Mist-ical movie..(Christ that's a bad pun)

There has been a distinct lack of film blogging on this site and it really needs to be put right. I have been doing bits and pieces for Film Ireland mag for some time. When I originally did a few months work in their cramped but cosy little Filmbase offices a few years back, while I searched for gainful employment in the media world, I was lucky enough to get to alot of press screenings around the city to review for the mag's website.
This was, and is, my dream job.
There is a secret world (kind of) of journalists who get to flit from film to film, a few times a week, tucked away in the screening rooms of Dubln City. That is their job and it is a wonderful thing. After screenings, the hacks would gather together and yap about the film, what they'd seen recently and assorted film critic stuff that made me envious they actually got paid for it.
Someday I hope to do this job professionally (full time as opposed to freelance) but for the moment I try and keep up as best I can with the movie situation. I am still a major film head with a bag load of books and DVDs and can still proudly boast that my Masters dissertation was a study of Hollywood and the Vietnam War, specifically in The Deerhunter, Apocalypse Now and Taxi Driver.
Anyway, this post was prompted by the fact that I recently saw Frank Darabont's The Mist, a horror film based on a Stephen King novella and released at the end of last year in the States. It is an excellent, gory, character-based, well-acted, Stephen King-y (that feel of a Stephen King work that can't be explained any other way), sci-fi/horror film that proved to be a great throwback to B-movie 50s sci-fi like Them or even to Hitchcock's The Birds.
It's not out here yet, and I'm not sure when it will be, but I recommend that you seek it out somewhere (the Internet..)and enjoy a gripping, sometimes cheesy, often scary film with a great cast, clever but not over-developed characters, melodrama, scares, spiders, chilling overtones, allegoric undertones and above all......mist. It's not often a horror film has as much to offer and engage as The Mist, perhaps not since John Carpenter's classic The Thing. And a non-traditional ending, that makes perfect sense, made sure that the film bombed in the USA, unfortunately.
It's certainly not for everyone, but if you have ever enjoyed the films mentioned above, alongside maybe Starship Troopers, Deep Blue Sea (an absolute classic), Dawn of the Dead (both versions, but particularly the most recent one), Planet of the Apes or The Fog (ONLY the original), Slither and Tremors, then this is a movie for you.