Can you let us know what other scifi projects you've worked on? How did you get started?

My education was at the Art Center College of Design in Product Design (Pasadena, California). Upon graduation I started a design Consultancy with Scott Robertson and we went down many different paths creatively. One of which was products for the disabled. Now, although this was a very satisfying experience, I still yearned for the world of entertainment. So, I will cut to the chase with some of the first experiences. I worked with Rhythm and Hues on many "pitch" projects and a number of films, X-Men and Chronicles of Narnia to name some. A fantastic break, however,was working for James Cameron on Avatar. Started off as a few months and went on forover 2 years. Amazing experience. That then rolled into Cloverfield and Watchmen and currently Star Trek.

How were you approached to work on Cloverfield?

It is kinda funny. While I was in the last few months of Avatar, I received an email from someone who has seen my educational DVDs with the Gnomon Workshop and they liked the way I worked. They said that they were working on a monster movie and would like to see if I could be involved. As mentioned, I was in the last moments of Avatar and overwhelmed with work. Sadly, I did not even respond to the email. Then I got another. Again, I was terrible at responding to them (think of how long it took me to get to answering these questions). Eventually, Gnomon called me up and said this guy is trying to get in touch with you, can you please deal with it. So, I thought, "who is this guy, and what does he want"?. I went online and googled J.J. Abrams and could not have kicked myself harder. Not just for being so bad at responding to the emails, but to be so clueless. Anyhow, it all worked out.

How many iterations did the monster go through? Were there different versions with it walking upright, etc? Were you told specifically to avoid any Godzilla-esque designs?

If an iteration was a sketch, then maybe 50 or so. I really did not have the time to invest in this as I had wanted to, because I was still wrapping up Avatar. So. weekends and evenings were all that was available. With that, I had to be very efficient with my time and the process of development I chose. There were many different versions that we explored as we were all looking for what it could be. There were tentacles, there were fewer limbs, more limbs, no limbs... big, broad strokes in search of Clover. I am not recalling being told to NOT do Godzilla like designs, it was more implicit. Since it was not a Godzilla movie, it would have been a huge mistake to do things like it. However, it still needed to be huge, have a head full of teeth, arms and legs, and, because of it coming out of the water, I felt it needed a tail to justify an aquatic potential origin or existence.

Did you also design the smaller parasite creatures?

Yes. But, not without major help from the talents of Tully Summers. A fantastic creature designer and sculptor. We worked together on Avatar and many a project in the past.

What inspired your design? What sources did you draw from?

Well, once we had a direction the inspirations were definitely aquatic. Especially with the head. There is a very complex skeletal structure in there for eating, but you don't see it at all in the movie or toy. Clover also has a complex breathing system and more than one way to eat. But, again, it is hardly obvious in the film nor toy. Honestly, the biggest inspiration is less about one or two other animals, but rather inspired by biological plausibility in general (ignoring the fact that something that big could never live on land). Sometime the cart has to lead the horse and you make it cool first then justify it later, but I always try to give the creatures I design a "good reason" to be. As for the parasite, I knew that I wanted something thin and vertical and light. Kinda like a flea.

What's a favorite of creature of yours, that you didn't design, in another film or tv show?

A favorite still is Alien. HR Giger is one of the few people out there that did something really new and fresh. Granted, it still had to be a man in a rubber suit for all sorts of other reasons, but Giger has such a unique style, that he even made those challenging parameters work. It would be incredible to one day achieve such a unique style that does become iconic. I can only try.

Was the scale of the creature always the same?

Not sure really. I know that often times the scale changes to suit the particular moment or narrative, but I think Clover was around 250 feet?

The monster looks ungainly and J.J. Abrams has said in the press notes that it's a "baby". Was that also part of the design? For it to look a bit clumsy?

I would have preferred that it be even clumsier. But then it can get comical. Yes, it was the intention that it is a baby and it is not only developing its strength, but also its land legs. The proportions are intended to feel a little like a new born deer or horse. Long, thin and slightly awkward.

How involved were you with the final, CGI version of the creature?

Very and not at all. Phil Tippett's group has way more knowledge in the realm of bringing this stuff to life that I ever will, so they would have no use for me. The "very" part is that the sculpture that I did in "Z-Brush" is essentially what they used. There is a tremendous amount of work that needs to be done when you hand over a digital model, but the sculpture part of it usually remains intact.

