With a rare weekend work project taking place early this morning, I stayed at a hotel in the city last night to avoid being late and/or needing to get up three hours earlier just to make it there in time from my humble abode. A cumbersome opening sentence for sure; I'm not too tired to notice it, but I'm definitely too tired to fix it.

Around 11 PM, I checked into the Millennium Hotel, which was adequate but totally not worth the 400 bucks that I've now gotta weasel my way into T&E'ing. Though the room featured a mini-bar, I kind of assumed that 400 bucks would merit a mini-bar stuffed with peanut M&M's and those oh-so-glorious hermetically sealed jars of fashionably shaped pretzels. But there weren't any. I was sad.

I was also sad because the room lacked Internet access, meaning that all of my last minute work preparations had to transpire over my cell phone's poor excuse for a web browser. How could a $400 hotel room not come equipped with that stupid Ethernet cable thing? I started feeling plenty stupid over spending so much money, especially after glancing out the window and spotting the same office I go to multiple times a week not more than two blocks away. Surely it wouldn't have been that hard to make it in on time on a Sunday morning.

Defeated, I perused the hotel's collection of overpriced pay-per-view movies, and after deducing that I didn't want to watch Cloverfield while sitting inside a building that was probably destroyed during the course of it, I settled on The Mist.

And HOLY FUCK, where the hell have I been? I absolutely LOVED this movie. LOVED it! Still...before I continue gushing, I need to come clean and admit that I always love movies when I watch them on pay-per-view from inside hotel rooms. It's one the quirks that makes me me.

For whatever reason, I wrote The Mist off as just another in the long, long line of recent horror movies that carefully treaded the fine line between PG-13 and R, putting mood and music before visceral awesomeness in the name of a suspected broader audience. Or something. I didn't say that too well, but I think you know what I mean. Course, had I bothered to spend more than three seconds drawing that conclusion, I would've realized that The Mist was rated R.

I was under the impression that the movie's titular gimmick would've provided the filmmakers an excuse to avoid showing a lot; instead, it was creature after creature after creature, and every single one of 'em was creepy as shit. I'm tempted to toss in the "literally" descriptor, but then I'd have to justify it with a scary looking photo of a pile of horse mud, and that isn't the kind of Google Image Search that I want to end the weekend with.

The creatures were fashioned without any set pattern or "laws" -- some looked like exaggerated critters of our world, while others were so beyond comprehension that I'm still digging up YouTube videos to figure out what the heck I was watching.

While I'll give most films a passing grade just for the inclusion of weird and wacky monsters, I loved the story, the characters, the pacing, the acting....basically, I loved everything that all of the "External Link" reviewers on IMDB complained about. Maybe that's the aforementioned "pay-per-view in hotel room" nuance acting up, but even as someone who so often utilizes his online voice for nonpartisan opinions that take half-stances at best, I feel perfectly comfortable giving The Mist a solid recommendation.

Oh, and if I was at all on the fence about that, something that happened in the movie's last scene pushed it over the edge. Spoilers ahead...

After Thomas Jane and his ragtag bunch of survivors successfully leave the trappings of the supermarket and drive away with the hopes of escaping the horrible fog and all of its horrible monsters, they run out of gas and determine that there's no avoiding their awful fate.

Just when things couldn't seem more grim, a series of earthquakes sends all eyes about a mile ahead, and then, waaay up to the sky:

After facing a horde of giant spiders, crabs, pterodactyls and locusts, the heroes (or whatever you'd call them in this case) lose whatever small bits of hope they had left as that thing stumbles across the horizon. The six-legged "Impossibly Tall Creature" doesn't attack or anything, but he (she?) seemed to indicate that there would be no happy ending in their immediate future. (No need for me to spoil what happened after this, but I think the scene helped justify it.)

Honestly, that's what I wanted the Cloverfield monster to look like. Something wholly indecipherable, and something that was so beyond being simply "big." In fact, the Impossibly Tall Creature almost looked like an uber version of the Cloverfield monster. It's practically a throwaway scene, too, but it's the kind of visual that sticks with you and takes The Mist from being a worthy watch to something you can't get out of your head for days.

That's the long, messy way of saying: Good movie...go watch it.

Posted by Matt on 04/20/2008. E-mail me!