The Fog (2005)

I would hardly have expected it, but John Carpenter has co-produced a remake of The Fog that actually manages to be even more inertly inept than his 1980 original. Both films suffer from the same visceral-conceptual letdown: Fog, which was a creepy mood setter about...oh, I don't know, 65 years ago, isn't really all that scary, and so our hopes of being enveloped in a cloudy gray haze of fear give way to the depressing realization that we're watching a movie about boring old ghosts — banal apparitions who hide in fog. Selma Blair, the one vibrant actress in a cast of colorless screamers (including Tom Welling from Smallville and Maggie Grace from Lost), takes Adrienne Barbeau's old role of a night-owl DJ in a small coastal town haunted by the crimes of its murderous founders. There's a ramshackle anything-goes desperation to the effects: We're meant to be unsettled by digital spectres, reckless Mack trucks, and rotting old pirates who look every bit as terrifying as the guy on the Fisherman's Friend cold-lozenge box.

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