Director: Frank Darabont, 15, 126min

Stars: Marcia Gay Harden, Thomas Jane, Laurie Holden

On general release

A fogbank rolls over Maine and a group of townsfolk hole up in a supermarket as tentacles, bugs and ugly flying creatures zoom out of the unnatural murk to whittle down the supporting cast.

Darabont, hitherto typecast as the man who makes Stephen King prison movies (The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile), branches out slightly to deliver a solid adaptation of one of King’s tributes to the horror movies of the 1950s. It is hampered by King’s habit of having characters deliver paragraph-long speeches when a single line would play better, but a solid cast take it seriously enough to look worried, and Harden effectively hammers home the point by making her lunatic Christian rabble-rouser more terrifying than “the tentacles from Planet X”.

It has a nice B-movie feel, with small-scale tasks (an expedition to a cobweb-covered drugstore) turned into catastrophic endeavours by the crisis. But it would have done well to prune its two-hour running time to proper B-picture length.

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