‘The Mist’ helps revive modern horror films

In theaters

THE MIST, written and directed by Frank Darabont, based on Stephen King’s novella, 127 minutes, rated R.

Two of the year’s best horror movies have come from works by Stephen King, who knows a few things about the genre that Hollywood seems to have forgotten since losing itself to the entrails provided by directors Darren Lynn Bousman and Eli Roth.

The year’s first King adaptation was Mikael Hafstrom’s “1408,” a horror film that eschewed today’s penchant for torture porn and got back to the basics by employing some old effective standbys – shrieking ghosts, scratchy sounds emerging from behind bleeding walls, a sense of claustrophobia that nibbled away at the screen like one of the rats in “Ratatouille.”

After the onslaught of Bousman’s “Saw” and Roth’s “Hostel” movies, “1408” proved a necessary throwback, a movie focused on building character, atmosphere and chills rather than on being merely a gory gross-out.

Frank Darabont’s “The Mist,” which Darabont (“The Shawshank Redemption,” “The Green Mile”) adapted from King’s 1980 novella, follows suit. It’s a movie about how a mysterious mist takes rise on the horizon after a storm slams into a coastal Maine town, leaving its residents rushing to repair the destruction left in its wake.

To the supermarket the Maine locals and “those from away” go, including Thomas Jane’s David Drayton and his young son, Billy (Nathan Gamble), who offer to give their bitter New York neighbor, Brent Norton (Andre Braugher), a lift.

At the supermarket, a melting pot of the town’s residents brews, only to be whipped into a froth when the mist crashes into the store, shaking it, and then when a man with blood on his face runs screaming from the mist claiming something is in it and they need to shut the doors behind him now. Has the man gone mad or is there indeed something in the mist? To the film’s credit, it allows us sufficient time to be freaked out by not knowing before it unleashes all of the monsters hissing therein.

Of course, nothing in the mist is as terrifying – or as heroic – as what we ourselves can become when pressed by fear. That’s the film’s point, and that’s what it reveals so well.

While several characters remain as rational as possible in spite of the odds stacked against them, others waver on the sidelines while another character – Marcia Gay Harden’s Bible-thumping Mrs. Carmody – at last finds herself a pulpit and an audience upon whom she can unleash her religious rhetoric.

As things grow from bad to worse, so does she, bellowing to the heavens that the end of days is upon them. Only a human sacrifice will placate her god, and Drayton’s boy, as far as she is concerned, will do just fine.

Beyond Jane and Harden, who do fine work here (especially Harden, who is excellent), the movie offers solid supporting turns from Toby Jones and Laurie Holden, several surprises tucked within the so-so special effects and genre cliches, and an ending that’s so good, it proves that even in today’s mass-market movies, sometimes Hollywood has the guts to turn a blind eye to the box office, focus on what best serves the story – and just get it right.

Grade: B+

On DVD

WAITRESS, written and directed by Adrienne Shelly, 104 minutes, rated PG-13.

Unfortunately, “Waitress” is Adrienne Shelly’s last movie. The writer-actor-director was murdered Nov. 1, 2006, by Diego Pillco, a 19-year-old thug who knocked her unconscious and, in an effort to make her death look like a suicide, hanged her in a bathtub with a bedsheet. He did this because she complained of loud noise coming from his apartment.

Some readers might wonder who Shelly is. The short answer is that she was one of those gifted character actors you recognize and appreciate when you see them on screen, but whose name eludes you because, in this case, stardom eluded her.

Watching “Waitress,” which Shelly wrote and directed and in which she has a major supporting role, there’s the sense that her fortunes might have changed after this movie, which underscores just how ridiculously tragic her death is.

Keri Russell is Jenna, a gifted pie maker and waitress in a small Southern town whose imagination, at least when it comes to conceiving new pies, knows no limits.

Her pies match her moods. Since she’s stuck in a bad marriage with Earl (Jeremy Sisto) and recently learned she’s pregnant with his child, which she wants about as much as she wants Earl himself, Jenna makes such classics as “I Hate My Husband Pie,” “Baby Screaming Its Head Off in the Middle of the Night and Ruining My Life Pie” and “Earl Murders Me Because I’m Having an Affair Pie,” which runs blood-red with the syrup of mashed raspberries.

About that last pie. Upon going to her gynecologist to address the unwanted situation of her “damn baby,” as she calls it, Jenna finds that her doctor is phasing into retirement and that a new doctor, the studly Dr. Pomatter (Nathan Fillion, “Serenity”), has taken over the practice. The relationship that steams between them is heated with reckless, comic abandon, with Jenna’s co-workers Dawn (Shelly) and Becky (Cheryl Hines) offering raised eyebrows and halting advice as they freely tamper with their own lives.

Russell is very good here, easily winning audiences over in a tricky role that could have been abrasive if the actress didn’t find unexpected ways to make her character so appealing. Her relationship with Andy Griffith’s grumbling Old Joe, for instance, who owns the diner where Jenna works, is shaded with nuance. You don’t sneak anything past Joe – not a pregnancy, not a bad marriage, and certainly not an affair – and to Jenna’s credit, she doesn’t try.

The bond they create, much like the movie itself, is satisfying and real.

Grade: A-

Visit www.weekinrewind.com, the archive of Bangor Daily News film critic Christopher Smith’s reviews, which appear Mondays, Fridays and weekends in Lifestyle, as well as on bangordailynews.com. He may be reached at Christopher@weekinrewind.com.