DVD Of The Week: The Mist (2007)

First things first - if you like decent, tense, horror films or smart thrillers with monsters in, then see The Mist before someone tells you the ending.

It's not that the ending is particularly revelatory, but it would undermine your enjoyment of the movie if you knew where things were heading.

To be honest, you only have to be semi-cineliterate or have a penchant for bleak, nihilistic horror to be able to guess the 'twist' in the tale after about half an hour - but it's still better than anything the so-called "twistmeister" M. Night Shyamalan has given us since The Sixth Sense.

The Mist is Frank Darabont's two-hour adaptation of a Stephen King novella that has a small New England town (Castle Rock again) enveloped in a strange mist that rolls off the lake after a violent storm has left the area without power.

A group of locals and out-of-towners becomes trapped in a supermarket when they discover there are "things" in the mist... and these things have tentacles and teeth.

But the biggest threat to the people in the supermarket comes from their own paranoia and prejudices as the film quickly becomes a character study of the extremes fear can drive people to, with the town's local Bible-quoting eccentric (Marcia Gay Harden) fanning the flames of extremism as she wins more and more frightened people round to her Apocalyptic way of thinking.

Nominally in charge of the group is David Drayton (Thomas Jane), a level-hearted artist, who only wants what's best for his terrified and traumatised son Billy (Nathan Gamble), and he is our point-of-view anchor as events rapidly unravel.

If the film has a weak point it is the exposition info-dump delivered by the Private Jessup (Smallville's Sam Witwer) when the majority of crowd turn on him and blame the army for their predicament.

It would have been better if the audience could have been drip-fed this information somehow; but then again it is never confirmed - or denied - that this is the real explanation for what's going on anyway.

Although there are CGI monsters aplenty, The Mist's horrific impact is totally psychological because while, in all honesty, we are unlikely to actually come face-to-face with giant spider-like, flesh-dissolving, carnivorous creatures in the real world, we see fanatics who prey and thrive on other people's insecurities all the time.