Have you seen the finished film? If so, what did you think about it?

I have. A couple of times at Paramount and once at the Mann's Chinese Theater with friends. I was real impressed actually. I had no idea how they were going to pull the whole thing off and it was defiantly risky. But, I was engaged from start to finish. Sure it is a little difficult to be completely objective as I was aware of how it was made, what was to happen next, etc. But what was telling for me was that my palms were sweaty from the experience. And I did not throw up from it.

Do you think there will be a sequel for sure? We know they've said that they are working on one.

I am only speculating here, but I do think so. There are so many other movies that have sequels that make you wonder why. So, if a motivation to make a movie is based on the box office success, then it seems very probable. I have asked, and I still don't know yet. Regardless, I am designing Clover 2 in my head.

You can check out Neville's impressive portfolio of work at his website.

According to the CthulhuTech Web site:

CthulhuTech is an innovative storytelling game that started out as a combination of two popular genres. The first was that of cosmic horror, made popular by H. P. Lovecraft and culminating in the modern day with elements of Mike Mignola's Hellboy and John Carpenter's In the Mouth of Madness. The second was that of giant mecha Japanese animation, made popular by such series as Robotech, Neon Genesis Evangelion, and Rahxephon.

In fact, Paramount if you're still listening, just give the Cloverfield monster some sort of a blaster or missile pod in the sequel. Then we promise we won't complain. Check out Wildfire's CthuhuTech game on their site, where you can order everything you need to open dimensional portals and summon demonic forces. We didn't see any Shoggoths with armaments, but when you combine these two genres, you just know it's coming.

Cthulhu Tech

Remember this last shot in the film of our intrepid heroes at Coney Island, enjoying a post-coital day of amusement? Apparently something huge splashes down into the ocean in the background. We missed it, but if you couple it with the translation from the graphic novel that says the Japanese Tagruato corporation's satellite fell from orbit, then bingo. You've got the alarm clock that woke up the monster from its deep-sea slumber. We have no idea if it's true or not, but there you have it. We now promise you a Cloverfield free week from here on out. Well, maybe.

We know about J.J. Abrams going into the toy store in Japan and seeing all these Godzilla figures and being inspired to make this film, but at what point were you contacted and asked to come onboard to direct?

Basically, J.J. and Drew were talking about the story, and they went in and pitched it to Paramount and they immediately said "Okay, we'll make it." It wasn't like, okay write a script and then we'll put it into development. They were like, We love the idea, we'll make it, we know where it goes, we know when to open it. Apparently Drew walked out of that meeting and turned to J.J., because they'd pitched it as if they had everything, and he said "J.J., that's all we have!" J.J. said, "No no, we're gonna do it."

It all happened very, very quickly, so Drew went off and wrote a 60 page outline which we called a "scriptment" because it was a weird hybrid between a script and a treatment. That was what they showed me. J.J. and Bryan Burk, who has been his producing partner for years, came to me and showed me the treatment. I read it and they said I should meet Drew. The thing is... it was clearly filled with a huge amount of special effects. I was thinking, "We can't just go out on the streets of New York and film this as is. There's going to be a lot of effects work." I'd never done effects work before, and I was also in the middle of of putting this film together that I'm hoping to do now called The Invisible Woman, and we were in the middle of a casting snafu and J.J. was like "I want you to do this! Do this first and you can do that film right after." So I said to him, "Why do you want me? It's such a heavy visual effects thing." And he said, "Because I know that you love character, and that's what we want. We want a sense of realism."

Then I got very excited, because I was reading it and I was seeing all of the crazy detail, I thought if we could really do this, against this epic scale... on the page it read like a Roland Emmerich-sized Independence Day kind of movie. But I thought, if do it in this kind of intimate, naturalistic style... And I wanted to do some improvisation and other things to make it feel real. That was very exciting to me, and they said great, so J.J. and Drew and I got together and started talking about the direction to take the outline and we fleshed it out further.

