Few movies are as relentlessly disturbing as John Hillcoat’s post-apocalyptic nightmare The Road. Cannibalism, barbarism, suicide, mass extinction of the human race, rape, infanticide … this is not material you usually leave your Thanksgiving dinner to go see.
But amid all the grisly nihilism and stomach-turning hopelessness is one of the most heart-warming, tender and significant relationships of the movies of 2009. We have a father and a son, and the love they share brightens a screen that starts (and ends) in a pitch-black turmoil so thick it seems to drip from the screen like sludgy ink.
The Road, an exquisitely accurate adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s Pultizer Prize-winning novel of the same name, stars Viggo Mortensen as a man with no name. He wanders the burning plains of a destroyed world with his young son, also nameless. The movie makes no attempt to explain the disaster, although nuclear war, famine and disease are likely culprits. Calamity is everywhere: Fires are sweeping through the countryside, all vegetation has stopped growing, electricity is long gone, cars are parked where they ran out of gas, most houses are tombs for their last owners, and roving bands of cannibals terrorize the few survivors.
In an early scene in the film the father and son look for food in a barn. Hanging from the rafters are the corpses of a family that could no longer bear the world. Notice the young boy: he doesn’t flinch at their decomposing bodies. The Boy, young and innocent, has grown up in this chaos and it does not shake him easily.
Man and Boy are instinctively traveling south to the ocean from what might be the Carolinas or Virginias. They scrounge for food where they can. A can of soda makes an unexpected treat. The road they’re traveling on is worn and overgrown, and occasionally they meet other travelers, who they regard with caution.
Because the only real plot point in The Road is getting to the ocean, the movie is very episodic in nature. It skips from event to event, like a highlight reel of Man and Boy’s travelogue. They wander the road from hamlet to hamlet, passing under collapsing overpasses and through burning forests dislodged from the topsoil by unnerving earthquakes. They meet Ely (Robert Duvall), an old man who blindly shuffles along the crumbling road. They are robbed by a harmless thief (Michael K. Williams). They find a bunker with stockpiled food. They bathe in a beautiful waterfall spitting grey water.
They cross paths with cannibals fairly often and the movie does not shy away from the reality of the horrific device — disemboweled torsos, amputated victims, discarded heads and bones — although it stops short of the book, which had a glimpse of a baby roasting on a spit. Was the film exaggerating the cannibalism? I’m not so sure. People will do most anything to stop the hunger pangs.
But not the Man and his son, who live by principle even if the world does not. And that is the point of The Road: In a world with no humanity, love and compassion can still exist. This movie teaches that goodness is inherited from good people. “Papa, we carry the fire, don’t we?” the Boy asks. “Yes, we carry the fire,” the Man responds warmly. The Boy was born into this madness and he was taught right and wrong by a father who was not obligated to teach such things. The Road is also about the goodness of children. The sparkle in their eyes. The innocence of their questions.
McCarthy, the reclusive author, has said in interviews recently that the dialogue in his book — dialogue that’s been brought over into the movie — was based on actual conversations he had with his own son, whom he dedicated the book to. Put into the context of his post-apocalyptic vision and it becomes heartbreaking. “Are we the good guys?” the Boy wonders. The film knows where our heartstrings are, but doesn’t strum them unnecessarily. It doesn’t pander to our sentimentality. It simply speaks, and we listen.
McCarthy should be proud of what Hillcoat (The Proposition) has accomplished with his version of The Road. The film understands the source material, even as it changes it (with the addition of a mother, Charlize Theron) and condenses it. And the producers must be applauded for keeping the film as dark and hopeless as the book, which is a brave declaration of the sanctity of McCarthy’s original work.
Really, though, what is this movie? It’s a movie for fathers and their sons. Very few movies speak so loudly and proudly about the powers of fathers. The day I saw The Road I had been helping my own father rewire electricity in his home, the home I grew up in. We had been working on it for more than a week, and we had bonded tremendously during those days of hard work. That time is priceless to me. I knew that before seeing The Road, but the film magnified it further.
Someone once said that parents raise children to replace them. It’s the truth. A good father only wants his child to grow up to be wiser and kinder than he is. And this father is no different with his son, be it the end of the world or no.
