When is a horror movie not a horror movie? When it has a 12A rating? Check. When it’s studio effluent released as a multiplex makeweight into the January dead zone? Check. When you sit there trying to recall the recipe for courgette bread during the really anaemic bits involving hooks? Check. Oh yes, The Fog is all of these things and much, much less.
A remake of John Carpenter’s fun-but-lame 1980 Birds riff, Rupert (not one of them) Wainwright’s wholly inept movie imagines it’s, you know, for kids. As a malevolent fog descends upon their small island town, nice-looking feather-brained teens off the television (Tom Welling from Superman, Maggie Grace from Lost; both hopeless) run aimlessly for cover. Using the ‘internet’, as youngsters so often will, they discover that the visiting vapour harbours the restless hook-wielding souls of a ship’s crew, betrayed by the town founders and hell-bent on revenge. Will they still go out on the yacht at night to party to pseudo-music and maybe, just maybe, get butchered off-screen? But of course.
Being the least coherent horror since Blair Witch 2, (but minus the scares and the laughs) random portent reigns – an alcoholic priest mutters to himself in the streets, Latin graffiti appears on gravestones and a hairbrush (why?) goes on fire. As we bumble toward a ridiculous ‘pay-off’ through a mess of sub-televisual special effects, even the normally reliable Selma Blair (a second-rate stand in for Adrienne Barbeau as the town’s sultry DJ) can’t escape the miasma.
As the title implies, it’s a whole lot of nothing.