Guest Reviewer!

The following review of The Mist is by the Super Mommy.

I like a happy ending as much as the next gal. That said, I’m not one of those people who MUST have a happy ending, who can’t appreciate an ending that is ironic instead of positive, or that is downright unhappy but appropriate. I tell you this so you’ll understand that it’s really unusual for me to have a visceral negative reaction to the ending of a movie. The Mist, however, has an ending that just ruined the movie for me. Director Frank Darabont also wrote the screenplay adapting Stephen King’s popular novella of the same name. Thomas Janes (one of my favorite under-rated actors) plays Dave Drayton, an artist living with his wife and young son in (where else) Castle Rock, Maine. The trouble begins when Dave and his son, Billy, are grocery shopping in town and a man runs into the store, bleeding from the nose and crying out that “There’s something in the mist.” And then the mist rolls in and all hell breaks loose.
For nearly two hours this made-for-TV movie was on its way to ranking among my favorite Stephen King adaptations. It had everything you want in a creepy horror flick – compelling characters, decent dialogue, scary as heck monsters rendered in excellent CGI, believable conflicts among the characters and incisive commentary on the human condition. Forget the fact that Thomas Janes is stellar, or that Oscar winner Marcia Gaye Harden tears up the scenery as the apocalypse-predicting village Bible-thumper. It doesn’t matter that over the course of the film you are inexorably moved to care deeply about these characters. Because they’re going to get screwed, royally, by the end of the movie – and so are you. The Mist has the ONLY kind of ending I really hate – an unhappy ending that’s obviously done for gratuitous shock value and that doesn’t flow naturally from the two hours that preceded it. When an ending seems to serve no other purpose than to let life take a big, ugly, stinky crap on the protagonist, then it’s an ending that serves no purpose.
Don’t see this movie. SPOILER WARNING: (Don’t read this next sentence if you still think you want to see this dismal debacle.)
If you are a parent, you will lose sleep over how this movie ends. I sure did.

All reviews in this blog are by the movie mommy unless otherwise noted.