Do horror movies work when the monsters are no longer horrifying? I would argue for the negative, although Jason Voorhees’ fans, who cheered his very appearance in the rebooted Friday the 13th, would argue in the other direction. In their twisted worlds the machete-wielding murderer would have been knighted by now — Sir Jason, Lord of the Welsh Farthing, cousin of the Duke of Westerly. Sainthood would not be far behind.
In any case, Jason is no longer a villain to his core audience; he’s decidedly blue-collar. Horrors don’t work when audiences cheer for the bad guy, especially since great pains are undertaken to introduce good guys, in this case (and in all cases for Friday the 13th movies) hormonal teens screwing around near Camp Crystal Lake, the site of some grisly murders decades back. So they have two-track minds (drugs and intercourse), but the movie requires us to care for their well-being, otherwise the scares don’t work because the victims might as well be ottomans in an Ikea display, just meaningless things.
In the original Friday the 13th from 1980 — way before Jason went to Manhattan, Hell and space (in that order) — Jason’s mother was the bloodthirsty killer; she sought revenge against the camp counselors that let her little boy die in the lake while they were playing naked Twister in the bushes somewhere between the archery range and the whittling den. Jason and his hockey mask didn’t actually appear until Friday the 13th Part II. With the remake, the original movie’s entire plot has been relegated to the opening credits, ending with Mrs. Voorhees’ head being separated from her neck in a method not recommended by most doctors. And that’s where this one picks up, basically at Part II.
It’s been untold decades since the Camp Crystal Lake murders, and the camp, totem poles and all, is overgrown and rotting by the festering marsh they call a lake. College kids searching for a hidden field of marijuana stumble into the camp and find Jason, who hacks up all of them save for one that he wraps in her sleeping bag and barbecues alive. Six weeks later another group of college kids venture into town to party at a rich father’s cabin. They also trespass on Jason’s right-of-way and meet grisly ends. The movie is a series of encounters with Jason, who has to one-up only himself on torture and killing devices — from screwdrivers and elk antlers to the machete that severed his own mother’s head, an implement that proves 98 percent of Freud’s theories true.
This time around, though, the hulking and massive Jason, who was a supernatural force in the original series, is rebooted as a severely disabled (and semi-mortal) orphan, who probably doesn’t understand the concept of his mother’s death. With Jason’s newfound transience from the original series, one gets the impression that with some therapy and some wabbits he might make a convincing Lennie for a production of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. I liked mortal Jason, and I liked that his behavior could be counted on. He's written with a Norman Bates-like crush on his mother, which would be even more twisted and deranged had he actually vocalized his feelings, but instead he skulks around silently with apparently no will, or mouth, from which to speak. I can see why fans appreciate the Jason character — he's dependable — although I will never understand how he has risen to cult hero status.
The college kids, with their floppy hair, Greek letters and sandals — just asking for some chest ventilating if you ask me — do everything that they’re supposed to do in movies like this: the men use drugs, the women show their breasts, they all wander out in the dark for no reason, they investigate strange noises, they never run faster than Jason can walk … it’s all a very defined routine, like they’re caught in the groove of a record and can’t get out. And the record came out in 1980.
One character, the Funny Asian Guy, doesn’t even have the ironic foresight to laugh when he says, “I’m going to the toolshed and I’ll be right back” … with a hedge trimmer rammed through my ribcage. Then there’s topless water-skier, the Hot Blonde, who is too dense to realize her nakedness just guaranteed her skull-splitting demise. Or the woodchipper operator, who forgot to install the “This Woodchipper Must Be Used As a Weapon In the Climax or Not At All” plaque to his machine's operating panel. Or the Witty Black Guy who acknowledges he's the only black character by making obtuse references to his blackness. Finally there's Girl's Boyfriend, who's like 28 years old but has apparently never had sex before, which is why he tries way too hard to get in the sack with his virginal co-star. That last douchebag has the movie's best line: staring up at a naked girl's chest he says, "Your tits are stupendous." The movie's writers must not have wives or girlfriends, because if they did they'd know better than to call breasts "stupendous" in fear of never seeing another pair again. I'm way off topic, but all these characters and their horrible dialogie are horror-movie clichés and the movie doesn’t even avoid them, or at least poke fun at their expense. It presents them as legitimate developments in a plot it's calling fresh and orginal.
