The Fog

Finally! The Fog comes to DVD! The Fog is one of my favorite horror films, and it's great to see it get the full DVD treatment!

The plot is simple: On her 100th anniversary, the small hamlet of Antonio Bay is beseiged by a strange fog, cloaking the vengeful ghosts of a murdered leper colony, whose deaths provided the wealth necessary to start the town. Writer/Director John Carpenter gets right to the point, and there isn't a wasted frame of film in this tightly paced chiller. The scene where the men on the fishing boat see the ghost-ship is one of the classic movie creep-outs, and the ending is great. This film really harks back to the old ghost story films of the 40's.

The DVD is full-frame on one side, and the widescreen side of the disc has all of the extras, including commentary by Carpenter and co-writer/producer Debra Hill, an old documentary and a made-for-the-DVD documentary, trailers and commercials, posters and print ads, and lots more. (I would have liked to have seen more about the makeup effects for Blake and his crew, but that's just me...) The film transfer is GREATThe Fog has never looked better, and the colors are lovely and vibrant. I even managed to find an easter egg! On the "Special features" screen, tab up until a pair of glowing eyes appear in the fogpress enter and you'll see a brief (a little under three minutes) music video of behind-the-scenes-footage from the making of the film.

Overall, The Fog is a must-have for fans of Ghost stories or John Carpenter. Now lets see Escape From New York and Prince of Darkness get the deluxe treatment.....

I am so glad this got a re-release on video! I have been searching for this movie for years. Okay, so this one is not the classic that Halloween was but look at the cast... Jamie Lee Curtis, Janet Leigh, Adrianne Barbeau, Hal Holbrook, and Nancy Loomis. It's a mood piece (not too much happens quickly)...pure and simply put it's just a creepy movie. But the scenes with Adrianne Barbeau as a deejay pleading for anybody who can hear her to help her son "get out of the fog" are worth the price of the video alone. It's a wonderfully fun film that any John Carpenter fan will enjoy! The signature music is there, and the cinematography is great too! It's not your typical "slasher" movie. THE FOG aspires to be something more...or maybe something less depending on how you see it. It opens with a man telling a ghost story around a campfire about a ship of un-dead lepers exacting their revenge on the inhabitants of a small coastal town. Well, that's what this is! It's a ghost story that you might hear around a campfire. Primal and scary, and not really all that gory or violent. It's a wise purchase for any horror fans out there!

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Here is the lowdown on the re-release of this Special Edition. The original S.E (Green cover art) was put out by MGM in late 2002 with the Hi-Def transfer, 5.1 audio, featurettes all the bells and whistles. When Sony acquired MGM in 2005, they discontinued this version. Taking the existing DLT, they slapped on a trailer for their new re-make (as well as the prerequisite umpteen cross-promotional trailers) and altered the cover art (Blue!) for no other reason than to drive ticket sales for what turned out to be one of the worst horror re-makes of this truly ugly cycle American cinema seems to be going through now. So unless you're hungry for advertising, go with whichever one you can find for the least amount of money it's all the same thing.

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Let's just cut to the chase right now and say THIS is THE version of The Fog to own. If you're a fan of the movie, or of John Carpenter (before he turned into a pod person and became incapable of releasing anything but dreck), buy this disc now! The transfer is beautiful: the contrast is high, the detail incredible, the colour rich, and the sound well-balanced. In fact, the overall image quality is better than that of the laserdisc version, with almost no noticeable flecks or scratches, and is almost entirely free of compression artifacting (the only spot I noticed it was after the attack on The Seagrass, when the fog completely covers the screen, and even then I really had to look to notice it). Even the menu screens get the professional touch, with artfully composed looping clips from the movie as well as art and sounds created specifically for the DVD.

As far as sound, I'm no expert, but this disc really seemed to clean up all the problems found on previous versions. The levels seem balanced: no playing remote jockey to lower or raise the volume. And MGM even fixed faulty dialogue cues (for example, on the laserdisc version, during the attack on the church, when Father Malone makes his way out of the study to take the gold cross to Blake, and Andy warns him not to, the line "Don't go out there" plays, and then about five seconds later you see Andy's lips move. On the DVD, the cue and action are perfectly synched).

The extras are decent, but nothing to write home about. The storyboard-to-film comparison "feature," in particular, is especially disappointing, in that it only shows a very brief segment of the film (the murder of Al and Tom on The Seagrass, about 140 seconds' worth of footage), and even cheats at that (the same art is shown for several shots, although this may have been how the storyboards were actually used). Also, the quality of the film portion of the comparison screen is inexplicably awful. The section is so short and so plainly presented that it seems a cheat to put "Storyboard to Film Comparison" on the packaging. Instead, it feels like an afterthought, something included because today's DVD consumer expects it, but with as little effort as possible, and no attention or focus at all on how the storyboards were conceived, designed, or used specifically for this film.

