Summary:
An insurance investigator searches for a missing best selling horror novelist, only to find that the books have an increasing sway on his fans’ lives.
My Thoughts:
I’m a casual fan of John Carpenter (“The Thing (1982)”, “Halloween (1978)”); I’ve seen his bigger films, and some of his smaller ones, and for the most part, they vibe with me. “The Thing” is absolutely fantastic, and while I think “Halloween” is a bit overrated, it’s still decent. This film, “In the Mouth of Madness” is nowhere near as good as either of those films previously, but I, personally, think it’s about on par with “Escape from New York” and “Big Trouble in Little China”, and it’s better than “They Live” and “Vampires” (and that’s the extent of my Carpenter knowledge).
While, quality-wise, I wouldn’t say this isn’t one of Carpenter’s best, I actually thought the ideas in this movie were better than some of his other films. This movie feels part Lovecraft (particularly The Dunwich Horror), part Stephen King (anything that happens in the town of Derry), and part acid-trip gone wrong (ald. It’s a movie that feels like you’ve wandered into an inescapable nightmare.
“Do you read Sutter Cane?”
After the disappearance of best selling horror novelist Sutter Cane (Jurgen Prochnow, “Das Boot”), Jackson Harglow (Charlton Heston, “Ben-Hur”) hires insurance investigator John Trent (Sam Neil, “Possession”) to try to track him down. Trent teams up with Cane’s editor Linda Styles (Julie Carmen, “Gloria (1980)”) and the two follow a rather bizarre clue that Trent insists Cane left behind to lead them to his whereabouts. As the pair makes their way into a town called Hobb’s End, where everything seems to be slightly off.
I really like the way that this story is structured; when the film starts, we watch as John Trent is being dragged into a mental institution, where we quickly learn that he is being plagued by apocalyptic visions. Dr. Wrenn (David Warner, “Titanic”) visits Trent in a padded cell, which Trent has covered in drawings of crosses, and prompts him to talk about what has happened. From there we flash back to when Trent was ostensibly sane, and work our way towards the madness. There’s a line that Trent says, something about how, “It must be getting pretty bad out there”, and the way that Wrenn reacts is not what the viewer would expect; he seems to believe Trent’s theories. I like this kind opening because it sets up the movie to be wild; we know that if insanity is now the new sane (like America post-2016 election), then some absolutely bonkers stuff is going to happen in this flick. For the most part, this movie delivers on that promise.
I go back and forth with how I feel about Sam Neill’s performances, and in this film he was about 70% good, 30% hokey. That’s still a passing grade as far as I’m concerned, but his acting in this is no way comparable to “Possession” or even his comedic roles like “Hunt for the Wilderpeople”. However, Neill gives a far better than his onscreen counterpart Julie Carmen; she has quite a few scenes where she overacted so much I wondered how it was she even landed this role. Jurgen Prochnow is fine for the little time he’s in it, though he does have a few of the more ridiculous lines, and his big reveal feels a little cheap when compared to the scares that run through the rest of the film.
For me, the coolest part of this film was the concept and the way they approached it. And here I have to throw a little bit of a SPOILER TAG up.
After Trent and Styles arrive at Hob’s End, Styles immediately starts to recognize things that she shouldn’t have any knowledge of. She inexplicably knows that certain boards on the floor will squeak, she claims the lady who runs the hotel will ax murder her husband, and she seems certain that one of the pictures in the foyer continues to shift. She begins to suspect that, somehow, they’ve wandered into Cane’s fictional world. For any true bibliophile, this is an everyday daydream; what I wouldn’t give to waltz through the pages of Rothfuss’ ‘Name of the Wind’ or any of the Harry Potter books and into those worlds. So, naturally, I gravitate towards this kind of story; throw in the fact that this is pretty much a waltz into Stephen King’s fictional town of Derry, and I’m one happy camper. The concept is awesome, but the execution could’ve been given a bit more care.
There are a ton of pretty inventive dream/trip/fever dream sequences, and in those parts is where Carpenter really excels. It’s like we get little vignettes of horror, all of which compound to make the town of Hob’s End altogether disquieting. Again this town feels pretty Stephen King heavy: there are plenty of ‘Children of the Corn’ references, and a quasi-reference to “Misery”; the overall plot however tends to lean more towards Lovecraft, who tends to deal with the unknown creatures from beyond a bit more. For whatever reason one scene in particular really stuck with me: the boy riding the bicycle that gets stuck in a loop until he becomes an old man. After Styles hits him with her car, he whispers quietly: “He won’t let me out.” He gets back on his bike and starts riding again.
I don’t know why but that really creeped me the heck out.
Verdict:
This is a pretty solid film.
I think people who are obsessive readers (like me) will probably enjoy this more than people who just watch movies, just because the film is so literarily themed. For fans of Carpenter, you’ll find plenty to love: his trademark killer soundtracks run constantly in the background; there’s enough gory/unnatural looking practical effects to be comparable to “The Thing (1982)”; and the concept is unique enough that, if this were playing on a rainy Saturday afternoon, I might stop to watch it again. I don’t think this film will ever be revered as a classic, but it’s got enough good in it to like to warrant at least one watch.
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