Full-blown aggravation, though, set in when I realized that this could have been a reinvention, not just a remake. Yes, the film needs to acknowledge its roots by setting up dopey twentysomethings like lambs to the slaughter, but here those roots are deified for the faithful fans who expect nothing less. Yes, a remake is a very literal word: the film was made over again, as in re-done, re-filmed, re-examined. But usually such things are done to involve us in more story, better special effects or just something that the original didn’t have. This Friday the 13th lacks nothing that wasn’t in the first franchise. Yes, the mood is scarier, the violence a bit more visceral, and modern cinematography has nailed nighttime photography, but otherwise there’s nothing new that warrants more Jason. It’s frustrating that with so many horror writers working in Hollywood, none could come up with an original premise for the veteran slasher — at this stage even Jason should be bored.
The movie is rebooted by Marcus Nispel, the same guy who rebooted the Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchise. Nispel has done something appalling: he’s remade the two franchises the same way, nearly overlapping them in fact. In both, the villains are large, beastly men who are mentally challenged as well as mentally deranged. Both have signature weapons: Jason uses a machete so large it probably serves no purpose, and Leatherface uses a chainsaw in a part of the Lone Star State where there are no trees. Both films feature run-down houses with macabre shrines made of questionable bone and skin fragments. And both films are nihilist by design, with characters and villains who represent nothing but their own ends. Even the horror feels like black voids of emptiness.
Jason kills out of necessity perhaps, and Leatherface out of dietary requirements, but I can't say they kill for thrills — they're too emotionless and disabled to experience any emotion that might be mistaken for happiness or joy, or even just some kind of bizarre violent perversion. Truth be told, they kill to fulfill the fans' urge for blood, which is why I will never trust the opinions of gore-hounds — their appetites require only blood and every plot they endorse is just a vehicle for more carnage.
The horror genre is desperately waiting for its rebirth. Don’t break out the cigars, though, for Friday the 13th.
The Uninvited manipulates its audience for no reason other than because it can. It sets up one story only to swap in another later, it bludgeons the soundtrack with ominous rattling and volume spikes, it shows us dreams that are blatant lies, and then, in the throes of desperation, it cheats one ending with another. Abuse like this hasn’t been dealt to punching bags.
No wonder studios stopped screening horror movies for critics: modern horrors are visual cons intended for teens with disposable allowances, not critics who can see through the wafer-thin plot devices and petty manipulation. Strangely enough, though, The Uninvited was screened for critics, which means someone at Dreamworks didn’t get a memo or the studio actually believes in its film. Or a third choice: no one at Dreamworks even cares anymore.
The Uninvited is a remake of the Korean movie A Tale of Two Sisters. Both movies were released after The Sixth Sense, which is a critical piece of trivia you’d look up on your own after viewing Uninvited. I’ve saved you a Google search, and maybe by the end of this review, a trip to the theater.
A lot can be diagnosed about a movie by its first line. I’m reminded of Terrence Malick’s Badlands, in which Martin Sheen begins his descent into madness with this: “I’ll give you a dollar to eat that collie.” In Uninvited, two teens are making out. He sits up: “I love you … and I have a condom.” Nothing says “welcome to our movie” better than empty proclamations and safe sex.
He is random dude at party. She is Anna (Emily Browning) and she’s dreaming of the night her mother died under mysterious circumstances. She wakes in therapy, her shrink telling her, “Sometimes we survive by remembering. Sometimes by forgetting.” He doesn't know it, but he just gave away the ending of the movie. It's Anna's last day in a psych ward; the camera cleverly shows us the scars on her wrists and then the loony neighbors in robes. Daddy, an author of books better than this screenplay, takes her home to a sprawling mansion on a lake. The boathouse, where mom died, has been rebuilt and dad (David Strathairn) has a new girlfriend, a too-young-for-him babe named Rachael (Elizabeth Banks). Rachael, realizing she's in a film, commits various acts of step-momery: shadowy eavesdropping, kitchen renovation, heavy-handed requests for grocery assistance and sexy workouts in stretch pants and nipple-accenting sports bras.
Anna, modest and wholesome, cavorts around the lake with her sister Alex (Arielle Kebbel), whose wardrobes consist of bikinis for all occasions. Based on increasingly deranged dreams — dead bodies in plastic bags, twisted corpses with broken backs, catatonic, pale-faced children — Anna and Alex come to the conclusion that Rachael was responsible for their mother’s death. So Rachael, the bimbo, has to go.
