The ending will Shock you, they say. Well I don’t know about all of that but I will talk about the ending of the Stephen King derived ‘The Mist’ and the problems that I think it presented at the end of this little article.

A terrible storm hit a small coastal town somewhere in Maine totally wrecking stuff up. You know if it wasn’t for Stephen King, absolutely nothing would happen in Maine. Big time movie poster artist David Drayton (Thomas Jane) has a tree go through his studio, amongst other major damage to his property while he, along with his wife Stephanie (Kelly Collins Lintz) and his young son Billy (Nathan Gamble) look on in stunned amazement. Off in the distance Stephanie notices a weird mist coming from the mountains, and apparently having some kind of mystical meteorological knowledge Stephanie correctly thinks that’s just not right. David assures her it’s nothing and grabs the boy and his cranky hostile neighbor Brent Norton (Andre Braugher) as the trio loads up in the Land Cruiser and heads to the local store to get some supplies and get to fixing the place up.

While our crew is driving to the store there is quite the brigade of soldiers heading in the direction of this mist, but they disregard it as nothing and continue to get their supplies. That is until neighbor Dan Miller (Jeffrey DeMunn) busts up in the joint all bloodied and beaten shouting about how ‘There’s something in the Mist’, and how it grabbed and shredded his good buddy. Naturally everybody thinks he had one too many hot toddies, that is with the exception of the towns crazed religious lunatic Mrs. Carmody (Marcia Gay Hardin) who has proclaimed that it is the end of days and that the 4 horseman are a riding! Now I don’t much but I know that I’ve seen enough of these movies to know that if I were in these folks predicament, I would be slitting Mrs.

Cormody’s throat first.  Religious people in non-religous themed movies are always Karazay! But that’s just my observation. Regardless, despite Mr. Miller’s dire warning about the mist, some dude decides to leave the store and all we hear are his blood curdling screams of agony which prompts the locals to lock the doors and prepare for the worst.

The worst certainly has come for a group of incredibly diverse people in Maine who find themselves in the worst situation possible under attack by all kinds of other worldly vermin, and it’s all the Gub-Ments Fault! Of course we have our non-believers who decide, despite proof to contrary, that there is nothing in the Mist and decide to go on out on their own, and we have our true believers who knew eventually that pestilence plague and famine were coming as has been clearly laid out in Revelations and are prepared to make the necessary blood sacrifices, though I believe that’s some Pagan ass stuff masquerading as Christian lunacy in this flick, but I could be wrong. In this little supermarket we are witnessing the microcosm of the breakdown of society, not that anybody should really care since we’re dealing with mosquitoes the size of Labrador Retrievers, and they’re the least of their problems.

Everybody knows that bugs are attracted to light right? It doesn’t matter if they’re the size of a small Volkswagen, it’s still a bug and it’s attracted to light. I just don’t know why it took these clowns in the supermarket so long to figure this out. Still, ‘The Mist’ was a pretty good monster movie in the sense that director Frank Darabont builds his story slowly and deliberately, teases us with hints and morsels of what may be in the mist and then unleashes the horror of the Mist on us in full force. Darabont’s film however aims to be much more than simple monster movie as it appears he has set the up the inhabitants of the store to represent the potential breakdown in the larger society on a smaller scale, and here it falters a bit. The problem is that the characters inhabiting this little society are rather two-dimensional and absolute. Mrs. Carmody as not simply a devout Christian but a religious lunatic. ‘If I want a friend like you I’ll take a squat and shit one out’. That’s not a very Christian thing to say Mrs. Carmody. Andre Braugher’s lawyer dude was not simply a skeptic but doubter in the face of overwhelming evidence and this cat is supposed to be the next Clarence Thomas. Then we have Thomas Jane’s David Drayton who is noble and true and will risk his life to save all which leads to the EARTH SHATTERING CONCLUSION!’

KRAZY SPOILERS!!! 5 survivors get into the car to see if anything’s out there beyond the mist and run out of gas. David takes his gun with only four bullets and apparently upon agreement kills his passengers, including his son, then gets out the car to await the mist menace to take him out but only finds that the mist is clearing and that soldiers seem to have the situation under control. Some believe this ending is awesome in its darkness, and though I like a dark ending as much as anyone this one didn’t ring true to me. It didn’t seem plausible that David, with all he’s done up to this point, risking his life to save everyone and everybody would simply say ‘okay, we all die now, y’all cool wit dat?’ I would’ve thought that until the bugs actually converged on the car and all seemed lost, then perhaps maybe. Not just because we’ve run out a gas. We’re talking about putting a bullet in the head of my child here. Besides, why not just jump out the car and gas up and jump back in? I mean there are so many things that could have been done instead of mercy killing four people at that point. This seemed like a dark ending just for the sake of having a dark ending to me. KRAZY SPOILERS OVAH!

Still I thought ‘The Mist’ was a very entertaining monster movie and more of a failure as a moral treatise on the breakdowns of society. Just remember two words whenever there’s trouble and you don’t know where it came from… one is Gub and the other is Ment.