UNDERRATED: THE MIST (2007), directed by Frank Darabont

Stephen King's novels, novellas and short stories are among the most adapted properties in modern cinema. Brian DePalma's superlative screen version of King's first published novel, Carrie, still holds the gold standard. (Rounded out by Kubrick's The Shining, Rob Reiner's Stand By Me and Frank Darabont's Shawshank Redemption, and – in my ultra-humble estimation – David Koepp's supremely nasty Secret Window, in case you were wondering.) The Mist, while not in the same league of those earlier films, has its own exploitive charms to dig on and celebrate. Once again written and directed by Frank Darabont – who's proven several times that he's one of the best in the business at interpreting Kingworld – The Mist is based on a novella from King's mid-Eighties short story collection, Skeleton Crew.

In yet another small town in Maine, a freak storm wreaks havoc on a lakeside community. The lights go out, trees are knocked aside like Lincoln logs, the windows are destroyed in the studio home of illustrator David Drayton (played with appropriate gravity by Thomas Jane) and his wife and son, Billy. The wife is essentially a nonentity, and the kid is Cute Enough. All fine so far. David has a high-toned New York lawyer neighbor, Brent Norton (played by an entertainingly bilious Andrew Braugher), and hey there's bad blood between these two! Predictable so far? Sure, but the story unravels at a steady, well-acted-and-directed pace. As David, Brent and Billy head into town for groceries, we learn about the Mysterious Government Installation Nearby, the Arrowhead Project, and catch a glimpse of the mysterious mist swooping in over the lake.

Now, then. Everything's set up nicely by now. The mist overtakes the parking lot of the grocery store, some young Military Police show up to grab a couple of their buddies about to go on leave, and we meet Mrs. Carmody, our resident Small Town Nutjob. Mrs. Carmody, as played by Marcia Gay Harden, is an inexplicably young spinster (who's in her sixties or something in the book, but whatever). There's a sweet little moment between one of the Army guys and a pretty young thing working at a cash register.

All hell breaks loose at this point. A bloodied man comes tear-assing into the store with the mist roiling in at his heels. Something in the mist took a friend of his, and it'd be a damned good idea to stay indoors.

So begins a classic siege-flick formula. People become unglued, the social order begins to break down, and we're left rooting for David Drayton, who only wants to protect his son. Critics dismissed the movie's cardboard characters, but there really isn't time for anything more than sketches of real people. Darabont knows that he only has to suggest these characters within the dialogue and action, and lets his actors leap onto their haunches and start chewing on the scenery.

Andre Braugher in particular fares well in his role as the staunch, skeptically crass prick lawyer from the city. He's a nasty piece of work, leading a group of naysayers – Drayton and his pals call them the Flat Earth Society – into the mist and certain disaster, in a tense scene that definitely silences any of the doubters inside the grocery store and spins the movie into a fresh circle of hell.

There's one particular set piece that deserves attention: our first glimpse of precisely what's waiting in the mist. I can't understand exactly why critics pissed all over this movie, but I suspect the fact that the studio insisted Darabont release the film in color – rather than the director's preferred black and white – explains it all. In the first really scary sequence, David heads into the back of the store and discovers that the generator's exhaust has been blocked and is spewing smoke inside the room. He shuts it off and immediately hears something slithering across the steel loading doors. When the doors bulge menacingly inward, he knows Something's Wrong and grabs his pal Ollie, the store's assistant manager, local yokels Myron and Jim and a checkout boy, Norm. David's concerns are mocked, of course, and against David's better judgment, the doors go up.

The mist slips in and Norm is immediately snagged by a CGI tentacle – all of this follows Stephen King's story damn near word for word. Darabont throws in his own brutal touches, however, such as the moment when another tentacle – gruesomely pink and thick as a tree trunk – wanders inside. The tip of this one yawns open, revealing a few rows of revolting fucking teeth, dripping with goo. It's awesome, and this little detail is not in the book.

This first glimpse of the CGI creatures – and the subsequent beasties that terrorize our hardy band of survivors throughout the next few days and nights – are far more convincing in black and white. This reflects Stephen King's own comments on his story, that he wanted people to have the feeling of watching a black and white horror flick, alone in the dark with the monsters.

The Mist is admirable for Frank Darabont's daring. It's worth seeing for how closely he hews to King's story, and for the ballsy liberties he takes, such as the very end scene, suggested in King's story but far darker – and logical, and terrifying – than King's own. It's a stark, vicious movie, and will hopefully find it's audience in the future.

The Dark Knight of the Soul (Rated Just Right)

To start off my long-gestating collection of well-thought-out (well, for the most part) essays on certain movies, records, books, comic books, comic book characters, graphic novels, graphic novel movie adaptations, adaptations in general, assorted collections of poems and overall - and in general - whatnot, I figured the most direct way to communicate what I'm getting at here is with the Second Highest Grossing Flick of Like All Time And Stuff - adjusted for inflation - Christopher Nolan's THE DARK KNIGHT.

And it's rated just right. Which is to say: simultaneously overrated and underrated. Such contradiction in a work of art is not unique to the world of flickdom, although no graphic novel or nonfiction rehab memoir gets nearly as much press as some comic book movie directed by the "Memento Guy."

The Dark Knight was over-hyped long before it ever entered pre-production. Such expectations, having been amplified to a degree no summer blockbuster movie could ever match (the relatively hushed, expectant wait for James Cameron's AVATAR reflects the lessons painfully learned by a hyperactive ad campaign). The film symbolized a major investment in the vision of a director with but four features to his credit - each one terrific in its own right, including Christopher Nolan's own Batman reboot. Grounding the cinematic world of Batman in cold, hard reality was not only a great idea, it was kind of an inevitable evolutionary step in the history of a character that has become the most prominent comic book superhero in American history. Arguments for Superman are acknowledged, accepted, and to some extent agreed with, but Batman is now the indisputably most iconic superhero figure. The key to understanding Nolan's success with The Dark Knight is his treatment of the badass, schizophrenic main character; Nolan seems to understand that this borderline-sociopath is also the great divided id and superego of us sycophantic citizens of Americana, Inc.

Batman/Bruce Wayne is a screwed-up rich kid with a conscience and deep, almost Puritanical streak of basic morality co-existing in the same mind and body as an angry, blood-chilling crimefighter. The stories that have filled the comic book pages and celluloid frames reveal an extraordinary flexible character, a superhero of dangerous, sometimes frightening fire who is still a powerfully neurotic, deeply lonely and driven man, aching to erase a permanent open wound to his psyche. Like Superman and Spider-Man, Batman lost his parents, but right in front of his eyes. He witnessed cold-blooded murder at a point in life when most people have yet to form any kind of self-consciousness or individual identity. His family would have been his universe, as it should be for all little kids.

Yet all this Freudian fire and brimstone is still confined within comics or flicks or queerly campy (or campily queer, your choice) TV shows starring the Mayor of Quahog. Mostly. In The Dark Knight, the lived-in, anti-Tim Burton quality to Gotham City reinforces the shock at seeing Batman or The Joker against the background of a sorta-sane, contemporary world. Either figure's appearance is at once ludicrous and somehow deadly serious, almost a blight on reality.

After all, it's just a comic book movie. It's also a moving tragedy and an assured, epic-scale crime film, and if Nolan decides to make a third one (as he's said in various interviews, and then move on from the Bat-universe), it'll be welcome. In the end, his first two still say it all.