There's a growing genre in Hollywood that we like to call "tragedy porn." It can be described as follows: Just as porn films introduce characters for the sole purpose of getting them naked and screwed, so does tragedy porn (Crash and Babel come to mind) march out a cast simply to have the worst possible things happen to them. The Mist (Nov. 16), the latest in the endless chain of Stephen King adaptations, may just set the tragedy-porn standard. For sheer gratuitous misery, no other pseudo- Armageddon-brings-carnage-and-suffering film has come close.

The plot (really just filler in between the terrible things happening) centers on David Drayton (Thomas Jane), an earnest everyman who wakes up to find his quiet Maine (of course) town immersed in a storm. The next morning, after surveying the damage and dropping some unsubtle exposition about experiments at a nearby military base, he drives to the grocery store with his five-year-old son, leaving his sugar-sweet wife at home. Once they're inside, the mysterious mist hits, mayhem ensues, and the rest of the movie is an ascending ladder of repulsive deaths and groundless agony.

Director Frank Darabont (Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile) has made a career out of feel-good Stephen King adaptations with moral lessons. But while The Mist is thick with preaching, there are no Shawshank morals (i.e. the good will eventually be rewarded while the bad will be punished). No, this time it's closer to "the good and bad will be equally chopped up, disemboweled, burned to death, and eaten alive."

Even the now-standard monster movie twist—the humans inside become more dangerous than the monsters outside—falls flat here. Films like 28 Days Later did it better, with greater subtlety. In fact, there's nothing close to subtle in this film. What's in the mist? Wait eight minutes, you'll find out. What will happen next? The characters are more than happy to tell you in advance. Marcia Gay Harden is the one, er, redemption as Mrs. Carmody, the town nut/religious zealot who delights in preaching her "sinners in the hands of an angry God" message.

But for all its self-righteous sermonizing, the movie has a cheap, almost made-for-TV quality. The monsters are too CGI, the horrified reactions to them too pat. Plus you'd think they could get a few key details right (last I checked, blood wasn't cherry-tomato red). As for the "ultra-shocking" ending, well, watch enough trailers and you can probably guess it. After all, in the realm of tragedy porn, things can really only turn out one way.