The Fog (1980)

Posted by Zac in Entertainment and Pop Culture Movies.

As the people of Antonio Bay prepare to celebrate the town’s centennial anniversary, a preacher (Hal Holbrook-Creep Show) learns the awful truth about what really happened 100 years earlier. This is very convenient since we need someone to explain why there are a bunch of dead pirates murdering all of director John Carpenter’s buddies under a shroud of……..yep, fog! Bwhahahahaha!

Besides Holbrook, Carpenter’s cast also features Adrienne Barbeau (Swamp Thing), Jamie Lee Curtis (Halloween), Tom Atkins (Night of the Creeps and the recent My Bloody Valentine remake), Janet Leigh, (Psycho, Touch of Evil), John Houseman (Ghost Story), and a handful of actors who either had or would appear in other Carpenter films (Nancy Loomis, Charles Cyphers, Buck Owens, Darwin Johnson, and John Strobel). Since this was the director’s follow-up to Halloween, it was deemed necessary to plaster Curtis’ face all over the ads, even though hers is a supporting role and Barbeau is the main character. While not considered one of the director’s A-List films, it holds up very well compared to his later work. The film works largely due to the strength of it’s characters, all of whom are developed enough to make the audience care about them.

There are many in-jokes in the film when it comes to character names such as Nick Castle (who played Michael Myers for most of Halloween), Dick Baxter (an unseen character mentioned in the aforementioned film), Tommy Wallace (after frequent Carpenter cohort Tommy Lee Wallace), Dan O’Bannon (who collaborated with Carpenter on Dark Star) and Dr. Phibes (from the two Vincent Price films). John Carpenter was a fan of Howard Hawks films growing up, and one characters warning at this film’s conclusion is similar to the one made in Hawks’ The Thing from Another World, a film Carpenter would remake a few years later. While not great, The Fog is pretty good modern ghost story and is worth revisiting.

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