REVIEWED - THE FOG: RELEASED last year, French director Jean-Francois Richet's US remake of John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) was a refreshing surprise: a lean, taut and satisfying cover version that took on a distinctive style of its own.
The same cannot be said of another European director's reworking of a Carpenter thriller in Rupert Wainwright's slack new treatment of The Fog (1980).
Updated to the present, the narrative is set on Antonio Island off the coast of Oregon as the community prepares to celebrate the town's centenary. Dark secrets from the past are ploddingly revealed as the islanders are threatened with retribution for the dastardly deeds of their ancestors.
First, in an unsuccessful effort at establishing human interest, the thinly sketched protagonists are wheeled on. Tom Welling, the muscle-bound 28-year-old portrayer of the teen Clark Kent/Superman in Smallville, plays a local fisherman, with another TV alumnus, Maggie Grace (Shannon Rutherford in Lost), as his ex-girlfriend who returns home after six months.
Selma Blair is uncomfortably cast as the sole DJ on the local radio station, and Adrian Hough gets to chew up some island scenery as the boozy priest, Father Malone.
Wainwright, the English director of Stigmata, jettisons the most compelling element of Carpenter's version: the sustained building of a tense atmosphere before the ominous consequences of the enveloping fog become, well, clear.
Instead, resorting to a compendium of stock horror movie cliches, Wainwright clutters his noisy, preposterous picture with pointless incidents without ever raising a scare.
