Rish Outfield's reviews
John Carpenter is a cool director. He makes great, unsatisfying action movies, and even greater, unsatisfying horror movies. This is no exception. It's a fun, scary, silly horror film. Jamie Lee Curtis has very little to do here, but boy, is her hair bad! Her mother, Janet Leigh, also appears, but both looks old and is unsympathetic. Adrienne Barbeau, a Scream Queen in her own right, is the star of this show, and does an admirable job (though my favourite performance is still as ‘call me Billie' in Creepshow--with Hal Holbrook, who plays the priest in The Fog). As a boy, I was fascinated by the television commercials for this film, endlessly quoting, "What's in the Fog won't hurt you...it will kill you!" But what's in the fog (skeletal sailors) aren't half as scary as the fog itself. The creepy scenes of translucent mist moving slowly toward the shore are completely effective. Also, there are many scary moments, such as when a message appears on a piece of driftwood (hard to read thanks to the video transfer), and the sounds of unseen, but approaching ghosts. Unfortunately, the end of the film is kind of anticlimactic, and I was left with more of a ho hum reaction than maybe I should have been. What can I say? I guess that's Carpenter's way.
Best Scare: The aforementioned fog.
I'd Recommend It To: most ghost story fans.

The tyranist's thoughts
This one has some pretty scary moments and more of that cool John Carpenter music that was featured in Halloween, but this one is also much more sloppy. The characters are a little less sympathetic and it is really hard to make fog menacing. They do pull off a few good moments, but the end seems very contrived and rushed. It could have used at least fifteen minutes devoted to characters and back story. We saw this one on VHS and let me warn you that it is the worst pan & scan job that I have ever seen. It was so bad that it was distracting most of the time. There were constantly shots of nothing while a character did something barely off screen. And conversations were impossible. I would be willing to watch this one again if I could find a widescreen DVD release on the chance that there were cool things that I missed, but otherwise I don't think I care enough.