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'The Mist'

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BY JAN STUART | jan.stuart@newsday.com

November 21, 2007

Stephen King is all things to all filmmakers. To Frank Darabont, he's a left-of-Noam-Chomsky nihilist who thinks the military and the religious right are to blame for anything and everything that ails us.

That, at least, is the King that emerges from "The Mist," the shrill and mean-spirited horror melange that Darabont (of "Shawshank Redemption" fame) has adapted from the author's novella.

Following on the heels of such grim apocalyptic wails as "28 Years Later" and "Right at Your Door," Darabont's scarefest herds a terrifed group of New Englanders into a supermarket after a storm has draped their village in a thick fog. Lurking in the mist is a giant tentacled creature ready to reel in and devour anyone who walks out the door.

This unorthodox crisis ultimately separates the men from the children. The men are led by David Drayton (Thomas Jane), a decisive, fireman-hunky dad who paints movie posters for a living. (As the curtain rises, he's toiling over a facsimile of Clint Eastwood in his spaghetti Western moment.) The children, as in dumb lemming townsfolk, are shepherded by Mrs. Carmody (Marcia Gay Harden, going to town), a babbling Bible loon with a talent for glib prophecies.

There are a few other ninnies in the crowd, including Andre Braugher as a big-city attorney with an outsider's chip on his shoulder. But none of them hold a candle to Mrs. Carmody's fire-and-brimstone machinations, which prove to be as great a threat to Drayton and the trapped villagers as the monster hovering in the parking lot.

As Mrs. Carmody practices her anemic Elmer Gantry imitation (dropping calculated references to the evils of abortion and stem cell research), the strange creatures multiply and the body count rises in a checklist of really bad deaths.

The message is as blunt and unmistakable as Mrs. Carmody's rhetoric: Let the Bible-thumpers and fear-mongerers rule the roost, and we will be made even more vulnerable to the demon terrorists banging at the door.

In its own creepy-crawly fashion, "The Mist" is very much of a piece with "Fahrenheit 9/11," "Redacted," "No End in Sight" and every other Bush-regime siren that has been sounded by filmmakers in recent months.

For all his salty political insinuations, however, Darabont is quite conservative in his choices. Anointing Drayton as his resident Eastwood, he spins out a lugubrious variation on the testosterone-charged theme of fighting fire with more fire.

"The Mist" is another Chicken Little admonition built upon the cynical belief that when the sky really falls, we'll reveal our true inner beast and prey on one another. Enough with that already.

THE MIST (R). Giant creatures prey upon a village in Maine, and people react in unconstructive ways. There is a mind behind Frank Darabont's windy adaptation of a Stephen King novella, but it is twisted to cynical and dispiriting ends. With Thomas Jane, Andre Braugher, Toby Jones and a holy-rolling Marcia Gay Harden. 2:07 (violence, terror and gore, and language). At area theaters.