The Fog (2005): The Curse of the Terrible Remake

Remakes aren’t new to movies– they have been around since the invention of the medium. It is also a fallacy to suggest that the original is always better, as there are examples of a remake being just as good, if not better than the original; The Maltese Falcon (1941), The Ten Commandments (1956), and The Thing (1982), come to mind. Unfortunately, The Fog doesn’t belong in this category and, is in fact, one of the worst remakes of all time.  It is an extremely ill conceived remake, complete with an attractive, but bland, cast and some of the silliest looking CGI in film history.

The original movie, while not a classic, was still an effective horror movie filled with genuinely haunting visuals and a better than average cast; the only real misfire is Jamie Lee Curtis, who, as the hitchhiking artist, Elizabeth, is given very little to do.  The script is filled with holes, but John Carpenter’s efficient direction, plus Dean Cundey’s moody photography, help smooth things over.  The Fog was panned by critics when it came out, but its reputation has improved with passing of time.  The remake has been widely forgotten about and, despite being only a decade old, actually comes off as more dated than the original.

There are so many things wrong with the remake, but I will limit my criticisms down to three things:

1) Casting/Characters.
 It’s really hard to decide which piece of casting is worse- Tom Welling (as Nick Castle), or Selma Blair (as Stevie Wayne).  The original movie did a nice job of separating Stevie Wayne’s (Adrienne Barbeau) radio and real life personas – when she goes on the air, she adopts a much more soothing, and sexy, voice.  This nicely sets up the ending; when Stevie starts to suspect something is amiss she begins to use her actual voice and as the movie progresses, it becomes more frantic. The remake makes no distinction between the two – Selma Blair’s Stevie Wayne is just as sarcastic in her normal life as she is on the radio.  There's a lot of nice nuances in Barbeau's performance - just from  her standoffish attitude towards Dan the weatherman, we can deduce that she has just gone through a bitter divorce and wants to keep her distance. She has moved to Antonio Bay from the big city with her son, Andy, to begin a new life. This is also verified visually; the only interaction Stevie has with the other characters is via the telephone. None of this comes through in the remake, largely because Stevie is largely sidelined to make room for Elizabeth. The movie also has her in the same physical space as the rest of the cast during the climax. Stevie Wayne in the original movie was the glue that held everything together; she uses her vantage point (her radio station is located inside a light house) to warn her radio listeners about the fog and guides them to safety. She has no real function in the remake; she's just there.

Nick Castle is even more ill served, in the original, as played by Tom Atkins, he was a gruff, but rather intuitive fisherman; from what little evidence he has, he is able to deduce that the fog is of a supernatural origin.  In the 2005 movie, he is not only dull, but rather dim as well – he fails to recognize that the hitchhiker on the side of the road is his girlfriend, Elizabeth.  He is ready to have a tryst with Stevie Wayne when Elizabeth appears out of the blue (she has been in New York for last six months).  Maggie Grace is, essentially, inhabiting the role (Elizabeth) that Jamie Lee Curtis played in the original movie - and she is certainly given much more to do than Curtis – the problem is that neither the character nor the actress are particularly interesting to watch.  It is revealed that Elizabeth is a reincarnation of the lost love of one of the vengeful ghosts, Captain Blake.  This bit of exposition gets doled out throughout the movie, but there is really no substance to this actual storyline. Is it supposed to be romantic or tragic that Elizabeth is reunited with her past life lover?  The character never seems to struggle with these emotions.  It is reminiscent of The Mummy (1932), where the character of Helen is torn between her past love (Imhotep) and her modern day existence.  Helen genuinely struggles in her choice, whereas Elizabeth seems to choose Blake on a mere whim.  

Finally, there is Father Malone, a pivotal character in the original movie (wonderfully played by Hal Holbrook), who almost feels like an afterthought in the 2005 movie.  In the original movie, Father Malone is guilt-ridden by the sins committed by the town's forefathers; it’s him that discovers the journal of his grandfather. The journal reveals that they killed Blake, because he suffered from leprosy and wants to establish a leper colony near Antonio Bay. Father Malone character spends most of the movie brooding in anguish, but is given a redemptive arc when  he sacrifices himself to save the others.  In the remake, he just stumbles around in a drunken stupor and is killed in gruesome fashion. He's just another tally mark in the movie's body count.

