Reviews

John Carpenter's In The Mouth of Madness

I have always had a soft spot for the movie "In the Mouth of Madness" that came out in 1995. A John Carpenter production, it basically starts within the normal world and blasts outward. Unlike "12 Monkeys" which has a circular time frame that continues from the boy's childhood until his viewed death (based on a French collage movie short "La Jetee"), this movie has a twisting path more similar to "Dark City's" fibanacci sequence patterns found from beginning to end.

Quick synopsis of the generic type:

Sam Neill	    ... 	John Trent
Julie Carmen	... 	Linda Styles
Jürgen Prochnow	... 	Sutter Cane (as Jurgen Prochnow)

Unlike most movies of the genre there is no romantic subplot. There is a mockery of the idea that in a world that the "The Old Ones" channel could ever even have such a situation occur. The way the writer and director handle the joke works quite well when they have Styles basically become the plaything of Cane. Cane, of course, is the plaything of "The Old Ones."

At several points there are even "Children of the Corn" type lead ups that end up being dead ends (not in the literal sense). For a movie that is tackling H.P. Lovecraft's world in which we as humans can only go insane upon finding the reality released upon us, I admire the gung-ho feeling that you get from all the actors. Even the smaller roles who just discuss their children eating their wives before starting on them as a snack really bring a true feeling of what "The Old Ones" will foreshadow.

The fourth wall gets broken usually only in the most meta of movies due to the difficulty in handling it properly. When you're writing a movie about a book that changes reality that is going to be made into a movie to further finish changing reality and the characters in the movie either slowly or quickly recognize that they're characters in the book that Sutter Cane has written. The movie handles it excellently in two instances and terribly in one in particular. The man who holds the rifle to his head and says he can't help it since he was written to do it and the dream within a dream within a dream where Cane tells Trent that his favorite color is blue only to have Neill wake up to a blue shaded world that starts his screaming and wakes him up to the "real world." The tacked on romance is almost funny since it does come across as a tacked on romantic angle by the author in a way that any horror novel that has one thrown in for better sellability.

Anyway. If you want a good H.P. Lovecraft movie that has moderately decent acting, fantastic tentacles (though no hentai thank freaking heaven), and is NOT the awesome one done by The HP Lovecraft Society (a movie I will review later) this one definitely should bring some fun into the time you put aside for it.

"Animal interaction was monitored by the American Humane Association with on set supervision by the Toronto Humane Society. No animal was harmed in the making of this film.
Human interaction was monitored by the Inter Planetary Psychiatric Association. The body count was high, the casualties are heavy."