Entertainment, Movies - Army Times

Top-notch ‘Mist’ leaves hands cold, clammy

Note to self: If something big and weird is swiftly approaching and a column of heavily armed military dudes is fleeing in the other direction with their eyes bugging out, it’s probably a good idea to join the parade.

But then, Stephen King has gotten rich off stories featuring characters who don’t take the opportunity to run away from trouble — until it’s far too late.

And so it is with “The Mist” — a short story from King’s 1985 collection “Skeleton Crew” — which in the hands of writer-director Frank Darabont is a hair-raising exploration of which is more terrifying: the demons lurking just outside the door, or the demons within ourselves.

“The Mist” is a nearly impenetrable blanket that rolls down a mountain in Maine one morning after a freak electrical storm has ravaged the local area.

The unnatural wall of fog hits town shortly after David Drayton (Thomas Jane), a local artist (the opening scene shows him working on a poster of the Gunslinger from King’s “Dark Tower” series), and his young son Billy (Nathan Gamble) arrive at the local market, along with some 50 other townsfolk, to stock up on supplies.

Having already seen the local military, police and fire assets whizzing past, and with the local air raid sirens now sounding their mournful moan, David and the others figure they should sit tight until they can figure out what’s going on.

They get their first clue when a bag boy (Chris Owen) volunteers to go out and unclog a generator vent, and as soon as they raise the bay door, huge, slimy tentacles appear out of the mist, rip the kid to shreds and drag him, screaming, out of sight.

Soon, strange locust-like insects two and three feet long start banging against the windows. Then some mutant pterodactyls swoop in to feast on the bugs. But wait — there’s more … wait until you get a load of the ravenous 50-pound spiders that shoot strands of highly acidic webbing.

“It appears we may have a problem of some magnitude here,” the officious store manager (Robert C. Treveiler) says in the understatement of the young millennium.

Turns out the military was fooling with something called the “Arrowhead Project” and has opened a trans-dimensional rift through which a stream of unimaginable creatures has poured — all of them apparently very hungry.

But these waves of mayhem are only one side of the story. The other side has to do with the devolution of the stunned people inside the store, in grand “Lord of the Flies” style.

It becomes a battle of reason against faith when the local religious zealot, Mrs. Carmody (Marcia Gay Harden in fine scene-gobbling form) starts ranting about “the end of days” and “the Lord’s judgment” — and gains new converts with each wave of creature attacks.

The message, of course, is about how thinly translucent our civilized veneer really is, and how close we remain to falling back into mindless superstition — up to and including human sacrifice as appeasements for the gods.

It’s all brought to life by a fine cast. Along with Jane and Harden, it includes the great Andre Braugher as a pompous lawyer; Toby Jones as an unassuming assistant manager who turns out to have a steel backbone and excellent marksmanship; William Sadler and David Jensen as good-old-boy grease monkeys; Laurie Holden (the cool, enigmatic beauty Marita Covarrubias on the last couple of season of “The X-Files”), who becomes a surrogate mother to Jane’s son; and veteran character actors Frances Sternhagen and Jeffrey DeMunn as the elder voices of reason.

Darabont lets some scenes get a little too talky, but he skillfully weaves all these characters and more into the narrative, building the tension among them between the harrowing scenes of the creatures swooping in for a snack.

To save time on production, Darabont hired the crew of the TV series “The Shield,” which is used to the grueling, frantic pace of a television series. The crew’s imprint is easy to see in the handheld, herky-jerky camera work inside the store, a trademark of “The Shield” that lends an air of docudrama to the whole thing.

At this point, the technique is seriously overused in both TV and film, but there’s no denying its effectiveness in goosing the tension between and among characters, especially when the tension is already close to popping off the scale.

It all leads up to a new ending crafted by Darabont that is vastly less ambiguous than King’s original, but which the master apparently loves. In fact, he has called it the “most shocking ending ever,” and has decreed that “anybody who reveals the last five minutes … should be hung from their neck until dead.”

OK, then! No spoilers here! Let’s just say that while “most shocking ever” might be a stretch, the ending is definitely a killer.

“The Shawshank Redemption” (which Darabont also directed) remains my favorite film version of any King story. But among his horror tales, this adaptation of “The Mist” ranks with “Carrie” right up at the top of my list.

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Rated R for violence.