The Mist Rolls In Slowly

Some horror movies just aren't fun enough, and that's the way Newsday's Jan Stuart feels about The Mist, a "mean-spirited horror melange" based on a Stephen King novella about a monster-filled fog that engulfs a grocery store and shakes up the customers trapped inside. “The Mist is another Chicken Little admonition built upon the cynical belief that when the sky really falls, we’ll reveal our true inner beast and prey on one another. Enough with that already,” he writes.

Claudia Puig of USA Today calls the adaptation by Frank Darabont (“The Shawshank Redemption”) “more thought-provoking than frightening.” Michael Phillips of The Chicago Tribune gives the movie three-and-a-half stars, calling it “good and creepy.” But he adds: “The bleakest ending this side of 'The Vanishing' may well curtail the masses.” (More Stephen King stories.)