The Descendants Must Die
The residents of Antonio Island are very proud of their heritage and are preparing to honour their founding fathers with a monument in the centre of the town. What they don't realise is that the men they are honouring were responsible for the callous killing of a man and who had bought part of the island as a home to a leper colony, with the founding fathers torching his boat as he was transporting the lepers there. But when a mysterious fog engulfs the island it appears the descendants of the founding fathers are the target of a vengeful spirit which is looking for justice for the travesty done over 100 years earlier.
I will be honest; I had to have a look though what I wrote about John Carpenter's 1980 version of "The Fog" because my memory was sketchy on the details. What I wrote basically said that whilst it had an appealing cast and some classic sudden fright style horror it was in the end forgettable. Now whilst I am sure there were many who were indignant when they announced this 2005 remake of "The Fog" the truth is having watched it my thoughts are exactly the same. This remake has an appealing cast, it has some sudden scares but in the end it is just as forgettable as the 1980 version.
The thing is that there isn't a lot that can be said about this version of "The Fog" as it is all pretty standard from the visual appeal of Tom Welling, Maggie Grace and Selma Blair to the shock factor of something suddenly happening to break the quiet. The thing is that many of those sudden frights are signposted because you can feel that something is coming such as in a scene where someone puts their face to close to a navigational display on a boat which is shrouded in the fog. And as for the appealing cast, well there is one of the cheesiest shower scenes you will see as Tom Welling and Maggie Grace get cheesy rather than hot and steamy in what can only be an attempt to capture the soft eroticism of 80s horror.
What this all boils down to is that "The Fog" isn't a bad movie and truth be told it does a nice job of retelling a story for a new generation who might find the 1980s version dated with the effects and less appealing because of not being familiar with the cast. But like with the 1980s version of "The Fog" this version ends up just as forgettable as it lacks anything to simply make it stand out from the crowd.
