13 Days of First-Time Frights: The Mist

13 Days of First-Time Frights is a series of reviews for October 2019 where Douglas Laman, in the spirit of Halloween, watches and writes about thirteen horror movies he's never seen before. These reviews will be posted each Tuesday and Thursday as well as the last three Wednesdays of October 2019.

Entry #3: The Mist

We're always talking about the Before trilogy, the Toy Story trilogy or the Lord of the Rings trilogy. But what about the most important trilogy of 21st-century filmmaking? What about the trilogy I call Mid-2000s Genre Fare Where An Andre Braugher Character Perishes? This trio of films, Poseidon, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer and The Mist, are all connected in how they feature Andre Braugher playing supporting characters that prove to be antagonistic to the protagonists and eventually, even in the PG-rated Silver Surfer movie, meet gruesome ends. It's the only thread holding these three individual films released over the span of 18 months together but it's all they need to make up the greatest trilogy of all-time.

The Savages Is Another Authentically Messy Achievement From Tamara Jenkins

Who exactly are the titular family of The Savages? Well, they're an eclectic group mostly consisting of a father, Lenny (Phillip Bosco) and two adult children named Wendy (Laura Linney) and Jon (Philip Seymour Hoffman), with Wendy serving as the stories protagonist. Both Wendy and Jon are trying their best to muddle through their lives when they get the news that their distant father is having extreme issues related to a newly formed case of Dementia in Arizona on the other side of the country. Wendy and Jon bring their father back to their neck of the woods in Buffalo, New York and set him up in a nursing home. As she tries to chart a course for where her life needs to go, Wendy decides to live with Jon so that she can be nearby if their father has any issues.

A Load Of Pointless Computer Effects Trickery Can't Boost The Serviceable But Substance-Free Beowulf

For a good chunk of the first decade of the 21st century, Robert Zemeckis devoted himself to being the first filmmaker to dabble in the world of full motion-capture animation (a process whereby actors wear special suits and have their movements put onto CGI characters) movies, a subgenre that basically died off after 2011, though motion-capture animation itself has become quite the frequent presence in live-action movies like the two most recent Star Wars movies. Two of those three efforts were The Polar Express and A Christmas Carol, a duo of family-skewing Christmas movies. Naturally, in between those movies, Zemeckis also used the motion-capture animation artform to create one of only four American computer-animated movies to get an MPAA rating harsher than PG: Beowulf.