That's basically how I got involved. I'm going to guess they had their pitch around January or February, and then Drew wrote up that very extensive treatment very quickly. By the end of February I'd already read it and was on board, and we started developing the treatment further and going into production on the teaser trailer. There was no script when I got on-board, so from when I got on to the release date, is still under a year, which is crazy. In fact, we didn't even have a script until four weeks before we started shooting. Drew was still working on Lost, and we were working on weekends and talking about how to rework the story, coming up with the structure of the flashbacks and all that stuff. It was all madly coming together because we knew that we had this release date, and we also knew we wanted to finish this teaser trailer and get it onto the front of Transformers.

We thought for a movie that didn't have any recognizable people in it, we thought it would be great to tease people with that trailer on the front of a huge movie like Transformers, and we had no idea what kind of a reaction we'd get. All of that, working on the script, readying the trailer, was all happening at once.

How different was this experience vs. your other feature film, The Pallbearer?

It was very different, although it's funny because the casting process was very similar in that... it's funny, because when we did that film I wanted the main character to be someone you didn't recognize, and who you'd meet as that new character. When we cast David Schwimmer at the time he was on the first season of Friends. We thought it was this show that had just begun, and he was part of a huge ensemble, and in it's first season it wasn't a hit, it was only sort of a middling success. However, right when it began filming it became this monster smash, and we knew this because we'd be out on location filming and kids, little kids, would come out and surround where we were shooting, and then we realized, "Oh, we don't have an unknown cast."

In this case, we thought it was critical to cast people you didn't realize, because in trying to create this "reality," and create this illusion that you're watching found footage. If you're supposed to be looking at someone's camcorder, you don't want to end up seeing Will Smith, because as great as he is, that immediately tells you that you're watching a movie.

The actual process itself was different, and not just for me, because I'd never done effects before, but also for the visual effects people as well. I went to them and I said "Okay, I don't know how this is done, but this is what I want to do. I want it to look handheld, and I want it to be continuous takes." I thought it was critical that this needed to look like a handheld film. Our escape route has always been that we could put in a jump cut, but I felt if we used that in this, people would feel cheated. So when we met with the vfs people, they suggested shooting on steadicam and then adding shake later, but the problem with that is that anyone who is doing these kind of videos that you see on YouTube every day, which is really our audience, will say "Hey, that's not authentic." So they had to figure out a way that it could all be done handheld.

Also, in most films you have all these shots that are like a small shot here, a few seconds there, and it would all be very containable and the visual effects people would know exactly how many shots they'd be working on. But, with this film since we were doing everything in continuous takes, we'd shoot a scene and I'd ask them "How many effects shots is that?" and they'd say, "Well, we don't know." Instead of doing many shots, we did one long shot that would basically take in all the effects of many shots.

It was also really different for the crew, because I was having the camera operators run the cameras as unprofessionally as possible. And the focus pullers as well... focus pullers lose their job if they're not dead on when someone walks into a room and hits their mark. I'd be saying "No! You're too dead on! This is autofocus on a handheld consumer camera, it has to go past them, and come back." They'd say, "Well, this is the kind of thing that gets me fired." I told them, "Not on this movie!"

I also wanted to be able to use the handheld camera as a basis for improvisation as well. Instead of shooting the scene a normal way where you'd have several angles, I'd only have one angle. I would also shoot the rehearsals, because you never know if something great was going to happen. Then after we'd done the scenes a bunch of times, I'd say "Okay, forget the words and lets just try something else. You know what the scene is about." I'd let them go and improv the scene, and a lot of times those ended up in the movie, because they felt more understated and natural.

Were you inspired at all by the original 1954 Gojira film?

Yeah, absolutely! That's actually an incredible film, and we've seen the bastardized version here in the United States. Most people are familiar with the film and have seen the Raymond Burr intercut scenes, but that movie is far inferior to the original. It came out the same year as Seven Samurai, and is considered to be a masterpiece in that country. It is a great movie, and it's very haunting.

There's no question that we were aware of the fact that the monster in that film was really a metaphor for the anxiety of that time. That was definitely the idea here that we wanted to create our own national monster the same way Godzilla did to create a monster of our time.

When you worked with artist Neville Page who designed the monster, what inspirations did both of you draw from? What was that like?

