'The Mist' should just fade away

Frank Darabont has made a nice living off the work of Stephen King, picking up numerous Oscar nominations, including two best picture nods for his adaptations of King's short stories "The Shawshank Redemption" and "The Green Mile."

The well runs dry, though, with "The Mist," a more traditional offering from the King of Horror that raises an intriguing question: What's more fearsome, aliens or your neighbor?

Most of the townsfolk in the western Maine hamlet where our scare story is set behave abominably in a grocery store that becomes the last safe haven when a mysterious fog envelops the community.

As one survivor astutely notes, things are hunky-dory as long as "you can call 911." Take that away, "toss people in the dark, scare the heck out of them … and you'll see how primitive they can get."

And it gets even more complicated when a religious zealot (Marcia Gay Harden) starts to convince her companions that offering a human sacrifice may be the best way out.

The film, and to a lesser extent, King's 1980 novella, are clearly metaphors for the way Americans get easily brainwashed by political and religious rhetoric.

At the center of it all is down-home Downeaster David Drayton (Thomas Jane), who heads to the grocery with his smarmy son, Billy (Nathan Gamble), after a nasty storm does a number on their home. Panic ensues when a bloodied man emerges from the eerie mist warning "they" (creatures of mass destruction) are out there.

Too bad Darabont's screenplay wasn't left out there with them. The adapter-director gets nothing right, failing to generated neither laughs nor screams in a grueling two-plus hour marathon of yawn-inducing clichés that wants to be "The War of the Worlds" but plays like "Plan 9 From Outer Space."

No one is believable, no one is interesting. The cast, a large collection of B-list and unknown actors, simply goes through the motions, their monotone deliveries occasionally interrupted by ear-shattering screams that are more annoying than terrifying.

The only drama is whether the drones will subscribe to Harden's fire-and-brimstone dogma or Jane's philosophy of let's get the hell out of here now. Of course, there are numerous discussions of who's right and who's wrong, or at least there is between intermittent alien assaults that look as cheap as the talk.

It all culminates with lots of screaming for blood - by the audience, not the Mainers.

<p style="text-indent: 0in">Grade: D

<p style="text-indent: 0in">Rated R. "The Mist" has violence, terror and gore, and language.