Halloween Films: Part 4 (4 of 7). Henry fights ghost pirates in John Carpenter's The Fog (currently available via Amazon Prime). Get the full show now @ FilmBuds.Bandcamp.com!
[00:00:02] Let's get to The Fog from 1980. It is directed by John Carpenter, stars Jamie Lee Curtis,
[00:00:13] Adrian Barbo, Janet Leigh. And the synopsis is, an unearthly fog rolls into a small coastal
[00:00:22] town exactly 100 years after a ship mysteriously sank in its waters. I hadn't watched this movie
[00:00:31] for a while. This was only my second time watching it all the way through. I saw it, I think,
[00:00:37] the first time in college when I was just getting into movies. I had seen John Carpenter's Halloween,
[00:00:45] which remains my favorite. Christine, the Stephen King film. And overall, I like John Carpenter a lot.
[00:00:52] He's not an all-time favorite filmmaker. The Thing is great as well, of course. I knew this one was
[00:01:01] considered to be a bit of a lesser work, a B-movie more so than the others, but still had a decent
[00:01:09] fan base. One quick note, and I feel like this is the general consensus, but this has to be an
[00:01:20] inspiration for Pirates of the Caribbean in terms of this group of ghost pirates coming into a town,
[00:01:27] causing chaos, killing people because of a curse. It's hard to not see the comparison.
[00:01:34] I don't think that's crazy to say, but just wanted to get it out there.
[00:01:41] Rewatching it, it's about the same as it was the first time. I think that this movie could be amazing,
[00:01:47] but there are a lot of things that hold it back. Everything with the ghost pirates, amazing.
[00:01:56] The look of the fog, the look of the pirates, the costumes, the weapons, how they're shot,
[00:02:02] the very dark, gloomy, ghostly cinematography. It looks amazing during all those sequences.
[00:02:09] It's very haunting and spooky and just iconic more than anything. I haven't really seen many other movies
[00:02:17] aside from Pirates of the Caribbean do something in this way and do it so well.
[00:02:23] It's more so that everything else in the movie is not so good.
[00:02:29] I like the idea of this town, a modern day town, having to deal with its dark history and trying to suppress all of these bad things that have happened over the years and them not wanting to think about it.
[00:02:45] Even with that commentary there, and it's not inherently a bad thing. There are plenty of movies that do this well that I appreciate them for, but this movie relies way too much on less is more.
[00:03:00] And I know that the budget was not big, so they had to do the most with what they had. That's life, unfortunately.
[00:03:08] But the amount of time it takes to get to the ghost pirates feels like forever, especially on rewatch.
[00:03:18] People like Janet Leigh, it's cool to see her, or Jamie Lee Curtis. It's a decent cast, but I just don't care that much about anyone.
[00:03:27] I don't think their interactions are that good. It's not that funny. It's not really that dramatic.
[00:03:34] It's just very surface-level character work that is building up to this eventual attack or arrival of the ghosts.
[00:03:45] And you don't really see the ghosts until the last 15 or 20 minutes in their entirety.
[00:03:52] Maybe a few other moments here and there, but it's very, very few and far between.
[00:03:57] So knowing... Because I remember the first time I saw it, and I didn't know when the ghosts were going to come out, so I was more on edge.
[00:04:07] However, I do like the look of the town. It seems to be a real place. I like the look of the coast, the ocean.
[00:04:15] The score is awesome.
[00:04:19] I know some people don't like how quiet the ending is.
[00:04:24] Like, the resolution kind of comes out of nowhere, almost, and it's not at all a big, epic climax.
[00:04:31] I don't mind that really at all.
[00:04:34] I don't care about the characters in terms of what they're discovering or doing.
[00:04:38] It's more so just, all right, what are the pirates doing?
[00:04:40] I think there's enough there to find the ending satisfying.
[00:04:46] The idea of the radio host broadcasting in a variety of ways, but then her becoming almost like the warning system for the town and saying,
[00:04:58] Hey, this is what's going on here. This is going on here.
[00:05:01] And not really in a bad way.
[00:05:03] It does feel very similar to the structure of Halloween.
[00:05:09] It's a small town with its inhabitants being terrorized by something from their past.
[00:05:16] There's these elusive slasher killer figures popping up here and there watching people,
[00:05:21] and then suddenly it all comes together and the townspeople have to fight back.
[00:05:27] There was a remake, I think, in the mid-2000s, which I haven't seen.
[00:05:32] I heard it was horrendous, so I don't have a lot of interest in watching it.
[00:05:38] But in this day and age, I think that there are a lot of filmmakers who could remake this or do some kind of reboot of it.
[00:05:47] It's such a simple concept that you could do whatever you want with it, where you set it.
[00:05:53] Like, you could just go crazy.
[00:05:54] So I'm hoping that that happens at some point since it's been 20 years since the remake came out, or just about.
[00:06:03] That one is a heavy three and a half out of five.