We wanted it to be totally original. He is really amazing, he has this thing I affectionately call his "Wall of Terror." You walk into this office and there's this very colorful wall of pictures, and immediately you want to walk over to it and check it out. However, the closer you get to it, the more quickly you want to look away. They're images of intestines and body parts and all these different things because there's a very biological, evolutionary logic to his work. He was coming up with all of these different features for the monster, and drawing from nature for this.

In working with him I was very interested in what the creature was going through, and we came up with the secret that the creature was a baby. It was this enormous baby that was going through terrible separation anxiety, it didn't know what was going on, and it was pissed. I wanted a creature that would be ferocious and angry, but also that there would be fear in the eyes. He showed all these sorts of fearful eyes, like how horses have a lot of white showing under their eyes when they're scared. He would always come up with these diabolical features that the creature would have. He has a singular talent, and he's really amazing.

So, at the end of the film, after the credits, a walkie-talkie crackles to life and you hear... something. What is it?

Yes, you do hear something! That's another sort of radio chatter moment. I don't actually want to give that away at this point, because it is decipherable. That's the very last thing we did on the mix, I sort of jumped up to the microphone and did this thing. I know someone will figure it out, but I don't want to give it away yet.

Early in Cloverfield, when the monster first attacks New York, we see nothing of the giant beast — only the destruction it's leaving behind. As bloodied people stumble from the wreckage of leaning skyscrapers, dazed and covered in a thick layer of dust, one cannot help but recall the first, terrifying images that leaked from New York after the World Trade Center was hit. Most of it came from shaky, amateur footage. Likewise, Cloverfield is shot to look like it comes from a handheld camera dragged around by a group of rich twenty-somethings fleeing the wreckage of a party. So Cloverfield isn't just reenacting the attacks. It's reenacting TV news images of the attacks too. There is something genuinely shocking and brilliant about those moments in the film when you know you're watching scenes so clearly inspired by 9/11. It feels risky and wrong, and therefore you are profoundly relieved to see the comical, rubbery monster come on the scene, stomping and roaring and shedding lice the size of great danes. That creature, who does all the appropriate monstery things like resist conventional weapons and open its mouth really wide to reveal layers of weird teeth, is profound reassurance that we are firmly in the realm of fantasy. New York has not been attacked. It's just a silly dream about a monster so goofy-looking that you can hardly look at it without giggling. (Don't believe me? See the Cloverfield monster do its funky chicken dance in our morning spoilers.)

Director Matt Reeves knows what he's doing with his monster, bringing it blundering into the story whenever we get too close to remembering the real disaster that inspired it. In fact, one of the most genuinely horrifying scenes in the film has no monster at all. Several characters decide to rescue their friend from a sixty-story building that has collapsed against another one. Exhausted and in shock from watching their other friends die, they climb those sixty flights up the non-collapsed building, and jump into the slowly-crumbling one next door to get to their friend. Nothing is more terrifying than these vacant, tottering buildings whose blasted walls howl with wind.

And then, just as you start to contemplate those other blasted buildings, those other terrified people trapped inside them, the monster arrives and suddenly everything is fun, B-movie goodness. It takes smart writing and directing to make a movie like this, that pushes raw historical tragedy right into our eyeballs and then deftly distracts us with old-fashioned entertainment.

Sure, you can go see Cloverfield for the stomping and roaring, and you won't be disappointed. But when the movie's images of a destroyed New York fallen into chaos haunt you for days afterward, you'll start to realize that Reeves and his twangy-ass monster have given the U.S. its first great movie about 9/11.

We've broken the hour-long movie down to its best parts in the video above, while trying to maintain some semblance of a story. However, since it still doesn't make much sense (although it seems a lot clearer than the whole film), we'll break it down for you.

