MovieFest

★★★★☆ Everyone at the church wakes up, the first morning after the mist consumed their town. Adrian (Russell Posner) worries the others are “all dead” but Kevin (Morgan Spector) assures him they’re still alive, that they’ve survived just like them. Upstairs, they look through a stained glass window to spy a vehicle worth taking. They’ll need Mia (Danica Curcic), though the kid doesn’t trust her. And there’s the fact Connor (Darren Pettie) has her handcuffed. Those two dads are going to have a difficult moment, at some point. Over in the mall, Eve (Alyssa Sutherland) comforts her daughter. Alex (Gus Birney) doesn’t exactly know how to be comforted, with the things outside, her "rapist" Jay (Luke Cosgrove) inside, and people hanging themselves. The bodies are cut down by Jay and mall manager Gus Bradley (Isiah Whitlock Jr) – they’re military personnel, soldiers (just like the film). Even more unsettling. There’s discussion of what to do with the corpses, then they want ...

★★★☆☆ The Mist, episode 2, “Withdrawal,” wastes no time on introductions. We are right in the middle of that feels like a standoff at the police station. The phones don’t work, there are dead bodies scattered on blood stained floors. Trigger fingers are itching, but there is no visible target (as of yet). Welcome to The Mist. Kevin Copeland (Morgan Spector), soldier Bryan Hunt, mysterious refugee Mia Lambert, and teenaged Adrian Garf are locked inside a police station, filled with a shit-ton of guns, and the only person they trust to shoot one is the mystery date. The setting is claustrophobic in the station and it’s actually expansive when they make a break for it into the heavy haze. The church is a much calmer place. Because of Natalie Raven (Frances Conroy), there is a funereal feel to it. Her husband got shot by a crazed lunatic lost in a hallucinogenic fog and she’s looking for answers. So is the priest, who wants to give more than solace to his perishing parishioners. H...

★★★★☆ Based on a Stephen King novella from the 1980’s The Mist is small-scale paranoia ramped up by small town mentalities. More prevalent now than upon its initial literary release the show establishes stock characters early, drops in an atmospheric sense of unease within five minutes while setting up small town rivalries and broadly written stereotypes. Teacher Eve Copeland (Sutherland) is put on suspension because of unorthodox methods, her husband (Spector) the local newspaper man who is trying to raise their daughter. Conspiracy theorists living next door and a bunch of testosterone fuelled police, more interested in snapping selfies than stopping crimes. After a girl has cause to get the local quarterback in trouble the aforementioned ‘Mist’ rolls in with no degree of subtlety instantly wreaking havoc. From that point on people quickly lose their noodles and are constantly telling each other there is something in The Mist while still going out into it without any hes...