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 Predator Is A Staggeringly And Tragically Inept Feature

The Predator is a movie that feels like it's been put through a meat grinder and then put through numerous cycles in a blender. Good luck keeping track of where characters are or why crucial plot points are even happening amidst the ramshackle editing that renders the whole movie choppy & frequently incoherent. The disastrous editing isn't all that goes wrong here though in this motion picture whose extremely low level of quality is tragic to see. You'd think pairing up Shane Black, the mind behind Iron Man 3 and The Nice Guys, with a new Predator movie (Black had previously appeared in the first Predator film in a support role) would be the easiest recipe ever for surefire entertainment, but The Predator is instead a total waste of potential that rarely feels like a Shane Black movie, and I'm not just saying that because it doesn't take place at Christmastime!

The Punisher Is So Lacking In Creativity Even John Travolta Phones It In As A Mob Boss

Over the course of a 19 year period, we got three different Punisher movies, none of them direct continuations of each other. Instead, we got a trio of attempts to launch a series of movies based on this Marvel Comics character, none of which left all that much of an impact, especially compared to how well-received Jon Bernthal's take on the character on the Daredevil TV show was. The second of these three Punisher movies is the 2004 film by Johnathan Hensleigh, simply called The Punisher, which is one of only two movies (along with that 2005 Man-Thing film that ended up becoming a TV movie) to emerge from an extensive deal Marvel made with now-defunct movie studio Artisan Entertainment to turn various Marvel characters into various pop culture properties.