The Fog * (1980, Adrienne Barbeau, Jamie Lee Curtis, Janet Leigh, John Houseman, Hal Holbrook, Tom Atkins, Nancy Loomis, Charles Cyphers) – Classic Movie Review 2969

Director John Carpenter, who had just done horror so brilliantly with Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) and Halloween (1978), comes up with this feeble, daft and unconvincing 1980 spook chiller. In Carpenter’s screenplay, written with Debra Hill, evil spirits come in off the Pacific to terrorise a Californian fishing village. Carpenter hasn’t got the foggiest idea how to make this work.

There is an old legend that the small seaside town of Antonio Bay, California, was built in 1880 with blood money obtained from shipwrecked lepers. The vengeful ghosts of the murdered lepers are unwanted visitors when the town celebrates its centennial.

A cheap looking, artificial studio-bound production means there is a lack of real chills and eerie atmosphere and there are some very hokey performances, not least from John Houseman as hammy old seadog Mr Machen, who tells ghost stories to fascinated children by a campfire in a belatedly added prologue. But the main trouble is Carpenter and Debra Hill’s weak, poor screenplay with a murky, fog-shrouded story and virtually unspeakable lines of dialogue that defeat even these decent actors. This means that, though it is gory, it is just not at all involving or scary.

On the plus side, Adrienne Barbeau, Carpenter’s then-wife, makes a fine heroine as Stevie Wayne and Halloween ‘s Jamie Lee Curtis (as Elizabeth Solley) also stars with her real-life mother Janet Leigh (as Kathy Williams).

Carpenter also provides the score and has a walk-on role as Bennett, the church janitor; production designer Tommy Lee Wallace is one of the ghosts; ghost special effects man Rob Bottin plays Blake. The town’s coroner Dr Phibes is named after Vincent Price’s horror movie character from the early 1970s.

Hal Holbrook, Tom Atkins, Nancy Loomis and Charles Cyphers co-star. A low-budget independent film, it was shot on a reported budget of $1 million and made $21.3 million in the United States and Canada, after the Avco Embassy company spent over $3 million promoting it.

Carpenter added several other new scenes and re-shot others to make the film more comprehensible, scarier and gorier. About a third of the film is the new footage, increasing the film’s budget slightly to $1.1 million.

It was remade as The Fog in 2005 with Tom Welling and Maggie Grace.

Carpenter said that some inspiration came from the British film The Trollenberg Terror [The Crawling Eye] (1958), which has monsters hiding in the clouds. He was also inspired by a visit with his then girlfriend Debra Hill to Stonehenge, where they saw an eerie fog in the distance. The deliberate wreckage of a ship and its plundering were based on a 19th century event near Goleta, California.

A third of the film is the newer footage, increasing the film’s budget slightly to $1.1 million.

Many of Adrienne Barbeau’s scenes were shot at Point Reyes Lighthouse, Marin County, California.

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© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 2969

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Many of Adrienne Barbeau’s scenes were shot at Point Reyes Lighthouse.