Meanwhile, their father is oblivious, the film’s most aggravating flaw. Strathairn, who was recently Edward R. Murrow in Good Night and Good Luck, plays his author as a practical guy, but so clueless it’s amazing he could even conceive children, let alone raise them past their terrible twos. He never notices their cries for attention, the daggers shooting from his new girlfriend’s eyes, the manipulation of Anna’s moods by Rachael’s snotty attitude. Later, when the rules have changed and the father’s role has been reversed, his actions still seem cold and distanced. If there’s ever a sequel (The Re-Invited maybe) it should be about Anna’s legal emancipation from her dad, the heartless jerk.
Poor Anna. She’s the film’s scapegoat, and it all seems too cruel to young actress Emily Browning, the teen version of Angelina Jolie who gave an energetic performance in A Series of Unfortunate Events. Anna’s perception is shaped by her dreams, which is Uninvited’s most manipulative cheat. If dreams are absolute truths, then the movie shouldn’t be able to swap them in and out like socks. As we’re beaten over the head with these subjective plot-altering dreams, we’re distanced from the one character we’ve come to like in a film that’s not all that likeable.
Anna’s whole messy affair — none of which is very scary, I should add — ends with a twist that redefines everything that happens before it. I’m convinced these endings were designed to create repeat business for movies that most people will have regretted seeing once, nevermind twice.
Super-huge, gargantuan, impossible-even-to-grasp-how-big-it-is spoiler alert right here, right now. And consider it in effect until ... well, the remainder. If you haven’t seen Cloverfield, and in fact desire to see it, then you should avert your peepers and click away. The other blogs are quite interesting, I promise you.
For those still reading, let me announce here that it pains me to send readers away, but with a movie like Cloverfield — with its secretive development, cryptic preview ads and cagey plot details — I’m given no other choice. Movies this secret, with all their unmentionable mystery, could put movie critics out of business.
The idea of keeping elements of a movie hidden probably dates back to Psycho, when Alfred Hitchcock himself would plead with viewers to not spoil the plot. Janet Leigh’s early (and naked) death was a secret because it was startling and unexpected, as was the ultimate revelation that Norman Bates was psychologically deranged. Most secretive movies nowadays try to sell you that same line of logic, that their secrets shouldn’t be spoiled because they’re awesome secrets. Rarely is that really the case, though, since these same movies barely invest any interest into their secrets to begin with. Too often now they’re just marketing ploys.
Cloverfield is different, though. It’s staying mum, but not because the secrets are jolting or shocking, or even because they’re lame like those in Pirates 3. It’s keeping its mouth shut because it works better when the viewer knows nothing at all walking into it. That is why I’m sending readers away, because a fresh perspective is paramount to everything else.
Cloverfield is like Signs and The Blair Witch Project crashing into each other at Mach 4. Signs because it takes a major calamity and localizes it onto one reference point on a smaller scale. Blair Witch because it purports to be real footage of real people experiencing a real event. Of course we know it’s not real, but from their shoes it’s mighty authentic.
We begin with five young adults at a party. An earthquake interrupts the evening, so everyone spills out onto the sidewalk to survey the damage. That’s when Lady Liberty’s head rolls down the street with bite and claw marks marring her pretty green dome. Then, down the street, a large reptilian-like creature crashes through the Chrysler Building rendering it into a fine powder that sweeps down the street in such a way that New Yorkers are all too familiar with. Our five heroes, with their video camera documenting the early carnage, dive into a store and take stock of their limbs.
From there on they document their journey through the city, first to escape on the Brooklyn Bridge and then to rescue a girl trapped on a roof somewhere in Midtown Manhattan. Of course these tasks are not easy, because, if they didn’t notice, there’s a monster the size of Vermont stomping through Madison Avenue. And he makes Godzilla look like a member of the Wiggles — kid’s stuff.