The outtakes section also dissatisfies, as it is exactly the same as that on the laserdisc, comprising a bunch of unused (and unexplained) special effects and lighting test shots, followed by a scant 2 ½ minutes of actual bloopers (half of which consist of Adrienne Barbeau making post-take faces at the awfulness of her performance, although it is worth the price of admission to see the legendary John Houseman say "sh*t" after blowing a line), followed by shots of the crew at work. All with very poor sound, or smothered by overbearing music cues. But for those who haven't seen the laserdisc version, it makes a fair addition, in that it also shows many behind-the-scenes activities which are either missing or inadequately described in the voice-over commentary and documentaries

Finally, the audio commentary by Carpenter and Hill is also a letdown; while it is fun to hear these two old friends chat away (and it should be noted their synergy is phenomenal), they often fall into a sort of verbal shorthand, leaving any of us without a film degree or fanatical zealot's insider info completely in the dark. Hill's commentary begins to annoy after a while, sounding like a high school TA puffing up her involvement in the film ("Those are my hands!" "That's my quilt!" "There I am!" "That's me!"), and frequently the contextual information she gives is wrong (at the point in the movie where Janet Leigh's character encourages the townsfolk to stick around and take a look at the statue, for example, Hill claims "Here Janet is telling everyone to go home, lock their windows, and be safe"). Carpenter tries to give some technical background, but I really don't need to know what town EVERY SINGLE SCENE was shot in, and one can only hear "That's Tommy Lee Wallace playing the part of the ghost" so many times without wanting to shoot...something. The few times he actually begins to describe interesting or revealing filmmaking footnotes, he either loses his train of thought, or uses abbreviated jargon which leaves the viewer scratching his head in bewilderment.

If the disc shines at all in the area of extras, it is for the new documentary made specifically for the DVD. While "Fear on Film," made concurrently with the movie, is an abysmally jarring, low-low-budget pastiche of the various people involved blathering on about whatever interested them (Janet Leigh provides such stellar insights as "suspense is the fear of what's going to happen," then babbles on about Psycho and Alfred Hitchcock for the rest of her segment) intercut with overlong movie clips that have nothing to do with what the talking heads are talking about, "Tales from the Mist" presents the entire moviemaking process in a logical, chronological fashion, with movie clips whose content and brevity fully complement the script. Although nowhere near as in-depth or complete as the documentary made for the Halloween DVD, "Tales from the Mist" is an intelligent, beautifully edited, well-thought-out expose covering all aspects of the production. All in all, its only fault is that it ends much too soon.

To sum up, this is a beautiful print which does great justice to a great movie; it deserves a place in your collection on the basis of audio and video quality alone. The presentation is so clean and rich that it looks as if the movie were filmed yesterday. Nor is it a bare-bones edition, with audio commentary, outtakes, storyboard comparisons, and two documentaries...just don't buy it solely for the extras, or you may be disappointed.

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I remember the release of John Carpenter's "The Fog" back in 1980. The expectations were so high for this film after the stunning box office/critical success of his now-legendary "Halloween." I recall, somewhat hazily, of critics being disappointed and the film performing below expectations financially. But I remembered thinking after seeing the movie that in many ways it was superior to "Halloween." Today, "The Fog" has a nice cult following and deservedly so. It is an old-fashioned ghost story with extraordinary atmosphere. It is blessed with a cast of veterans including Hal Holbrook, Janet Leigh and John Houseman. And it contains one of Carpenter's finest musical scores (as good, if not better than his peak work on "Halloween" and "Escape From New York").

The coastal town of Antonio Bay is celebrating its centennial, but a dark secret is discovered about the town's historic origins. An eerie fog soon rolls in and within its glowing depths are ghosts bent on revenge. Carpenter regulars Adrienne Barbeau, Jamie Lee Curtis, Tom Atkins and Nancy Loomis eventually are fighting for their lives, with the final confrontation taking place within the confines of a historic church.

The word "creepy" comes to mind often when discussing "The Fog." The opening scene, taking place around a campfire, will send chills up your spine. The isolation of Barbeau's lighthouse/radio station is a near-brilliant location. The multiple H. P. Lovecraft touches including hidden diaries with terrifying secrets are great set-ups. The eyeless dead body rising from the stretcher is a perfectly directed scene. The gold coin turning into a piece of ship wreckage is a nice touch. And the ghosts, complete with moldy clothes and clanking swords, red eyes staring through the green fog, are about as nightmarish a portrait as one could imagine.

I have some problems with several of the characters in "The Fog," most notably that of Jamie Lee Curtis. Hers is essentially a throwaway role, seemingly added so that she could co-star with her mother (Janet Leigh). A hitchhiker in the wrong place at the wrong time, she ends up in bed with Tom Atkins about an hour after meeting him. I suppose any good old horror film needs a little sex thrown in for good measure, but it seems rather B-Movie fabricated.

But "The Fog" is a perfect example of John Carpenter at the peak of his once notable creative powers. After suffering through his recent work including "Escape From LA" and the uninspired "Ghost of Mars," I return to this terrific 1980 ghost story. I enjoy the chills with great fondness, like one does when putting on a childhood Halloween mask. This will always be one of my favorite Carpenter films, a better tradition for Halloween in many ways, than the film "Halloween" itself.

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