After stubbing his toe with the Jim Carrey vehicle The Majestic (2001), Frank Darabont returned to the well of Stephen King adaptations and followed up The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile with The Mist, which has a shot at being the best King adaptation of the last 15 years. Like Kings novella, its essentially a 50s monster movie given a modern spin, but Darabont gives the material a more downbeat feel and adds what turns out to be one of the movies most memorable scenes a grim ending thats very different from the source material. The perfect post-9/11 monster movie, The Mist brings on the apocalypse not by imitating George Romeros vision but by throwing regular people (flawlessly played by a terrific cast) into an irregular situation and watching them react. There are no Big Names performing superhuman acts of heroism here, just people attempting to do the right thing (usually to no avail) while weaker characters do nothing and survive.
Ian Watson is the author of 'Midnight Movie Madness', a 600+ page guide to "bad" movies from 'Reefer Madness' to 'Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead.'
