The Mist Spreads to DVD - Page 2

Well now that's just special

Which I am really rather annoyed about.
We don't even have a release date.

Bah! Don't reward those excuse-having mofos!
I'm brilliant.

Anyone catch the commercials for this. They're definitley going for broke by showing what looks to be every single monster money shot.

Blockbuster is selling the 1-disc with an exclusive King-Darabont chat (yawn) but they are offering a very limited amount of... Mist snow globes! Free for the first few to buy the DVD. You can't really see much at this link, but I think it has little spiders floating in it. Bizarre. And probably selling for hundreds on eBay in a couple years.

http://www.blockbuster.com/themist

I saw it a few times last night, and I'm not usually one to moan and groan about commercials and trailers, but my wife was watching TV with me and I was looking forward to eventually making her watch this and I feel like a good chunk of it is sort of ruined now. The whole "what's in the mist?" thing that they could have given to viewers was pretty much obliterated. If nothing else they should have left out the BIG one...

Gah!

That's not great or anything, but not nearly as bad as plastering every poster, ad, and DVD cover with "The most shocking ending in years!!!" "One of the most devastating endings in the history of horror!!!", and so on.

It's just my opinion, but trumpeting how shocking the ending of your movie is kinda defeats the purpose.

I think they needed to go with the Monsters! Monsters! Monsters! approach for video. Whatever approach they took with promoting the theaterical release didn't seem to work too well. Folks need to know it's a full-blown creature feature.

I literally just finished watching this. I blind bought it this past weekend, based on what I read here, and God DAMN if I'm not glad I did. This was one of the best horror films I've seen in a long, long while. I didn't see the flaws some complained about at all, and I was looking for them. I didn't think the CGI was bad at all, and the stupid decision fest one earlier poster complained about wasn't so obvious - again, even though I was looking for it - that it jumped out at you. But the best thing about it, IMO, was the ending. I won't give it away so as not to spoil for any who haven't seen this yet (and if that's you, please God do so as soon as you can), but MAN, that ending took balls. Darabont is to be given all the credit in the world. It is nothing short of a sin that this movie didn't do better box office.

Outside of the tentacle attack I thought the effects were pretty good considering the cheap budget. I even thought in some of the spider and bird scenes that they kinda looked like old school stop motion animation, which I thought was pretty cool.

Yeah, the Harryhausen love was clear.

Glad you liked it, Iggy.

i did end up coming around on this movie. i loved the short story though. i actually thought the changes were wrong for the film. i didn't mind the sex between tom jane and the chick in the book and thought they should have kept it because it seems like he is pretending its his wife and she pretends he's her man or something along those lines so its not as creepy. or maybe that makes it more creep. i do wish that they would have kept the scene with the spiders in the pharmacy more in line with the descriptions in the book because it sounded so cool with the way the webbing interacts with the skin. either way, the film has really grown on me. I hate the ending though. don't know why they changed it.

POTENTIAL SPOILERS AHEAD! PROCEED WITH CAUTION!I also have to comment on the innovative creature design. Whoever dreamed up how these things looked is to be commended. The way they blended species was pretty cool and disturbing. The bird things looked kind of reptillian, but kind of avian, with those weird beaks and all, and the spider things, especially, were very creepy. In the scene where the one crawls across the windshield & you get a good but quick look at its face, and see that in adition to fangs/mandibles, it has a row of teeth behind that that looks almost human. It added very well to the alien-ness of what might otherwise have been a pretty ho-hum kind of monster (yeah, spiders are kind of creepy, but they weren't as alien as some of the other things creeping around in the mist).
As far as the ending goes, I got into a brief discussion w/ one of my friends about this film, and he didn't like the ending at all because he thought it was "mean spirited" and called it a rip off of "Night of the Living Dead". I guess the former is a vaild criticism,although I didn't perceive it as mean spirited so much as tragic. The latter, though, strikes me as unfounded. Are we going to cry NOTLD ripoff every time a film doesn't have a happy ending?

I wouldn't call it a rip-off, but Darabont admitted that NOTLD was one of the influences in making the movie. I believe King even told him it was an inspiration in writing it. The panicked and paranoid (and allegorical) monster-siege story... The B & W version purposefully places it in that 50s & 60s era of scifi/horror. But just because it has a bleak ending doesn't make it a rip-off. Influence/homage/inspiration maybe. There wasn't SPOILER! a mass suicide at the end of NOTLD.

I didn't really find the ending mean-spirited at all. Like DM and Iggy, I felt it was meant simply to be tragic. On the commentary track, Darabont lays out his reasoning for changing the story's ending, and I tend to agree with him. Basically, he said that the ending to the story (in which our heroes continue driving because they hope to eventually get out of the mist, and David thought he heard the word Hartford come through the static on the radio) was too open ended for film audiences, and he felt that adding on a happy ending would be cheating. Sounds reasonable enough to me.

