Worst of the Worst: #66, The Fog

Old people suck.

That's the gist I got from watching The Fog, the sixty-sixth worst reviewed movie of 2000-09 on Rotten Tomatoes. The movie is about an island near Oregon that is about to celebrate the centennial of its town's founding. The founding fathers had a dark secret that helped them to create the society. An island insulated from the outside world, the teen descendants of the founding fathers can tell that something bad is about to happen as their ancestors' secret comes due. Old people suck -- you never can tell when something your great-grandfather did is going to come back to really ruin your day.

The secret comes due in the form of a fog that covers the island, bringing with it ghosts. Okay, the fog only really comes in the last thirty minutes or so, but it is the name of the movie, so we'll pretend that it was really scary. These ghosts happen to be lepers that the town's founding fathers totally screwed over and killed so they could steal money to start the town. Old people suck -- you never know when leprosy is going to give someone dark powers so they can do stuff like tangle you in seaweed, throw knives, and burn you up. The leper ghosts also give someone leprosy at some point, so perhaps that person will in turn come back to haunt the leper ghosts and outfog their fog.

The script is miserable. The plot makes little sense. Why should anyone give a hoot about some isolated island? The acting is passable by the best actors (Tom Welling, Maggie Grace), really weak by worse ones (Selma Blair), and the token black character, portrayed by DeRay Davis (who was in last week's Code Name: The Cleaner), was so much worse than anyone else that he literally sucked the life out of every scene as if he were the fog. Perhaps the leper ghost, given leprosy by the original leper ghosts, who is trying to outfog the fog will in turn be outfogged by the fog of DeRay Davis' diseased performance. Maybe none of this makes sense because the movie, supposedly a horror film, is about as scary as paint drying, even if the paint is a really spooky color like grey. And all of this is made even worse because the movie is a remake of John Carpenter's second film. Sure, they changed everything, because why would you ever want to rely on anything that the GREATEST HORROR DIRECTOR OF ALL TIME decided to do? Old people suck -- John Carpenter doesn't speak to today's youth so we have to keep remaking his movies and failing. I'm looking at you, Rob Zombie.

This movie is so forgettable that my brain is now in a fog. Congrats, leper ghost movie makers. You win again.