The Mist (Frank Darabont, 2007)

For a B-movie about a mist filled with swarms of killer insects, The Mist can’t seem to keep its mouth shut. When the aforementioned mist descends upon a small town in Maine, Thomas Jane and Marcia Gay Harden are amongst the largely brain-dead people trapped in the local grocery store. Then a man comes running out of the haze, blood dripping from his nose and making claims about being attacked. From there on out we’re sitting side-by-side with a small community of grocers, locals and the stray military officers, fodder for our creature feature appetite. Jane plays our ‘heroic’ leading man, who apparently can’t be bothered to spend time with his own son and instead drops him off with the women (what good are they fighting enormous insects anyway, right?). But the fascinating thing about The Mist isn’t its disregard for parental responsibilities, but its insistence that the only thing scarier than an apocalyptic mist with supernatural monsters is a right-wing conservative nutbag. That would be Mrs. Gay Harden, who already has the propensity for going over-the-top but here is over the damn moon. Her religious zealot Mrs. Carmody is a one-note horror, preaching on about the end of the world and how the mist is “God’s will” while behaving in such a cruel manner she’d make Anton Chigurh blush. And she never shuts up! Director Frank Darabont provides her with so many speeches to prattle off, ones that stretch on for seemingly endless amounts of time, that by the end of them you can only conclude the filmmaker is begging the audience to wish for her demise. Honestly the only thing I found redeeming is Toby Jones’ grocery store clerk Ollie. Not only does this shlumpy, dough-boy rescue hoardes of people (and entire scenes) all by himself, but his reaction to finding out there are creatures in the fog is to crack open a beer, tell his boss off, and then proceed to gun down some deadly mist creature baddies. Now THAT’S a hero.