Last night’s feature was The Mist (2007), an adaptation of the Stephen King short story. It was edited for TV but kept some blood and gore. The government performs experiments and punches a hole into another dimension. A strange mist comes through…along with a few monsters. We follow some survivors trapped in a supermarket. It’s a generally unremarkable story except for the religious loon trapped with the group and the ending. The loon devolves quickly into wanting to offer blood sacrifices to the monsters in the mist. The ending is rather bleak if you look at it one way and slightly less so when looked at it from another.
A group of four adults and a child escape in a truck. They drive until the gas runs out but do not escape the mist. They have a gun with four bullets. The father of the child kills everyone else then steps out of the truck hoping to be eaten by the monsters. A minute or so later the mist starts to clear and the army arrives escorting survivors. That’s a bleak ending. Until you realize there’s zero chance the government would ever let those people go and talk about this. The survivors are, at best, going to be held indefinitely. At worst, lined up and shot. Dad saved them from that. Either way, he saved them from the monsters.