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• The grooviest part of the movie are the opening credits, which actually feature some Terry Gilliam-esque animations. If the whole film had been done this way, we might have loved it.
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• A scientist accidentally concocts a serum that unleashes the "killer instinct" in lab rats. They attack his assistant, and chase her inexplicably out a window. He saves her as she dangles from the ledge. What a hero
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• The scientist takes the serum in a simple Mason jar down the the ocean, and tosses it in to get rid of the evidence. But not before taking a huge whiff of the contents. Good quarantine procedures, doc.
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• The serum ends up in a shopping bag, and gets caught by a local fisherman. He decides to hang onto the jar (what?) and takes it to another fishing location, this time in a stream in the woods.
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• Whoops, he knocks the jar into the stream where it smashes to bits. A few feet downstream, the weird gardener at a nudist camp drinks some of the serum-laced water. It makes him crabby and grumpy, so his blonde sister chains him up in a shed. You know, just like a doctor would recommend.
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• The lab assistant and her fashion model roommate both turn out to (surprise!) be members of the nudist camp, and they come in for a party weekend to celebrate their friend Claire's birthday.
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• The monster, enraged by barren flesh we suppose, tears loose from his chains and sets off with his newly ugly mutant face and an axe in search of nubile flesh.
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• A call gets put in to a bored military commander who brings the cavalry, and they blow the poor monster to bits. Actually, a very small bit. They turn him into a rock or... something.
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• The group is momentarily sad, but then point out that the sun is coming out, so they strip off and enjoy life once again in the nude, and now monster-free.
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Holy duplicates, Batman! This couldn't look more like Cloverfield unless they called it Cloverdale and set it in New York City instead of Tokyo. They even use the same font to plug to direct-to-DVD date of 01-15-08. I guess they're hoping that their three day lead on J.J. Abrams' film will fill up their coffers with bewildering video store browsers. Not surprisingly, it's from the same director who brought you Snakes on a Train. We can't wait to see his next flicks: Space Journey and Tungsten Man.

Movie Trailer: Monster - The Asylum's Cloverfield Knock-off [/Film]

Reeves says:

When we started the project there was going to be an announcement in the trades. In this case, they wanted to keep everything under wraps. So the movie was going to be made under this outside corporation that was basically a property of Paramount. That corporation had a name that I don't know the name of. I think Clover was the first part of it. Maybe it was Cloverdale. When Drew [Goddard, LOST writer] was putting a name to the project, there was supposed to be a name for the project like there was for The Manhattan Project. So he said, "I am going to use that weird mysterious thing," and he misheard it. He didn't even understand that it wasn't Cloverfield, it was Cloverdale. Maybe that was because of the street by J.J.'s old office, but the truth is he just misunderstood it.

Whist was pretty cagey about discussing any specifics of Cloverfield, but he did talk a bit about his creative process for the film:

How was this different from working on movies you've done before, like the Tenacious D movie or Lemony Snicket?

The goal was, in a strange way, realism, and obviously the stage and set for the environment it all takes place in [are meant to be as realistic as possible.] There's little information as to why things are happening. It's kind of a fusion of fantasy and realism, with the goal to be as real as possible, as it's all told in the first person.

Judging from the trailer, it's a very bleak look and a very muddy palette. Did you try to add anything extra to the designs to make it more scary?

There's nothing outside out of the box that I wanted to do. The story takes care of itself. It's not stylized in that way. It's a completely different format of film-making.

I read that a big chunk of the movie is actually filmed in high-def, but then they make it look like the handheld camera.

That's true, definitely, because a handheld camera, like a regular consumer grade camera, doesn't have the amount of information necessary to project for one thing, and also to add the visual effects.

When you were designing Cloverfield, were you worried about invoking memories of 9/11?

Because of the realism of the whole project, obviously the comparisons are going to be made.

Moviehole says the movie is "a headache-inducing nightmare that thankfully only lasts a couple of hours", and Yahoo Movies calls it "a dull actioner that looks like a bad video game." Ouch, indeed. Hopefully polarized silicon and acid for blood means you really have a thick skin for these kinds of things.

However, that wasn't the worst of the bunch. Bloody Disgusting really didn't like the movie, and this is only a small part of their playa-hatah review: "Tonight I was left in shock, and still haven't gotten over how terrible Aliens vs Predator: Requiem was. Not only did I waste $47 (I took my family), but I have to go and edit my Top 10 Worst Films of 2007 list. Thanks. After the abysmal AVP I figured nothing could be worse, so I was pretty pumped to give this one a chance. Unfortunately when the film was over I was perplexed at how terrible the film was... it's almost as if it was done on purpose. How can a movie be this bad - AGAIN?... please, please, please save your money."

Double ouch, especially since this sort of movie is supposed to be right up their alley. The movie has only hit 14% on Rotten Tomatoes so far, although expect things to drop down once the tomatoes start hitting the fan. Let's stop the hate, people! Do you really think AVPR is worse than Fred Claus?

