This film WAS going to be the second half of a John Carpenter double feature I wanted to attend, but Rampaige ruined everything with her damned tornado warnings! I had never seen this movie before, being under the impression that a horror movie about being scared of a fog would be terrible. I was working at a movie theater when the remake came out in 2005 and every time I tried to look in on whether or not it was scary, it ended up being a scene with Maggie Grace walking around in her underwear. They had set the bar pretty high, seeing as how that’s the only part I could tolerate, so I wondered what was so good about the original. And now, here we are!

Even in a movie, it was hard to believe Jamie Lee Curtis would sleep with Tom Atkins.

The town of Antonio Bay is celebrating its centennial by having a big party. A mysterious fog starts rolling in over the bay, which coincides with all sorts of creepy, ghost-like things happening. Windows shattering for no reasons, TVs turning on and of, ya know, all that good ghost stuff. Most of the film is spent being all “OH MY GOD WHAT’S HAPPENING THE FOG IS GETTING CLOSER OH NO” rather than learning what the fog is, or why it’s doing what it’s doing. It turns out that the town of Antonio Bay had a troubled past, and that when it was originally being settled, a ship full of lepers were attempting to colonize it. The original settlers led them astray and put up a false beacon that drove the ship into the rocks. The ghosts of the lepers have returned to kill the descendents of the people originally responsible for their deaths, and, they do! Good job ghosts!

Whoa! Am I about to be attacked by ghost lepers, or am I at a Daft Punk show?!

I mean, come on, it’s John Carpenter, so of course it’s going to be good. It’s tricky though, because you didn’t really know what you were supposed to be afraid of. Obviously the fog was connected with the sp0oky events around town, but you weren’t sure if the physical fog coming in held the danger, or if you were fucked no matter where the fog was. It was also a little confusing trying to figure out if these things were zombies that had a physical form, or if they were just apparitions or ghosts. I think that also might be why it was enjoyable, the fact that these figured were so mysterious. When you saw the figures, they were pretty creepy, because you never really saw what they looked liked. They were typically backlit, so you saw their creepy silhouettes, but since they were supposed to be the ghosts of lepers, they left that to the imagination. Although watching it might not be for everybody, I enjoyed the payoff at the end when you finally realized what was happening and why. Also because the treacherous leper-killing bastards descendents got it in the end.

Wolfman Moon Scale