Okay, so I finally got to see the trailer for The Mist thanks to the good people at YouTube:
And it looks pretty good–I actually had a Mist-related nightmare last night, for whatever that’s worth, although that’s probably at least in part because the TopSpinner and that swinging boat ride at Astroland literally had me convinced I was going to fall out of them and plummet to my death. Like Jason, I was happy to see that Marcia Gay Harden’s Mrs. Carmody isn’t a Jonathan Edwards fire-and-brimstone whackjob, which works great in the story but not so much in a movie. It seems like they’re painting her as your run-of-the-mill pastel-wearing minivan-driving evangelical, who’s read every Left Behind book and sees what’s going on and is like, “Finally!” That’s actually pretty scary. The problem is that it’s nowhere NEAR as interesting as giant tentacle monsters, and the trailer seems to overvalue the scare factor of an angry church-fundraiser organizer and her yokel minions in the context of A MONSTER APOCALYPSE. As for the SFX that have come in for some criticism, well, yeah, I hate boring glory shots of what the computer team hath wrought as much as the next guy, and we’re not talking Weta Digital here. But on the other hand I love the Mist monsters so much that I’m not sure how much I’ll care. We’ll see.
Also on the giant monster invasion beat, MTV’s Movie Blog has posted a Dragon Wars creature gallery, and it’s pretty bitchin’. (Via Cinematical.) This movie is already experiencing some “the effects suck!” backlash, and let’s face it, the effects will probably be noticeably cheesy. But also let’s face it, so what? This isn’t like The Host where we’re all supposed to think the ridiculous-looking giant monster is a new milestone in horror filmmaking–it’s a Godzilla-like B-movie. If primitive stop-motion and guys in suits still delight us while we’re watching the just-for-kicks monster movies of yore, I don’t think digital should be any different.
Finally, they’re making a movie out of the old arcade video game Joust, the one where you fly around on giant ostriches and fight pterodactyls who eat eggs, if I recall correctly. (Via Cinematical again.) The high concept is “Gladiator meets Mad Max,” which on the one hand is cool, and on the other hand sounds like one of those comic books that are so common right now that exist primarily as mercenary glorified movie pitches. Let’s just hope they keep the flying ostriches.