DVD review: In the electric mist

An investigation among the swamps of Lousiana.

This movie was never released theatrically in USA and that’s really a shame. This is certainly no masterpiece and it could have been so much shorter but this is not direct tot dvd material.

King here is the mood. The swamps with their stories, the mists and the ghosts! are such a refreshing view after countless California set productions.

The story is wacky and really roundabout, it reminds me of a saner Tarantino. The main plot is fairly linear to follow but it’s interspaced with subplots that really out there. I don’t want to spoil too much but there is a ghost subplot which according to the guidebook on how to write a story should have been excided because it’s not really connected to the rest of the movie but in reality it’s somehow the high point of the story. It changes the story from an almost banal investigation into a kind of dreamy quest along the mists of the swamp.

Tommy Lee Jones basically plays himself but for once this is not a problem. This movie really needs the archetypical Tommy Lee Jones Character, the great grandson of the classic hard boiled detectives.

As I alluded in the beginning the only real problem is the running time. A movie that slow, because this is a really slow movie, needs to be shorter, at 112 minutes it gets really tiring near the end.