There are several elements from which horror films and
thrillers tend to draw their strength. Sometimes it is from characters with
lurking depths like Norman Bates, or from the meticulous, slow build of an FBI
hunt aided by Hannibal the Cannibal, and sometimes they draw their strength
from an intense realism, as in Hitchcock's "Rear Window." Stephen King's "The
Mist," despite lacking all of these qualities, combines old-fashioned camera
scares with an obvious but well-executed focus on mob mentality to cover up the
absurdity of its plot and stop-motion spooks.

"The Mist" is a very difficult film to summarize without disclosing
the details of its continuously heightening intensity. On a day following an
unusually intense storm, a thick blanket of mist — and one might argue it is
actually fog, but they've already made "The Fog," so that's out.

— conspicuously rolls over a tiny New England town. David
Brayton (Thomas Jane, "The Punisher") and his son go to a grocery store with
their neighbor to restock the food spoiling in their fridge after a power outage
caused by the storm. The mist surrounds the store, and once clued in to the
dangers lurking within it, the group has no choice but to stay put and fight
for their lives through a series of increasingly horrific and progressively
more absurd encounters.

As that plot stretches out (and occasionally stretches thin),
it demands an increasing suspension of disbelief from the viewer. During the
first encounter with the unexpected inhabitants of the mist (which is not so
much the star of the show as a clumsy device to hide tentacles in), viewers might
have difficulty refraining from rolling their eyes at something so ridiculously
outlandish brought about by old-fashioned special effects so bad, it's tempting
to write off as deliberately campy.

But a superb camera crew, brought in from TV's "The Shield,"
masks the hokey plot and scenery far better than the title character. The
cinematographer may actually have had a better understanding of the story than
the actors, who generally exhibited only two emotions: fear or determination.
The cameras move fluidly throughout a relatively small space, standing still
during tense moments and always toying with the limited visibility of the mist
shrouding the world outside of the grocery store. The writing eventually takes
the viewer out of the action, however. Written by Stephen King himself with the
aid of director Frank Darabont (who also directed King's "The Green Mile"), the
screenplay never strays from bump-in-the-night clichés.

The screenplay does avoid the trap of disjointed Stephen
King stories like "Dreamcatcher," as while the origins of the mist is never
really clarified, the focus on the mob dynamics of the characters make this
unimportant. The best writing of this film has little to do with scare tactics
at all. As the townspeople inside the grocery store grow increasingly hopeless
they begin to turn toward a Bible-thumper obsessed with Judgment Day, played by
Marcia Gay Harden ("The Invisible"). With her religious fundamentalist ballyhoo,
she begins to divide the distraught group, clearly demonstrating the
animalization of humanity in life-or-death situations as the town's irrational
beliefs begin to take over any sense of proper judgment. This in itself is just
as frightening as anything else in the movie and certainly more disturbing.

With more than 200 books to his name, Stephen King is bound
to pound out something notable every once in a while. "The Mist" will never be
regarded as anything near a masterpiece of horror, but that doesn't mean it
isn't an engaging story with legitimate thrills, and "The Mist" is surely one Stephen
King fans will not want to miss.

3 stars out of 5