***SPOILER ALERT*** As the seaside town of Antonio Bay revs up to celebrate it's 100 anniversary an eerie and luminous fog, going against the wind, slowly overtakes the local fishing trawler "Sea Grass" and within minutes the entire three man crew is brutally murdered. Inside this fog there's a number of badly decomposed looking zombie-like mariner who are using the deadly mist as camouflage in assisting them in committing their crimes. It's not until later that we and the towns religious leader Father Malone, Hal Holbrook,find out the reason for this Fog/Zombie alliance and it has to do with the very founding of the town of Antonio Bay.
After doing a number on the "Sea Grass" and it's crew the Fog creates havoc in Antonio Bay itself causing everything electrical to go haywire. The disruptions also include local radio station KAB who's midnight to dawn music program is hosted by the sexy voiced, as well as looking, Stevie Wayne, Adrienne Barbeau.
Father Malone finds at approximately 12.04 AM a journal hidden in the wall of his chapel written by his grandfather that puts the fear of God into him. The journal explains, or better yet confesses, the sins that Father Malone's grandfather committed, together with the five other founding fathers of Antonio Bay, that resulted in the deaths of Captain Blake, Rob Bottin, and his crew of five on the trawler "Elizabeth Dane" which happened in the early morning hours of April 21, 1880. April 21 is the very day that's now being celebrated by the people of Antionio Bay as the towns founding and 100 year anniversary!
The very effective and startling ghostly photography, with a minimum use of state-of-the-art special effects, more then makes up for the movies very plot-holed ridden screenplay. John Carpenters sharp and tight directions is on par, or in some cases even better, with his previous horror blockbuster "Halloween" that was released two years earlier.
The movie also reunites a number of actors who were in John Carpenters "Halloween" that includes the love at first sight couple Jamie Lee Curtis and Tom Atkins as the out of town young hitchhiker Liz Solley and the local Antonio Bay fisherman Nick Castle. There's also Jamie Lee Curtis' real life mother Jane Leigh in the movie playing Antiono Bay's beleaguered, because of the killer Fog, Mayor Kathy Williams as well as Nancy Loomis who also stared in "Halloween" as Mayor Williams' press secretary Sandy Fadel.
The Fog and it's Zombie-like mariners go on a rampage seeking out the descendants of the original Father Malone and his cohorts who were responsible for their deaths by sending them and their boat "Elizabeth Daen" to the bottom of the sea off Antiono Bay's rocky and dangerous Spivey Point.
As you would have expected in a case like this it was old fashion greed that motivated Father Malone Sr and Co. to misdirect, with bonfires as navigation markers, the "Elizabeth Dane" to go off course in the dead of night and sink with it's crew as well as the some 200 pounds of gold that was on it. It was that gold that was to pay for building a leper colony for the afflicted Capt. Blake and his fellow leapers on the strip of land that was eventually to become the seaport town of Antoino Bay. In reality it in turn became Father Malone's and his fellow conspirator's's descendants both premature and permanent graves.
