There were monsters on that ship, and truly we were them.
Lisa Simpson
Stephen King’s The Mist is an old style Stephen King story, where nothing is exactly as it seems and the monsters are not just the over grown insects from Planet X. In Carrie, Stephen King’s first novel, we find that a young woman goes mad and kills a lot of her classmates after years of teasing her. But Carrie is not the villain in Carrie, her bible thumping Mother that thinks breasts are a sign of sin is the presence of evil.
And so it is in Stephen King’s The Mist, you think that the bad guys are the monsters outside the Food World waiting to eat anyone foolish enough to step outside, but it isn’t so. The villain is a bible thumping madwoman that thinks human sacrifice is the key to salvation. And also a bunch of bugs from Planet X.
There is a cute scene at the beginning of the Stephen King’s The Mist where our hero is painting covers for books, notably he seems to be working on a cover for Stephen King’s The Dark Tower: The Gun Slinger. The other cover paintings sitting around his studio also seem to have rather dark subject matters. I am not as big a fan of Stephen King as I could be, so I did not recognize any other images as coming King’s works.
I liked this movie, but there were only a couple of fun house type scares for me-random noises that made everyone in the theater jump a bit. There was a lot of thinking and pondering involved in this film. What would you do you were trapped with a madwoman and she was slowly making everyone else mad as well? How would you fight off monsters of unknown origin and purpose? What would you do to save your loved ones from being eating alive?
The twist at the end was fun, but not totally unexpected, any veteran of horror movies could see it coming once it was set up. But it was still fun, as there were a couple of other possibilities that would have also been shocking. As far as Stephen King movies go, this was not a bad one. It has been a while since there were any Stephen King’s type movies made, as such horrible efforts such as Stephen King’s Children of The Corn 27 kind of gave Stephen King’s name a bad name. As far as movies bearing his name went anyway. The recent 1408 was based on a Stephen King short story, for example, and this was not used to hype the movie.
I heard in an interview that this was a cheap movie to make. It looked pretty damned good to me. Of course, I’m sure that was cheap by Hollywood standards.
It’s a good little horror film and there were cheers in the theater when one of the bad guys was finally taken out. Still, it is the usual misdirection and smoke and mirror on the story. But then, it is a movie about a mist possibly created by a government gone wrong and the things from another world that don’t belong in ours. Don’t try to apply too much logic.
The real story was how our heroes handled this situation- let’s just say, not too well.
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