quickly envelops the area, a group of people get trapped in a local grocery store, among them, artist David Drayton and his five-year-old son. The people soon discover that within the mist lives numerous species of horrific, unworldly creatures that entered through an inter-dimensional rift, possibly caused by a project on a nearby military base. As the world around them turns into a literal Hell-on-earth, the horrified citizens try desperately to survive this apocalyptic disaster.

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Review:

In German "Mist" means "st", and who are we to argue about the prophetic nature of Germanic languages? This pile of Stephenkingsian crap is yet another amalgamation of ultra-clichés that we've seen about 1000 movies, except that it actually manages to be a notch dumber than even the most cretinous 50s B-movies. I take it back: Stephen King is not the Ed Wood of anything - for that would be insulting even to Ed Wood's "talents". Rather, he is the Paris Hilton of the horror genre: deluded, dirt-dumb, perpetually grinning, and adored for all the wrong reasons (non-reasons), i.e. a major cult figure in an age of rising stupidity. Forget Eco or Asimov: it's only King's moronic scribbles that the riff-raff can truly appreciate.

SK doesn't even try anymore, if he even ever tried at all: he's been repeating himself for decades, but almost no-one seems to care. His novelsmovies are like pop music: God forbid there should be a hint of originality in there somewhere, occasionally: his fanatically devoted, low-IQ fans would run away from him like the plague if that were ever to happen. TM doesn't omit any clichés: a small town being besieged by monsters, an unconvincing over-the-top religious nut, the survivors bickering over nothing, large insects, silly large spiders, the bad bad military experiments, etc. What's worse, this laughable malarkey-feast lasts a good two hours - which is about 90 minutes too long considering how unoriginal, retarded and thin its story-line is. Time is being wasted on totally irrelevant, dull scenes which SK probably throws into the "character development" category. The problem is that King's grasp of human behaviour is child-like at best... There is more character development in a bird-dropping.

At first, no-one wants to leave the store, not even to help a woman find her kid. (At the end we find out that she survived. No explanation whatsoever is given as to how she might have achieved this impossible feat: it goes against all logic - the "logic" that King himself established in this confused mess of a movie.) Yet, only a while later, a sizeable group of people are raring to go outside. Idiotic. This illogical group is lead by a black lawyer who refuses to believe the story of Squidy's attack. We all know what (defense) lawyers are, but they're not imbeciles; at least not as dumb as Stephen King himself. (Particularly hard to achieve.) So what does our "bright" hero, Thomas Jane, do to convince the lawyer? He does not show him the bloodied shirt. He does not tell him that a young man was dragged off and killed by Squidy. He just says "you must believe me". Idiotic.

The sole purpose of King's characters bickering retardedly is just so King can have his precious "conflict": that magic word in movie la-la-land. Conflict at any price. Conflict that will make you laugh out loud.

Ed Wood's hilariously inept plea for acceptance of transvestitism is peanuts compared to King's sorry attempts to pepper-up his horror stories with "relevant socialpolitical messages". This dumb little monster movie makes mention of abortion, stem-cell research, education funding (King the Education Expert), military spending (King the Foreign Policy Maestro), and even Fidel Castro! (No doubt a friend of King's.) It's a major movie disease in recent years (only second to nepotism): no genre seems to be safe anymore from the simplistic preachings of semi-educated "know-it-alls" who don't realize their infantile (mis)understanding of the world's problems don't amount to a hill of beans. Besides, Steve, if you're gonna preach, then don't sandwich your idiotictwisted morality and Leftist political messages between Squidy the Large Man-Killer and mosquitoes that suck blood: it just makes you look even more foolish...

Oh yeah, Steve, you forgot to mention gay rights, flag-burning, welfare reform, and health care funding. But I guess we'll have to seek Stephen's brilliant opinions on these issues in his other booksmovies. What a shame... I was so looking forward to learning everything there was to know about the political and social climate of today's America, from an intellectual of King's calibre. What a mind, what class.

What an ending! I disagree with the pervading view that it's depressing: I think it's HILARIOUS. King writes about people as if he's only joined the human race yesterday, from planet Gamma X Retard.

What nonsense: 1) After the soldier gets stabbed THREE times with a large kitchen knife - in the belly - he is then thrown out of the store, but instead of falling to the ground he walks around as if he'd been scratched by a nail-polisher! 2) There is a burn victim (the way he gets burnt is an unintentionally comedic highlight in itself), but there are no pain-killers at all in this entire store, just aspirin. However, the store has enough dog-food to feed half of Brazil... 3) People are extremely frightened of the "mist" from the very start, and in normal circumstances half of America's population believes in alien abductions and Sasqwatch - and yet(i) everyone is suddenly skeptical that Squidy really can exist! 4) The speed with which the survivors are ready to accept Harden as Christ's prophet is ludicrous: yet more evidence of King's laughable lack of understanding of humans and society. (He must have obtained all his "rich world knowledge" from watching "Oprah" and Bugs Bunny cartoons.)

I loved it when King spoke through the old lady: "too many bombs, too little spent on education", she says early on. Is Stephen referring to the kind of "education" his cretinous books and movies serve in enriching and improving America's peanut-butter culture?

Review by fedor8 from the Internet Movie Database.