The Fog is that special kind of stupid movie in which a character. when driving through the fog, says, “I can’t see anything” then immediately runs into another car. In other words, it’s completely and quite stupidly obvious. Worse than that, everything in this film that has been changed from the original has been made tremendously worse.
Now the original film was never a classic work of cinema but it is an important piece of the horror canon. Admittedly, however, the effects in the film are very dated with its ghosts looking less like scary apparitions and more like gay pride paraders looking for Bleecker Street. So maybe it was due for a remake. But the things that made the original interesting were things like the fact that Stevie, the unmarried mother and lighthouse DJ, has to take on the role of father / protector when her family is threatened, or that a major character is just a hitchhiker who happened to be passing through on the fateful night. This is some interesting shit that, of course, was changed in the remake.
I guess in our modern PG-13 horror film age, the people behind these films don’t want the teenyboppers they’re pitching them to to be encouraged to do immoral things like hitchhike and engage in premarital sex even though that aspect of the original film can be read as a cautionary tale against doing just that. I suppose the people behind this film think that’s too complex an argument for a horror film to make. Better just make the hitchhiker the ex-girlfriend of the guy picking her up. That way when they fall into bed the audience will know that premarital sex is only okay if you’re in love.
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