This new Fog floats in on the fumes of the 1980 John Carpenter original, but the surprise is that it's arguably better.

It's virtually indiscernible from any other contemporary horror film except for, well, the fog.

The production values are above par, but as in Carpenter's original, seeing ghosts is less scary than imagining them.

Nothing comes together after the first ten minutes.

Director Rupert Wainwright fails to bring any style to the material, not producing a fraction of the suspense or wit generated by Carpenter in the original even while working with a far lesser budget.

Unfortunately, interest lags between the grisly deaths, and, worse, none of the characters generates rooting interest.

Mildly scary here and there. It does not play by all the horror movie rules (e.g., the black guy always dies first). And the cast is good-looking.

If the characters were more interesting, the long, long buildup to their night of ghostly reckoning might be suspenseful rather than tedious.

Most of The Fog will seem drearily perfunctory even to those viewers who don't know Carpenter's version, which itself emulated the elegant gloom of Val Lewton's horror pics of the 1940s.

Less fun than "Cry_Wolf" and "Venom," if that's possible.

Making concessions at every turn to the youth-horror market, the film slashes the ages of its protagonists by some 15 years, and its IQ follows suit.

The fog also does something genuinely eerie: It causes everyone in the cast to deliver dreadful performances and display inappropriate reactions when their friends are drowned, burned, stabbed or thrown into glass display cases.

I was held in suspense throughout The Fog, aching to learn the answer to its central riddle: Why would any one remake such a crummy movie?

Selma Blair, the one vibrant actress in a cast of colorless screamers (including Tom Welling from Smallville and Maggie Grace from Lost), takes Adrienne Barbeau's old role.