2)      Endless Exposition/Pointless Subplots.
Watching the remake is on par with watching a person fold laundry for ninety minutes – it is extremely boring. The pacing of this movie is an absolute mess, this is largely due to the fact the exposition never stops; it isn’t until midway through the movie that Elizabeth discovers the journal of Patrick Malone, one of the conspirators  who killed Blake and his men.  When the movie should be shifting gears and ratcheting up the suspense, it instead flashbacks to Elizabeth’s previous life aboard the ship of lepers – it is extremely unnecessary given that we are already given this information at the movie’s beginning ; a beach comber approaches Elizabeth and gives her a pocket watch that he found on the beach. He warns her, “If you touch it, things will change.” Later on, Elizabeth tells Nick about a recurring dream she’s been having which ends with her drowning.  These are two incidents are enough to signal that Elizabeth is remembering a past life, but the filmmakers keep spoon feeding us this information. 

However, this isn’t nearly as irritating as the pointless subplots that the movie quickly discards minutes after having introduced them – the most obvious example being the videotape that shows the ghastly murder of Nick’s cousin, Sean.  Earlier in the movie, Sean and Nick’s friend, Spooner, are partying aboard his boat with two bikini clad woman. Spooner, rather conveniently, is videotaping the thing for all prosperity.  Sean and the two women are killed, but Spooner survives the night by locking himself in the freezer. Nick finds the video camera and has Elizabeth hide it in her handbag.  The authorities want to charge Spooner with murder, but thankfully Elizabeth has the video camera on hand to clear his name. NOPE! She proceeds to lose it in the ocean, when she falls off a plank in a boathouse.  Fortunately, nothing ever comes of these murder charges and Spooner is free to go.  The original avoided needless filler, but the remake is loaded with it. The failed tryst between Stevie Wayne and Nick is another example of this – nothing is ever made of it.  They do bump into each other in town and exchange a few words, but that’s about it.

What is the guiding logic to Blake’s revenge? In the original, it was fairly clear, “6 MUST DIE.” Six men were responsible for killing Blake and his crew, and they have come back to seek revenge. Here, it is implied that he is after the descendants of the town’s founding fathers; the four men who betrayed him.  If that’s the case, then why kill the two women aboard the boat and the weatherman?  Is everyone in town a descendant of the four conspirators?  What’s the point of the fog? In the original, Blake and crew were killed while a fog bank consumed the coastline. The founding fathers used it to their advantage and tricked Blake into crashing his clipper ship on the rocks by lighting a fire on the beach. They then plundered the ship and used the gold it was carrying to build the town of Antonio Bay.   In the remake, the four men board Blake’s ship and set fire to it. So, again, why the fog?

3)      The Special Effects.
The shots of the fog rolling along the coast in the original were genuinely creepy, in the remake they are laughable. This is one example where it would have been advantageous to use practical effects (smoke machines) instead of CGI – it is absolutely silly looking. We get endless shots of actors staring at what is obviously a green screen and not really certain just what their reaction should be. The most laughable moment comes when Stevie’s son, Andy, outruns the fog on the beach and just barely makes it inside his house.  Also, Blake and his ghostly crew can kill people merely by touching them – a hand pops out of the sink and grabs Andy’s babysitter, Connie, by the wrist, whose flesh slowly gets eaten away, until the only thing that is left of her is a skeleton.  If it’s that simple, then why isn’t this the M.O. of Blake and company? Also, if their touch is lethal, then how come the corpses of the two bikini-clad women were left virtually intact? I wouldn’t take issue with it if it weren’t for the fact that very little of this movie makes any sense.The scene of Elizabeth confronting the ghosts in the graveyard is eerily reminiscent of the Army of the Dead sequence in The Return of the King; this may seem like a compliment, but that is easily one of my least favorite scenes in the entire trilogy.