The quintet — soon-to-be quartet — dodge falling debris, looters, fleeing rats and destructible architecture to eventually take cover in the streets as the military sends bullets, mortars, rockets and salvos of hot lead into the creature’s side, apparently to no effect. “Whatever it is, it’s winning,” a soldier tells the group, who work out a deal to get access to Midtown to save their friend on the 59th Floor of a building pushed Pisa-like into its neighboring skyscraper by the monkey/lizard/whale monster. They’re told to be clear of the city by 6 a.m., when a siren will signal an ominous and unavoidable event.
See, now I’ve gone and given away too much, spoiler alert or not. That’s all the plot you get.
Cloverfield, part human drama and part horror flick, is a fascinating picture that gets very inventive with its camera gimmick. By making a video camera the film’s point-of-view, it allows us to experience the monster the way most people now experience the Internet — from another person’s perspective. (The video is marked “Department of Defense” but something tells me in the film’s world it’s already on YouTube.) Although this trick should limit the directions of the plot, the movie is still able to employ romance, humor, suspense and even flashbacks (in the form of undeleted video) to its arsenal of tricks. These are difficult tasks given Cloverfield’s methods. To squeeze a sense of humor out of this is very complicated; as it turns out, people are naturally funny, sometimes even when monsters destroy their city.
One drawback to the handheld-style point-of-view is that some people will feel a little ill. Some might heave into their popcorn. The shaky camera is not kind on weak stomachs, that’s for sure.
As much as I liked Cloverfield, though, it wasn’t wrapped up as neat as I would have liked. It responds to the monster’s actions in strange ways during the final 10 minutes. And the characters make questionable decisions in the closing moments after 80 minutes worth of (somewhat) wise choices. I also found some of the torturous, end-of-the-line dialogue a little unsettling. At times it felt almost too personal and the camera lingered on it so, long that it felt obtrusive. Maybe the acting - by a bunch of unknowns to boot — was just that effective. Maybe being a voyeur is supposed to be uncomfortable. Whatever it was, it worked, and in a big way.
Oh, by the way, spoiler alert over.
Sweeney Todd is Rated R for a marathon of neck slashings that occur in the middle of the film, where it seems to lag a little. I would not recommend bringing children or you’ll risk spoiling their Christmas. They’ll never eat a pie or go to the barber again — and wooly and hungry is no way to go through life.
Todd is based on Stephen Sondheim’s 1979 Broadway musical, which was possibly, although not ever proven, based on a real guy who really slit throats in pre-Victorian London. Todd was supposedly Jack the Ripper way before Jack the Ripper.
Always up for ghoulish emo roles, Depp plays ol’ Sweeney, a barber who was exiled from London after a crooked judge stole his wife and banished him from seeing her. Word on the streets is that she died shortly thereafter. Something like 15 years later, Sweeney, now a fiendish and bitter barber with a skunk hairdo, returns to London to slice himself off a little piece of revenge.
Todd’s somewhat-secret identity is revealed so he joins up with Mrs. Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter, another Burton regular … and his girlfriend), who bakes grotesque meat pies in a roach-infested bakery on Fleet Street. She sings: These are probably the worst pies in London/I know why nobody cares to take them/I should know, I make them.
After disposing of an extortionist Italian competitor (Sacha Baron Cohen), Todd and Mrs. Lovett begin killing and hacking up the barbershop’s customers to be baked into her now-famous meat pies. Mrs. Lovett acts pretty chipper about the whole process, even imagining, in rather specific detail, a marriage with Todd that is fueled by their human-pie profits. Todd is less cozy to the idea and he spends long episodes in front of a large window looking out onto London, even as he drags his blades (“my friends”) across lathered-up throats. All he wants is his wife, and the daughter they had together, back in his life.
There are other characters I’m neglecting, including Judge Turpin (Alan Rickman), who adopted Todd’s daughter and then plans to marry her 15 years later; a young sailor, one of only two innocent characters in the film; a greasy old beggar who threatens to spoil the pie business; and Toby (Ed Sanders), a boy Todd takes in after killing his master. Rickman, who is usually playing Severus Snape this time a year, is always a treat. Sanders, though, at only 14 years old, plays a street mutt with precision. And against Johnny Depp too!
Sweeney Todd is a musical through and through. I have to announce that because the film’s marketing department is playing up Depp and Burton’s sixth collaboration together and downplaying the musical elements in fear that it will turn people, ever fearful of singing and dancing, away from Todd. That’s a mistake. A big one. Play up the music; it’s the film’s best element. And what challenging lyrics, too: Here’s a politician, so oily/It’s served with doily/Have one? The lines, all of them, are sung speedily and their timing is perfect.
