Cover Art

Credits

Director: Rupert Wainwright Starring: Tom Welling, Maggie Grace, Selma Blair, DeRay Davis Screenplay: Cooper Layne Country: USA

This is the story about Nick Castle (Tom Welling) who has a charter boat service on the waters of Antonio Island, Oregon, which is about to celebrate it centenary. Nick, like others from the town, including prodigal daughter and girlfriend of Nick, Elizabeth Williams (Maggie Grace) and her mother Kathy (Sara Botsford), local radio personality and Tom's occasional piece on the side Stevie Wayne (Selma Blair) and her son, Andy (Cole Heppell), and local priest Father Malone (Adrian Hough), are all related to the town's four founding fathers, on which the celebration for the centenary is to be held around, including the presentation of a statue of the four to the town itself. Nick is not too impressed with his grand heritage, and believes the money being spent on the celebration could be better spent on the town itself. When Nick's friend, Spooner (DeRay Davis) doesn't come back from a night out partying on the sea in his boat, Nick goes searching for him, only to find him hiding in the freezer of the boat, with three corpses on board, and declaring they were killed by something in the fog… the same fog that has started to roll in off the sea and into the town…a fog that contains something that wants revenge.

It is hard to argue for the benefits of 'the remake' when films like this exist. The original worked so well due to the build up of tension. This films biggest problem is there is NO tension, and the characters are so wishy washy that you really couldn't give a damn WHAT happens to them anyway. Tension works best in a film when there is some emotional involvement from the viewer to the character, and you care about what happens to them, this is not the case here. The direction of this film is passable, but the performances extracted from the cast are below average. There are some classic examples of miscasting (Selma Blair as the mother of a ten year old just doesn't quite work, and let's face it, doesn't quite hold up to the sultry Adrienne Barbeau, who played the same role in the original). The script must have read like a Little Golden Book as the viewer is treated like an idiot and led hand in hand through the story and everything is explained very carefully, and this is all notwithstanding the most ridiculous case of purposeless obstruction of justice ever seen in the history of cinema. There is a re-incarnation plot device that is obvious very early, and is executed so badly it is almost laughable, and makes no sense. I understand that most of these remakes use slightly different plot devices to differentiate the original from the sequel, but this one was just plain out stupid.