The true horror in I Am Legend, and other stories like it, is having to watch what happens to people when they're robbed of society. It's no accident that Mary Shelley, author of horror-scifi classic Frankenstein, later wrote a post-apocalyptic book called The Last Man. Like many storytellers in the genre, she knew that no monster is scarier than a human being without companions.

Often the aloneness monster rears its head in post-apocalyptic scifi: New Zealand indie Quiet Earth tortures us with fear when our protagonist discovers he's the last guy on the planet; and the masterful 28 Days Later amps up the fear right away when the hero awakens to find himself alone in the middle of an abandoned London. Possibly the most desolate portrait of this aloneness comes in Vernor Vinge's novel Marooned in Realtime, where a handful characters who can travel forward in time find that they've "jumped" to a future where humans are mysteriously gone. The time-travelers head to the future in longer and longer jumps, trying to reach a world where apes or spiders have evolved into intelligent life that can keep them company. But it doesn't happen. The sun just grows older and dimmer, and the lost humans never cure their species-loneliness.

Of course, there's being completely alone and then there's being "the only one." Being completely alone can sometimes be peaceful, as Ripley demonstrates in Alien when she crawls into her pod after ejecting the alien into space. But being the only human left in a world of mutants, super-evolved apes, or alien invaders - that's more typical in scifi horror. It forms the basis of often-retold stories like Invasion of the Body Snatchers and countless Alien ripoffs (often little more than slasher movies in space).

Still, no matter what horrifying creature menaces that army of one, the true terror lurking beneath the surface is the loss of protective community. This isn't a fear that humans reserve for themselves, by they way. The scary parts of E.T. (and yes, there are some) have to do with E.T. being a castaway who is vulnerable on a world dominated by homo sapiens. And those who read Frankenstein know that what makes the reanimated man into a monster is his realization that he's alone among creatures who want him destroyed.
Image from Marooned in Realtime book cover by Stephen Martiniere.

We've found out that it is a lot more sinister than that. In fact, it's a giant humpback whale with legs, with a bad case of poor hygiene. No wonder the denizens of New York City are running in fear. A giant marine mammal that we've been hunting to extinction grows mutant huge and can't scratch? You'd probably be pretty mad too.

We're not quite sure what's weirder, a whale with legs or the fact that whale pubic lice is for real. While we certainly hope that the monster is a lot cooler than a big whale, this animated image from the trailer that shows a glimpse of the monster has us still wondering.

Spoilers for 1:18:08 Cloverfield [XGenStudios]

It is the most shocking ending ever and there should be a law passed stating that anybody who reveals the last five minutes of this film should be hung from their neck until dead.

So, here's the skinny. In King's original novella, there are five survivors who make it out of the mist in David Drayton's car: David himself, his son Billy, Amanda, and Mrs. Reppler. They've pulled into a Howard Johnson's, and only have enough gas left to get about 90 miles. David finds a radio in the manager's office, and thinks he hears a single word in the static, although it's never revealed what that word is. Then he heads out to the lobby where his son is sleeping on a mattress, whispers "Hartford" and "Hope" in his ear, and the book ends. You don't know if they make it or not, and depending on what sort of person you are, you either imagine that they get rescued or think the bizarre mist creatures chomped them for dinner.

Frank Darabont wasn't satisfied with that ending and wrote his own. He didn't veer that far out of line, though, because King definitely suggests Darabont's ending as one possibility. In the film, there are five passengers in Drayton's Scout. Dan Miller, who gets eaten by one of the creatures in the book but survives in the film, has been added to the mix. David has Amanda's pistol, which has only four bullets left in it. The Scout sputters and dies as it runs out of gas, and David silently exchanges glances with everyone in the car, except his sleeping son. They nod wordlessly at him, and he pulls out the revolver. As his son wakes up and stares in shock at his father, the view cuts to outside the vehicle and four shots ring out.

At this point, David loses it a bit, and how could blame him? He's just killed three people and his son at point-blank range in the back of his car, while surrounded by an eerie mist that contains creatures unlike anything the world has ever seen. It's a wonder he hadn't snapped before this point. He begins screaming and points the gun into his own mouth, but of course it's out of ammunition. He stumbles from the car, shouting for the creatures to take him. An ominous sound grows closer and closer. Finally from out of the mist bursts... a U.S. Army tank, and behind it scores of half-tracks and soldiers, killing every creature in sight. If only he'd waited five more minutes. He sinks to the ground and wails in agony as the view cranes up into the sky and finally fades out.