Depp is typical Depp, which means he’s very good. Not the best, though. That honor goes to Carter, who seems to embody the ragged spirit and gooey determination of Mrs. Lovett, the meat pie professional.
Sweeney Todd is Rated R for a marathon of neck slashings that occur in the middle of the film, where it seems to lag a little. I would not recommend bringing children or you’ll risk spoiling their Christmas. They’ll never eat a pie or go to the barber again — and wooly and hungry is no way to go through life.
Francis Lawrence’s version of I Am Legend is the third film to be based on Richard Matheson’s popular sci-fi/horror novel about vampires terrorizing mankind’s lone survivor. Omega Man and The Last Man on Earth were the previous versions. You’d think the film actually named after the source material would have an advantage here, but no, think again.
I begin my review with Francis Lawrence’s name only so I can now refer to his credentials: the film Constantine and music videos by Britney Spears, Janet Jackson and Jennifer Lopez, three performers who have heard of “thingies with paper guts and black scribbles” but did not know they were in fact called books. So it should be no surprise that Lawrence, with screenwriters Mark Protosevich and Akiva Goldsman, royally botch Matheson’s novel.
Before I get ahead of myself, I have to admit I’m breaking my own rules, one of them being, “Review the movie, not the book it was based on.” I’ve mentioned this rule beneath screams from readers who call to tell me that Clive Cussler and J.K. Rowling write books that are better than their film counterparts. Agreed. The book shouldn’t have to answer to the film. The film is its own entity. But in this case, the movie stops its upward accent into greatness at almost the exact moment it begins to drift from its source. Curious …
Will Smith stars as Robert Neville, apparently the last man on earth, and definitely the last man in New York City, where he drives through a weed-covered Times Square, grows corn in Central Park and hunts elk in Washington Square. And then his watch beeps and he smugly drives home to batten down the hatches and sleep in his bathtub. Smith wasn’t always the last man on earth — something we learn through periodic flashbacks with cliffhangers — but then a scientist cures cancer. Like those TV pharmaceutical ads, there are side effects to this cancer treatment: “May cause vampire or zombie effect; contact your doctor if symptoms continue longer than 4 hours.” Turns out the cure is really just a new cancer, this time with pointy fangs. And then the world falls apart.
We pick up with our hero about three years after the virus pops up and begins opening up seats for Broadway shows. Neville, somehow immune to the mutating airborne virus, wanders the streets in the day and takes shelter at night when the undead, sensitive to light and all, come out to terrorize the night. Smith, smooth as ever, plays the part as a lonely, sad man with nothing to lose except quick lines at the DVD rental counter, where he’s like a 1,000 days overdue on a copy of Shrek. Schwarzenegger was supposed to play this role years ago and it’s good he didn’t; Smith is more likeable, kind of an everyman type guy.
The first half of the movie is remarkable in the way it shows us striking imagery (an empty NYC) with Neville’s insanity-inducing isolation, which he combats by talking to his dog (the film’s co-star) and mannequins he’s named and posed in still life around the city. And notice his apartment: that’s Van Gogh’s real Starry Night hanging above the fireplace — of course he’d raid the museum to decorate his pad.
Neville also has several run-ins with the undead creatures. They mind their business in their dark hideaways as long as he minds his business in the daylight. At night the same dynamic is applied, albeit in reverse with Neville hiding out while they rule the streets. Occasionally their paths cross, though, and Neville is usually packing heat. I was a little disappointed that all the creatures were digital effects, and so agile, but they served their purpose, which was to jump out of the dark with gnashing teeth.
Where I Am Legend has an identity crisis is with the introduction of two human characters who turn up out of nowhere … and in the dark no less. Also, how did they get to Manhattan with all the bridges blown up and tunnels flooded? The movie never answers, but my guess is magic carpets.
Now, for me to go any further into detail about how and why these characters derail Legend would require me to ruin the movie and the book’s ending, and at the same time too. I don’t want to do that, even though it would feel really gratifying. Just know that the book and film endings are different, and not in good ways. (In fact, this ending is so different it completely invalidates the rather awesome title of the film.) The best thing I can compare the film/book ending to is Blade Runner. The book has the Blade Runner director’s cut ending, and the movie has the theatrical release ending. Get it now? Google it if you don’t.