If there’s one positive thing that can be taken from the 2005 remake of The Fog it is this – it makes you appreciate the ingenuity of the 1980 original even more so. Sure, it’s a flawed movie, but it is infinitely better than its generic remake. 

Credits

The Fog (2005)
Cast: Maggie Grace (Elizabeth Williams), Tom Welling (Nick Castle), Selma Blair (Stevie Wayne), DeRay Davis (Spooner), Kenneth Welsh (Mayor Tom Malone), Adrian Hough (Father Malone), Cole Heppell  (Andy Wayne), Sara Botsford (Kathy Williams), Rade Sherbedgia (Captain William Blake), Mary Black (Aunt Connie), Sonja Bennett (Mandi), Meghan Heffern (Jennifer), Matthew Currie Holmes (Sean Castle), Jonathon Young (Dan the Weatherman), Alex Bruhanski (Hank Castle), Christian Bocher (Patrick Malone)

Director: Rupert Wainwright
Screenplay: Cooper Layne.
Running Time: 100 min.

The Fog (1980)
Cast: Hal Holbrook (Father Malone), Adrienne Barbeau (Stevie Wayne), Tom Atkins (Nick Castle), Jamie Lee Curtis (Elizabeth), Janet Leigh (Kathy Williams), John Houseman (Mr. Machen), Nancy Loomis (Sandy), Charles Cyphers (Dan), James Canning (Dick Baxter), Ty Mitchell (Andy), Regina Waldon (Mrs.Kobritz), John F. Goff(Al Williams), George “Buck” Flower (Tommy Wallace), Darwin Joston (Dr. Phibes), Rob Bottin (Blake).

Director: John Carpenter
Screenplay: John Carpenter, Debra Hill.
Running Time: 90 min. 

The Ghost Breakers (1940)

Bob Hope, despite being one of the most beloved comedians of all time, never made a genuine masterpiece. He turned out some very good movies (The Ghost Breakers, The Cat and the Canary, Son of Paleface, Road to Morocco, and The Princess and the Pirate, to name a few), but I would hesitate to call any of them classics. This is largely due to the fact that Hope’s greatest strength, his voice, lent itself better to the radio than it did to the movies; the humor is in the delivery of a joke, not so much the joke itself.  Therefore, it’s not surprising that by the 1960s, Hope’s humor was extremely antiquated; his inoffensive brand of humor (one liners, good natured ribbing) was out of place in a decade that produced Dr. Strangelove, The Graduate, and Head. The less I say about his Christmas Specials, especially in the 90s, the better.

The Ghost Breakers and The Cat and the Canary are easily Bob Hope’s best movies, for two important reasons:

1)      They both play on Hope’s radio persona. In both films he is cast as a radio personality who unwittingly gets involved in a murder mystery. In The Cat and the Canary, he is radio actor, Wally Campbell, whose expertise in radio mysteries often puts him one step ahead of the narrative.  In The Ghost Breakers he is crime reporter, Larry Lawrence, who manages to get on the bad side of New York gangster, Frenchy Duval, after doing an exposé on the radio.  Through a set of contrivances (Larry mistaken believes he shot a man to death), he winds up on steam ship to Cuba. He is able to evade Frenchy, and the police, with the help of heiress, Mary Carter, who has inherited a “haunted” mansion in Cuba, “Castillo Maldito.” Grateful for her assistance, Larry vows to help Mary with her dealings in Cuba.

2)      His co-star in both movies is Paulette Goddard.  It’s a shame that Hope and Goddard didn’t make more movies together as they have great onscreen chemistry.  In The Cat and the Canary, Goddard is your standard damsel in distress, but in The Ghost Breakers her character, Mary Carter, is a genuinely brave soul and, despite all the warnings of danger, is determined to go there and claim her new property.  Goddard is a lively leading lady and holds her own against Bob Hope. Goddard was no stranger to comedy, having co-starred with (her then husband) Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times and The Great Dictator.  

