The Fog (1980)

The Fog (1980)
Director: John Carpenter
Cast: Adrienne Barbeau, Jamie Lee Curtis, Tom Atkins, Hal Holbrook, Charles Cyphers, John Houseman, Janet Leigh
Memorable Line(s): "To the ships at sea who can hear my voice, look across the water, into the darkness. Look for the fog."

There's a famous poem by Robert Frost with the line, "The fog comes in with little cat feet." In The Fog, the fog comes in and people die.

Antonio Bay is small, sleepy, coastal village with not a lot going on today, but with a dark secret in its past. Stevie Wayne (Barbeau) is a night DJ at a local radio station that is perched with a view over the ocean when she witnesses a large, mysterious fog bank coming in from the sea. Ships caught in the fog find their crews attacked by something in the mist. Citizens in the town run for cover. A minister (Holbrook) in the town knows the secret of the town's past and he know he is the next target for whatever is in the fog.

The Fog uses a similar style that director John Carpenter used effectively with Halloween. He spends a good deal of time setting up the story and telling us about the town and it's inhabitants. The slow build works effectively and Carpenter sustains the suspense through the middle of the movie, but then falls to a problem that would plague some of his future films -- he doesn't know how to finish a movie. By all accounts, Carpenter had a different ending, but the ending he did use seems forced and artificial.

Still, The Fog has enough going for it in the first two thirds of the movie to make it worth your time.