Wish I missed "The Mist"

Last night I watched "The Mist", a movie from a couple of years ago based upon a Steven King novella. I appreciated it at first. It utilized a very economical structure where almost all of the action takes place with one set of characters in one confined location (a grocery store), reminiscent of "Night of the Living Dead" in its minimalism or "Dawn of the Dead" for its logical convenience, but with monsters coming out of the trans-dimensional fog rather than zombies coming out of the dark. The "surprise ending" promised on the package was in fact the predictable ending; the "surprise" was that the characters find neither a twist nor salvation. When I was a nihilistic teenager, this would certainly have appealed to me. Today I felt heavy with the two hours of burden I subjected myself to.