It’s also interesting that Hope’s cowardly screen persona is greatly toned down for this movie - Larry is a fairly competent and dashing hero. He takes upon himself to solve the mystery of Mary’s “haunted” mansion and willing goes into harm’s way, with his servant, Alex, in tow.  More importantly, Hope proves to be a convincing romantic lead – it’s easy to understand why Mary would fall for a guy like Larry, he’s the only fun person in her life. Every one else around her is so grim, but Larry makes the most out of a bad situation. There’s a rather lovely moment, after an attempt has been on Mary’s life, where Larry cheers her up by asking her for a dance. It doesn’t have any narrative function, but the interplay between Hope and Goddard is marvelous.

The most problematic aspect of Ghost Breakers is Alex, who, as played by Willie Best, is a cowardly black man who stumbles through the scenery. The comical black sidekick was, unfortunately, a common trope in many murder-mysteries of the time. Though, to the movie’s credit, Alex, despite being a scaredy-cat, proves to be fairly reliable companion and……..SPOILERS…… actually saves the day at the end.  Alex can be cringe inducing at times, but compared to Stepin Fetchit in Charlie Chan in Egypt, he is a step in the right direction, albeit a very tiny one. The rest of the  supporting cast is good; Paul Lukas, in particular, is appropriately sinister as the solicitor, Parada. Richard Carlson's performance, however, greatly suffers because his character isn't introduced until the movie's half way point. 

It isn’t until the movie’s third act that Hope and company arrive at the “haunted mansion,” the first hour effectively builds up to this moment - characters warn Mary to stay away from Castillo Maldito; there are a few attempts on her life; and we’re even given a back story on the mansion.  The opening sequence is appropriately spooky; there has been a city wide blackout in Manhattan due to a lightning storm, so characters are either in silhouette and engulfed in shadows.  Ghost Breakers is one of the rare horror - comedies that is actually unnerving at times.  The scenes in Castillo Maldito are straight out of a nightmare –the scene of the zombie (Noble Johnson) shuffling towards Mary is genuinely creepy. It’s also refreshing that movie is fairly ambiguous about the supernatural; in most horror-comedies it is all revealed to be one elaborate plot by the bad guy to scare away potential meddlers from a hidden treasure. Granted, this is essentially the plot to The Ghost Breakers, but not all of its horrors are explained away – SPOILERS- in a complete twist it is revealed that ghost Larry witnessed rising from its coffin is indeed a ghost. This isn’t Scooby Doo, Where Are You where the villain possesses a 16 mm movie projector that can magically project images onto thin air, nope, this is the rare case where the supernatural does exist.

The visuals, the direction, and the performances are all first rate, but the screenplay is incredibly sloppy; plot threads are completely abandoned, while supporting characters are completely forgotten about.  Through out the movie Mary keeps bumping in a comically awkward man, who is revealed to be an acquaintance of Francisco Mederes - an antagonist of Mary’s.  Who is this man? Is he working for Mederes? Or is he just a tourist? The movie never explains this. Is there a deleted scene that reveals his identity? Or did the filmmakers decide to discard this character altogether, because, “WHO  CARES?”  I wouldn’t have a problem with the latter if it wasn’t for the fact that so much emphasis is placed on the character.  How do the zombie and his mother factor into all of this? Are they in cahoots with the main villain? Or do they simply resent intruders? The movie also forgets about the whole Frenchy Duval subplot. At the end, Larry and Mary are merrily on their way back to America, gushing about their honeymoon, while forgetting that Larry is still a marked man.  It is highly unlikely that Frenchy Duval is going to forget that Larry stood him up. 

Credits

Cast: Bob Hope (Larry), Paulette Goddard (Mary), Richard Carlson (Geoff), Paul Lukas (Parada), Anthony Quinn (Ramon Mederes/Francisco Mederes), Willie Best (Alex), Pedro de Cordoba (Havez), Virginia Brissac (Mother Zombie), Noble Johnson (Zombie), Tom Dugan (Raspy Kelly), Paul Fix (Frenchy), Llody Corrigan (Martin).

Director: George Marshall
Screenplay: Walter DeLeon.
Running Time: 85 min.