The Mist

Last night I did something for the very first time.......I actually watched an entire film on YOUTUBE. I mentioned in an earlier blog that I was very much looking forward to see the film The Mist (2007),on paper the story of how a group of small town characters fight to stay alive from a mist shrouded hoard of monsters, ticks every box in my disaster film loving obsessional personality and although I was watching it on a screen a few inches square, I absolutely loved it.

Frank Darabont has taken the novella from Steven King and given it a darker, heavier twist, he has also learnt lessons from the classic but rather bland The Fog (1980) and has fashioned a tense motion picture that's ultimately more about paranoia, religious fanaticism, and the price of hopelessness than it is about monsters and gore.

America cinema abounds with stories of small town hysteria.The battle between good and evil, right and wrong, self and foreign is ingrained into the US Psyche, and parallels between how America views anything "external" from self are obvious in the way the survivors react to the monster threat on film.

I wont go down the spoiler route here, suffice to say that I loved how the film celebrated the unlikely hero. Lumpy Store manager Ollie ( the excellent Toby Jones) and feisty old bespectacled gal schoolteacher (Frances Sternhagen) are two ordinary characters that make good in the crisis, and I suspect they will have the typical movie audience cheering and clapping in their seats.(Well that is until the rather bleak and surprising ending)

I need to see this film on the big screen when it does eventually gets released in the UK, but I was satisfied with my mini view last night.

Pic Jeffrey DeMunn, Laurie Holden as Amanda Dumfries, Frances Sternhagen as Irene, Thomas Jane as David Drayton and Nathan Gamble as Billy