It's an extremely tragic ending, but we love it. Why? Because it's realistic, and not a happy little package all tied up in a bow. We can imagine the studio suits meeting over a conference table and trying to convince Darabont to give it a happy ending, with the cavalry riding in at the last possible second, and little Billy yelling "Hooray!" while the tanks roll by. Instead we're given the stark portrait of what the sheer madness of the situation would do to you, and what extremes it would drive someone to. Nice job, Mr. Darabont. And Mr. King, if you still want to hang us, don't worry. We always save a shell for ourselves.

The Mist marks the fourth time that director Frank Darabont has turned one of prolific horror writer Stephen King's short stories into a film, and you think he'd have it down to an art form after directing The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile. However The Mist represents a rare misstep for the Darabont/King moviemaking machine, though it does make for good grossout eye candy.

The film centers around David Drayton (Thomas Jane), who lives with his wife Stephanie and 11-year-old son Billy in a small Maine town and makes his living painting movie posters for Hollywood. During the opening scene, there's a self-referential nod as Drayton appears to be painting a poster for King's series The Dark Towers, complete with Clint Eastwood as Roland of Gilead. When Stephen King movies start having in-joke nods to other Stephen King books, we hear the faint revving sounds of a motorcycle preparing to jump a shark somewhere.

A storm hits that night, smashing through David's studio window and wreaking general havoc. Just before he and some neighbors head into town to get supplies, they notice a thick white mist spilling over the lake from the direction of the nearby Army base. And as they drive to town, they encounter several Army vehicles leaving at high speed in the opposite direction. After getting trapped in a mist-surrounded grocery store with all the phones out and hazy giant things bashing on the doors, the guys start to get the idea that maybe something's gone wrong over at the old Army base.

The film (just like the novella) then devolves into a fire and brimstone battle in the grocery store, with Mrs. Carmody (Marcia Gay Harden) calling this the "end of days" and telling everyone that god is raining down his retribution upon them. True, she sounds like a nutjob at first, but that first night enormous bugs begin landing on the glass windows, and it isn't much longer before giant pterodactyl-like creatures smash their way in and people start getting picked off left and right.

After they fight off this invasion, more and more people start believing Mrs. Carmody, and soon she is running the whole show, except for David and his lone band of holdouts. For a moment, the film hovers between fantasy and science fiction — will it turn out that this is a Satanic invasion, like in that forgettable movie with Hilary Swank? Finally, we discover that this isn't a supernatural occurrence after all. A bawling army private (Sam Witwer) confesses to Mrs. Carmody that the scientists at the army base were building a window into other dimensions, and that something must have gone wrong. Score one for science.

In an interesting move, Garabont makes us believe that Mrs. Carmody and her bible-beating are more dangerous than whatever awaits our heroes outside in the mist. Trapped between an evangelical and a bunch of Cthulhu creatures, David chooses monsters. We won't spoil the ending here, but it is very different than the one in the novella.

The main problem with the film is that the it is very clumsy and heavy-handed at times, clunking you over the head with an onslaught of stereotypes: the religious woman, the country bumpkins, the young lover, the "good father" and so on. Readers of King's fiction will already be familiar with these characters, but the introduction of multiple characters all in the same setting jumbles everything together. Plus the film's claustrophobic setting inside the store requires more complex characters to keep us watching. You soon find yourself longing for anyone to run outside and get eaten, just for a change of scenery.

Very Important Monster Rating: The larger monsters aren't displayed in very much detail, although there are plenty of closeups with the smaller ones. We would have loved a couple of solid looks at some of those big suckers.

and that the monster definitely isn't Godzilla. We also know there will be a lot of hand held shakycam footage in an effort to seem real and gritty. But you've gotta show a little more skin on that creature in the shadows if you want movie-goers to take notice.

Now if only Abrams could maintain the same veil of secrecy around Star Trek. We really don't need to know every time an additional background character is cast.

Cloverfield image gallery

12 New Cloverfield Photos [/Film]