The film’s finale also comes too abrupt. We’re neck-deep in Legend, kind of enjoying ourselves, and then someone pulls the plug on a very big drain and in 15 nanoseconds we’re standing there dripping thinking, “Where’d the movie go?” Not where the book went, that’s for sure.
The book’s ending -- SPOILERS ahead!
In case you don’t want to read Matheson’s book from 50+ years ago, here’s a gigantic super-spoiler. Highlight over everything south of here for the text.
In the book, Neville is not a scientist, but he does pick up some science skills from books, enough knowledge to learn that there is a very specific biological reason why the undead haunt the night like vampires. Just as he makes progress hovering over his micrscope, a woman turns up near his home in the daylight.
He trusts her at first, but then begins asking for a blood sample to see if she has the virus in her veins. Eventually she whacks him on the head and takes off in the night leaving a note that says yes, indeed, she had the virus. She also reveals that there are two breeds of vampires: those that are completely dead, and those that have the virus and its side effects but are surviving in the dark. She tells Neville that he had previously killed her family as he ventured into buildings ridding his world of the virus. Because he lost his family, they share an unspoken bond, which is probably why she's not clawing out his eyes.
Lastly she warns him to leave because they are forming a new civilization in the night and they’ll eventually come for him. Neville, accustomed to his home and routines, chooses not to leave. Sure enough, months (or maybe years) later they come and take him in the night. They tell him that he is the scourge of their lives, the myth that stalks and kills them in their sleep. And because he’s the last one left, and such a ruthless killer, he has become the legend of their new culture, as legendary as Dracula was in ours.
The final passage reintroduces the girl, who offers Neville pills that will either kill him or render him numb to the execution he surely faces. In the last graphs he swallows the pills and embraces his end as a legend. Terrific stuff.
The greatest horror movies are human dramas. The monster exists to punctuate mankind’s limitations, not star in the show. By those rules, The Mist is a great horror film. It should make for a delightful case of indigestion after your turkey feast.
A hurricane-like storm knocks a small town on its hind end. The people, eager to start putting the pieces back together, head into town for supplies. A number of them are in the grocery store when the mist arrives. It comes rolling in off the lake as a thick fog. Standing at the front of the market’s large front windows, a group of 60 townspeople can hear people screaming outside as the wall of moisture crashes into the store. And then they hear bones crunching. So begins one of the better Stephen King book-to-film adaptations.
Like Jaws before it, The Mist finds its horror in the unseen evil, the vast nothing of humidity outside the store’s front windows. Shoppers wander outside at first, convinced there is nothing to hide from indoors. When they return in pieces, panic sweeps through the store, from the dairy (Aisle 5) to the produce section (Aisle 2).
The monster movie, very quickly from this point on, turns into a human drama — a la Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds — with people fearing the unknown in their own unique ways: the macho mechanics downplay the seriousness until they get someone killed and then they cower in the corners sipping warm beer (Aisle 4); the quiet clerk, with his round little belly and thinning hair, steps into a leadership role with a .357 Magnum; an elderly woman overdoses on painkillers (Aisle 7); and the butcher turns to barbarism with his various cutlery (Deli Department).
Much of the plot is spent with David Drayton (The Punisher’s Thomas Jane), who comes to the store with his young son when the mist rolls in. Drayton is the typical horror-film hero, the guy you can depend on to make wise decisions and play offense and defense with skill. His weapon of choice: flaming mop of death (mop, Aisle 10; lighter fluid, Aisle 9) His cool, calm character is countered by Mrs. Carmody (Marcia Gay Harden), a religious zealot who has such a fervent hold on God’s gospel that she would worship a Glade plug-in (Aisle 3) if it were written in the Old Testament. Mrs. Carmody is apparently a member of a satellite branch of the Westboro Baptist Church: her love for God is reduced to hating all that he has created.
