Our main characters are fisherman Nick Castle (Tom Welling), the recently back-in-town blondie called Elizabeth (Maggie Grace), and an allegedly sultry-voiced lady DJ named Stevie Wayne (Selma Blair). These three idiots get a whole bunch of obscure clues dropped into their laps regarding their town's unpleasant history, but they don't piece anything together until their seaside burg is overtaken by a huge fluffy fogbank filled with ghostly zombie leper things.
It's not the changes made from the original film that bother me, nor is it the shamelessly "toned-down" violence used to ensure the PG-13 rating. And it's not the amazingly banal screenplay and helplessly wooden acting performances that got me down.
It's that this misshapen mass of cinematic product is so amazingly, effortlessly, and irretrievably boring. The dialogue is bland, the characters are ciphers, the "scary stuff" is wholly inept, and once the movie's all done and over with, you'll leave the theater certain that The Fog was conceived, written, shot, cut, and released over the span of three lazy months.
I was with the flick for the first 15 minutes or so, but that charity soon turned into contempt as I realized I was watching one of the most sloppily directed movies of the past five years. Film students could use this movie as a 100-minute example of "what not to do" when making a horror film. Actors simply wander around the CGI-laden screen, unsure of how to speak their lines or where to cast their eyes.
By the time this tragic remake limps to its "who the hell even cares anymore" final�, you can practically hear the off-screen producers yelling "Ok, cut, print, move on to the next scene. We gotta mid-October release date set, and we're not missing it!" One particularly egregious sequence ends with Welling and Grace in a loud car accident but when we come back to these two characters, they're hopelessly lost in the fog and wandering around for each other. This piece of editorial ineptitude is symptomatic of the entire shitty flick:
Nobody seems to care. The actors look bored, and therefore deliver their "written on the fly" dialogue droplets with all the flavor of dog shit. Tom Welling, purportedly our hero, exudes the screen presence of a Banana Republic mannequin(stick to day time TV bud) ; Maggie Grace is even worse, displaying perhaps 2.4 emotions throughout the whole of the film; and poor Selma Blair, left to deliver her radio-gal banter in low drawl that's meant to be sexy, but comes off more like she is falling asleep on the job.
This flick gets a 1 out of 5