Saturday

Exactly one hundred years before my mother's birthday in 1980, a galleon carrying a leper colony was overtaken by a freak fog bank off Spivey's Point, somewhere along the US Pacific coast. Misidentifying a campfire as guide light, she dashed herself on the rocky shore, and every man aboard met his briny fate. Or so says John Houseman, playing a crotchety old fisherman in the opening minutes of John Carpenter's the Fog,* last night's do-it-yourself October Film Festival screening. Says Houseman, some day the fog will return, and well-armed zombies will stumble from the tide to exact bloody revenge. Three minutes into the movie we already have a pretty good idea of what might befall the town of Antonio Bay in the next eighty-seven. Happy centennial Antonio! I like the idea of "telling not showing" the plot, in the introduction no less, and then letting the bodies fall were they may. The Fog is uneven: beginning with a nerve-wracking environment of spreading menace, keyed to the sounds of everyday life--horns, clanking bottles, the radio--it comes slightly apart in its second act as we focus on a handful of individuals throughout their uncanny night. Come to discover, the filmmakers themselves disliked the original cut of this movie, and went back to work on it. They shot all of the good intro stuff ad-lib just weeks before the movie opened. But even when the Fog falters it's effective; scenes of the encroaching mist, and its shambling crew of weedy silhouettes with fishhooks, never stop being frightening. Speaking of never-ending fright, today's news notes that two more narco heads have been found in a colonial town near Morelia. The attached note insists that the killers are not "extortionists," and ends with "PS, I'm waiting for your next call."* Creepy. [Cavin]