Editor's Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on January 4, 2006, and we're proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
We all know that blood and gore and misuse of sharp objects can lead the MPAA to give a film a restrictive rating, but the DVD of last year’s remake of The Fog reveals that burning people can also get you in trouble with the board. In the uncut edition of Sony Pictures’ disc (a theatrical PG-13 edition is also available), director Rupert Wainwright points out in his commentary two scenes in which fiery deaths had to be toned way down in order to achieve the less restrictive rating. Also new to this version of the movie are a couple of mood-setting moments, including one in the town hall that contains an amusing sight gag.
None of this added material elevates the movie, which remains anchored toward the bottom of the list of recent horror remakes (see our original review here). The line in several of the reviews when the new Fog opened was that John Carpenter’s 1980 original wasn’t among his best work, which even the director himself has copped to—but it has a palpable mood, consistency and a number of genuine jumps, only the former of which are present in the update. There’s talk on the disc about how modern advances in FX technology allowed the new filmmakers to do a lot more with the fog itself, but for my money, Carpenter (also a producer on the redux) got a lot more out of a dry-ice machine and a little filmmaking ingenuity than Wainwright and crew are able to elicit with all their digital tricks. (To his credit, even Wainwright says in his commentary that he prefers the real fog to the CG kind.)
The Fog does have a terrific overall look in the 2.35:1 transfer, with rich colors, fine clarity and a high-contrast image that makes the most of Nathan Hope’s eerie cinematography. Just as impressive is the Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround audio, which frequently makes the movie sound scarier than it actually is. In addition to the few minutes of footage reinstated into the movie itself, the disc includes a number of deleted scenes, among them the flashback to the crime that starts the horror in the first place, presented complete instead of as the fragments seen in the finished feature. There’s a cool present-to-past transition that starts this version off, and the sequence has more power seen from beginning to end than in snippets. Most of the other cut bits are no great loss, though one, an extended meeting between Maggie Grace’s Elizabeth and her mother, contains a couple of nice character beats.
Wainwright begins his commentary by promising to discuss “some of the interesting things that went right and went wrong” while making The Fog, and he does point out a few amusing gaffes, like shattered boat windows that become unbroken in a later shot and misspelled Babylonian graffiti. There’s enough good stuff sprinkled throughout the director’s talk that it’s a shame there are so many dead spots, and moments when he simply describes the onscreen action. Along the way, we learn that Grace bravely did her own underwater stunts in part because co-star Selma Blair had already done all of hers, yet insisted on final cut in her shower scene with Tom Welling to assure no naughty bits showed (the duo “wore more clothes in the shower than I’ve seen on the beach,” Wainwright quips). The director comes off smart when he explains the difficulties of both filming on the ocean and finding waves around the Vancouver locations, but not quite so much when he discusses the film’s more clichéd elements as if they were givens, and points out “the best line in the movie”—“What kind of fog moves against the wind?”—which is lifted directly from Carpenter’s movie.
Wainwright further suggests an unfamiliarity with the original Fog when he questions, in a featurette interview, why its leprous ghosts are after the gold cross (’cause it was melted down from their stolen riches, that’s why). The collection of minidocumentaries, totaling a little over a half-hour, give face time to most of the main cast and crew and cover everything from the story development (or as Carpenter puts it, “reviving the corpse”) to the creation of the FX, both makeup and digital. The latter is the most interesting in a nuts-and-bolts kind of way, though clues to the movie’s underwhelming nature can be found in the earlier sections. Producer David Foster unabashedly states his desire that the movie appeal to “the young people out there today,” and screenwriter Cooper Layne reveals that the studio prioritized scary stuff over character development in their notes. Then there’s behind-the-scenes footage in which the crew arrives at a beach location to find it enveloped in thick, eerie real fog—and production is held up, instead of going forward with this bit of unplanned natural atmosphere.