Half expecting the dreaded mist to be a psychological dilemma — a mind-controlling mist that produces decibel-crushing hallucinations maybe — I was delighted to see that there are real monsters lurking in the billowing whiteness outside the store’s doors. They begin as tentacles, then giant scorpion-like mosquitoes, then full-blown pterodactyls. They eventually evolve at a steadfast rate: tiny gnats into tarantulas into cat-sized creepers into horse-sized spiders into elephant-sized crabs into brontosaurus-sized beasts right out of Middle Earth. They came from somewhere, the movie hints, but it’s pointless to describe it here — impalement is impalement whether they come from Saturn or the Boy Scouts of America. They’re from Sweden if you need to know.
The Mist is often times very humorous, very much like Slither, last year’s gory laugh factory of a horror film. Mist isn’t as silly as that movie, but it is never 100 percent serious until the final closing moments, which will shock you like only Stephen King knows how. Its real appeal is the way it fuses tremendous monster frights with the situational dilemma of being in a confined space with a person so loony that Acme should name an anvil after her. That’s Mrs. Carmody, who will have your blood boiling so hot that you’ll melt yourself through the chair and have to watch the remainder from the floor.
I greatly admired the pacing and structure of The Mist. And I’m usually hard on horror films. This is the best one since last year’s The Descent, which was awash in shadow and blackness. The Mist is bathed in white and that fiendish, overcast mist. The whiteness, the religious subtext, the devilish ending … all totaled up, this is an unconventional film from a man who has become all too conventional recently. Thanks for trying something new out, Stephen.
Few movies are as relentlessly disturbing as John Hillcoat’s post-apocalyptic nightmare The Road. Cannibalism, barbarism, suicide, mass extinction of the human race, rape, infanticide … this is not material you usually leave your Thanksgiving dinner to go see. 
The Road, an exquisitely accurate adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s Pultizer Prize-winning novel of the same name, stars Viggo Mortensen as a man with no name. He wanders the burning plains of a destroyed world with his young son, also nameless. The movie makes no attempt to explain the disaster, although nuclear war, famine and disease are likely culprits. Calamity is everywhere: Fires are sweeping through the countryside, all vegetation has stopped growing, electricity is long gone, cars are parked where they ran out of gas, most houses are tombs for their last owners, and roving bands of cannibals terrorize the few survivors. 
Man and Boy are instinctively traveling south to the ocean from what might be the Carolinas or Virginias. They scrounge for food where they can. A can of soda makes an unexpected treat. The road they’re traveling on is worn and overgrown, and occasionally they meet other travelers, who they regard with caution. 
They cross paths with cannibals fairly often and the movie does not shy away from the reality of the horrific device — disemboweled torsos, amputated victims, discarded heads and bones — although it stops short of the book, which had a glimpse of a baby roasting on a spit. Was the film exaggerating the cannibalism? I’m not so sure. People will do most anything to stop the hunger pangs. 
But not the Man and his son, who live by principle even if the world does not. And that is the point of The Road: In a world with no humanity, love and compassion can still exist. This movie teaches that goodness is inherited from good people. “Papa, we carry the fire, don’t we?” the Boy asks. “Yes, we carry the fire,” the Man responds warmly. The Boy was born into this madness and he was taught right and wrong by a father who was not obligated to teach such things. The Road is also about the goodness of children. The sparkle in their eyes. The innocence of their questions. 
McCarthy, the reclusive author, has said in interviews recently that the dialogue in his book — dialogue that’s been brought over into the movie — was based on actual conversations he had with his own son, whom he dedicated the book to. Put into the context of his post-apocalyptic vision and it becomes heartbreaking. “Are we the good guys?” the Boy wonders. The film knows where our heartstrings are, but doesn’t strum them unnecessarily. It doesn’t pander to our sentimentality. It simply speaks, and we listen. 
McCarthy should be proud of what Hillcoat (The Proposition) has accomplished with his version of The Road. The film understands the source material, even as it changes it (with the addition of a mother, Charlize Theron) and condenses it. And the producers must be applauded for keeping the film as dark and hopeless as the book, which is a brave declaration of the sanctity of McCarthy’s original work. 
Really, though, what is this movie? It’s a movie for fathers and their sons. Very few movies speak so loudly and proudly about the powers of fathers. The day I saw The Road I had been helping my own father rewire electricity in his home, the home I grew up in. We had been working on it for more than a week, and we had bonded tremendously during those days of hard work. That time is priceless to me. I knew that before seeing The Road, but the film magnified it further. 
