THE MIST [R]
Anyone dreading a marathon repeat of frequent Stephen King adapter Frank Darabont’s intermission-length The Green Mile can breath a relieved sigh in knowing that this delightfully creepy two-hour tour of the horror icon’s imagination is a tight showcase of both gents’ formidable storytelling skills. Based on King’s 1980 novella (which turned up slightly edited in the 1985 anthology Skeleton Crew), it concerns a small Maine town – and which King story doesn’t? – upon which a mysterious fog descends and brings with it a menagerie of horrific creatures with a taste for these hapless Mainiacs, holed up in the local supermarket. Beyond the horror of any King story are sympathetic characters, and this effort strikes a nearly perfect balance between them and the evil that would make snack food of them. In this carefully tailored claustrophobic outpost of humanity, survivors divide into two camps, Lifeboat style. There are the Christian fundamentalists, led by self-styled prophet-of-the-End Times Mrs. Carmody (Marcia Gay Harden) and the sensible sorts led by local Regular Guy, David Drayton (Christopher Lambert ringer Thomas Jane), a rational husband and father who isn’t so quick to assign Biblical significance to the hellish new visitors. It is this slow burn of a coming-to-fists that drives the story, with the pointedly Lovecraftian blood-and-guts circus serving as an underscore. Harden (Into the Wild) is fantastic, channeling her fury through us and back onto her character, a frighteningly charismatic Biblical literalist. The backlash against her on-screen takes the form of a stand-up-and-cheer moment of mob rule that would get an audience arrested for inciting if it were real life, but it is for that anonymity that we go to the movies, to cheer or laugh or scream and have our incontinence forgiven when the lights come up. –Robert Newton

A KING RANTS SOME?
The Mist author has a plan for the loose-lipped

Last week, at a rare press conference appearance, best-selling author of The Mist Stephen King, while praising the job that The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile writer did with his fourth King adaptation, said, “Frank wrote a new ending that I loved. It is the most shocking ending ever and there should be a law passed stating that anybody who reveals the last 5 minutes of this film should be hung from their neck until dead.” King offered more controversial words last week during an interview on ABC’s “Nightline” after being asked, “What scares you?” Without missing a beat, he answered, like one of the pragmatic reluctant heroes of The Mist, Ollie Weeks might, “Organized religion gives me the creeps.”•••