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.

13 Days of First-Time Frights: Misery

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 #1: Misery


Like I said in my piece on The Spool for Stand by Me, the best Stephen King movie adaptations tend to be the ones adapting smaller-scale material. When these films try to adapt expansive Stephen King tomes like The Dark Tower or lean heavily on convoluted scares rather than actual people like the new Pet Sematary, these films stumble badly. But when Stephen King film adaptations just focus on easily-explainable scenarios and grounded intense human dynamics, you get gold. The latter case informs Misery, which has a basic premise that could easily happen in reality and turns small tasks, like getting to a door, into monumental obstacles. If you ever needed proof how the more restrained King works make for the best movies, Misery is it.

Sometimes Dead Is Better And Maybe That's The Place The Pet Sematary Series Should Have Been Left In

The Creed family (unfortunately, not the Creech family) needs a change of pace. Boston is just too busy, so they've decided to move to an isolated house in Ludlow, Maine. There, Louis Creed (Jason Clarke), Rachel Creed (Amy Seimetz) and their two children, Ellie (Jete Laurence) and Gage (Hugo Lavoie & Lucas Lovie), plus their cat Church, can slow down and take some time to smell the roses. But the discovery of a local pet cemetery in the vast forest on their property puts the family on edge, as does the death of Church. If only there was some way to bring their cat back from the dead. If only neighbor Jud Crandell (John Lithgow) knew of some spot where dead things could be buried and then come back to life. If only that spot could bring Church back to life and start a series of tragic events for the family surrounding an inability to cope with death. Oh if only...

It Delivers The Scariest Clown Horror Since The Brave Little Toaster

There's something freaky going around the town of Derry. People keep disappearing, far more than the average American town and nobody seems to really care about it. They just keep going on about their business as if nothing's really happening. One person that's not standing by while these disappearances just keep on happening is Bill Denbrough (Jaeden Lieberher), a kid suffering from a stutter whose younger brother Georgie went missing a few months prior and now Bill is determined to find out what exactly happened to his younger sibling and try his hardest during his 1989 summer vacation to make sure no one else has to go missing under such mysterious and nefarious circumstances.

A Boring And Meandering Plot Make Sure That The Dark Tower Crumbles

When I finished watching Percy Jackson & The Olympians: The Lightning Thief back in February 2010, I was crushed. One of my favorite books, The Lightning Thief, had come to the big screen in a big-budget live-action movie and it was terrible. In taking the source material to the screen, they'd make drastic alterations to the book, which isn't inherently bad of course, but the changes they made here were just awful and somehow the execution of characters and plot details from the book were even worse. All those years of anticipation for a proper movie were answered by this trash heap of a feature film, one that seemed far more intent on kick-starting the next big fantasy movie franchise like Harry Potter than creating an actually good movie.

Idris Elba And Matthew McConaughey Set To Star In The Dark Tower Movie

There are movies that spend so long in development hell, one can be forgiven for being more than a tad dubious that such films would ever actually reach the silver screen. Some (like box office smashes Deadpool and Avatar) do eventually get made, while the likes of Hellboy 3 and The Goon are longtime residents of Development Hell, as is The Dark Tower, a feature film adaptation of Stephen King's critically acclaimed novel. Ambitious plans for this film have existed for years now, with various actors, directors and studios circling the project before failing to get it off the ground.

Classic Write-Up: The Shawshank Redemption Review

Simply trying to put an exact number on the amount of great things The LEGO Movie accomplishes would be a fools errand. For you see, there are so many contained within that film, trying to name every single one would take an eternity. However, one I do want to point out is how wonderfully it parodies, yet reveres Morgan Freeman. While they use his distinct vocals to deliver deliciously silly lines, he always manages to show just how adept he is in the craft of acting, that even his most humorous scenes still remain plenty of gravitas.