Those spider-things, for some reason, gave me an 'Outer Limits' Zanti Misfits-vibe...even though they don't really look anything LIKE each other...

Actually, I think Darabont states in the commentary that the Zanti Misfits were a direct inspiration on the spider designs.

So youse are with me that there was almost something human about them?

I haven't been able to see many eps of Outer Limits. Twilight Zone was always more populatr on our local stations, so I never saw the Zanti episode. And even though, as Graham says, they don't really look a lot alike, I can totally see where the both of you are coming from based on the pic above. Their being cited as an influence doesn't surprise me in the least, seeing that. But taking it and making it so totally different & so hideously scary was a bit of creative genius on the designers' parts.

I agree with that. It was a hell of a lot more powerful in its current form, as well. Particularly if you're a parent.

Got the dvd and watched it on Saturday. And man, what a great horror piece. Kudos to Mr Darabant on this one. The poster above was right: Big ol' brass balls were displayed in the approach to the story.

And the ending? I'll say it's mean...but not mean spirited. I see where he was coming from and I'll buy into it. But damn....I can understand now why the proletariat didn't give this thing any love. You didn't give them a happy...or even hopeful...ending.

My guess is that over time, this movie will be one of those that rises to the top of many lists as a "classic of the genre". Particularly given the B&W variation we got.

I sure as hell hope so.

Which is kinda funny because, the books end though a bit ambiguous there is a feeling of hope to it, hell I think hope is the last word in the story. And here Darabont does the complete opposite which I though was the right way to go with the ending.

I finally watched it. I liked it, but I'm disappoited. I was hoping Darabont would have hit a homerun here like he has with other King adaptations. That didn't happen, and I got a solid movie instead.

I hope I get to watch in black and white soon because I hear it works much more.

Was there a mass suicide at the end of The Mist?

Nothing to see here... Why are you reading this thread about the MIST DVD (can't get more "Post Release" than that), if you haven't seen it? 6 months after release, you should tread more carefully, sorry.

*EDITED original post with inviso-text, accepting some culpability.*

Well, I can tell you after watching Night of the Livng Dead 3D, I wanted to commit suicide. Wooka, wooka.

I have a high tolerance for crap. I once watched a triple feature of House of the Dead 2, Return of the Living Dead: Necropolis and Return of the Living Dead: Rave to the Grave, it was on Sci Fi though.

So you had the commercial breaks to get a beer, grab some cherry cheesecake and pop the debfibrillators on your chest then.

You shouldn't have revealed your high crap tolerance; movie moguls everywhere are going to put a bounty on your live capture, so their labs can figure out what makes you so incredibly crapwithstanding and put some in the water so the genral public can become equally tolerant of crap. And then they won't have to make any more good movies, and all we'll see is. . . oh wait.

So what'd they pay you for the privilege, Bub? Now what I want to know is how they got the public to not only withstand the crap, but actually ENJOY it. Perhaps some unsavory cloning experiment involving Darkmite's pineal gland?

This is no privilege, God* damned me. Hair loss, insomnia and general paranoia have been the price of watching shitty movies all the way though for me.

*Or Buddha, Krishna, Zeus, L. Ron Hubbard who ever.

I'm up for anything*, if there's free food.




* Unless it's helping someone move. Screw that.

In fairness, I wasn't accusing you of spoilers. It was more bemusement, you're completely right it's a post-release thread. Mass suicide though?

Doesn't sound fantastic.

Oh, it's a real hoot.
I promise!

Well, since you promised...

Children would enjoy this too, yes?

Okay, I'll say it...

NOM!

Of course, kids will find it a real blast.

* Chuckle! *

Just watched the B&W version last night. All the hype is true. It really is like watching a different film. It definitely has that creature feature, 1950's vibe going for it. But at the same time, it's oddly surreal to have that feel and then hear someone curse, or to see a bloody kill, both things we generally didn't see in that type of film. The B&W also made the film appear darker (both literally & figuratively speaking), which added to the creepiness on one level. By contrast, however, what gore there was was less graphic than was in color (although to be fair, this wasn't exactly a gore fest to begin with). And some things just looked different (such as being able to spot the weird teeth/faces on the spider things in the pharmacy scene). Was it better than the color version? I don't know if I'd go that far. To me, it's kind of like having an unplugged version of an electric studio version of a favorite song; sometimes you're in the mood for one over the other, but they're both equally good. But if you're buying this, DEFINITELY get the 2 disc set. It's worth it.

Glad you gave it a shot and dug it, Iggy. You're putting me in the mood to watch it again.

Man...I so want to buy this, but I must wait for the Blu-ray (hey, I have it, why not?) but Jesus if you guys aren't making it difficult for me to hold off!

I would love to see the b&w version, but I don't plan to buy the DVD set. I just sent a suggestion email to Netflix to ask them if they have plans to make the b&w version available as well.

Perhaps this can be a film selection at the upcoming Jersey Chewer fest?