The Mist

Whoda thunk that arch-schmalt merchant Frank Darabont would be able to pull off such a brutal, down and dirty creature feature as The Mist? I guess if all you do is adapt Stephen King materials, you'll eventually get to something horrifying. And man, are they some good creatures. Through a combination of suprisingly good CGI and rubber gags, Darabont creates some really horrible monsters lurking in that there titular mist: just looking at them gives you that Lovecraftian sense of revulsion that King was trying to convey. In addition to providing the B-movie goods, Darabont deepens the film with some great in-group/out-group tensions between the group of bewildered people trapped in a grocery store surrounded by monsters. Marcia Gay Harden in particular is vivid and eerie as a holy roller whipping her acolytes into a sacrificial frenzy to appease her Old Testament god. In fact, most of the characters are given richer shading than you usually see in this sort of scare-fest. Most remarkably, Darabont alters the original ending of King's story (which isn't really an ending at all) by making it both more dramatically satisfying AND darker than the original. In the end, The Mist isn't really scary, but it's deeply creepy, and since most horror films can't manage to be either scary or creepy, I'd put that down as a signficant accomplishment.

Score: 8.0