Movie Review - In the Mouth of Madness

In the Mouth of Madness (1994)

Starring Sam Neill, Julie Carmen, Jürgen Prochnow, and Charlton Heston(!?!?)

Directed by John Carpenter

***This film is currently streaming on Netflx***

I don't know why, but this is another one of those flicks that I wanted to see back when I was a teen, but never got around to it.  I was very horror-deprived growing up when it came to movies.  Horror books were a staple of my youth, but I never got to watch many horror movies...which probably accounts for the odd abundance of horror flicks I watch nowadays.  Seeing as how I loved reading horror, this film about a horror writer whose books begin to come to life seemed like an ingenious idea to me at the time.  Fifteen years later, the premise of In the Mouth of Madness seems a little flimsy and while it isn't exactly executed to perfection, I've got to say that I had a moderately enjoyable time watching this.

Sam Neill plays John Trent, an insurance investigator hired by Jackson Harglow (Charlton Heston), the head of a publishing film, to investigate the disappearance of the world's best selling author Sutter Cane.  Much like Stephen King who based many of his books in the fictional New England town of Castle Rock, horror novelist Cane (Jürgen Prochnow) created the town of Hobb's End, and Trent believes that Cane is hiding out in the vicinity of where that town would be found in the Northeast.  Trent, along with Cane's editor Linda (Julie Carmen), set out to track down Cane only to discover that they may have somehow fallen into the freakish Cane's vivid creations in which the lines between fiction and reality are greatly blurred.

It helps the ludicrous storyline that Sam Neill is actually darn good here.  There's a winking sensibility in his performance that he knows everything he's forced to do or say his just plain silly, but he never stoops to the level of playing things for laughs or hamming it up.  Unfortunately the same can't be said for his co-stars Julie Carmen or Jürgen Prochnow -- never heard of them?  I didn't either and there's certainly a reason they never achieved stardom.  (Although their filmographies on imdb are actually quite extensive which is rather surprising.)

Director John Carpenter does an adequate job keeping things tense.  He fills the flick with random stream of consciousness quick cuts that surprisingly add to the eeriness rather than seeming like unnecessary directorial flourishes.  Granted, my ventures into the Carpenter oeuvre are slim (I've never seen his supposed "masterpiece" Halloween), but I liked what he did with In the Mouth of Madness even if it is silly and ridiculous at times (but, let's be honest...silly and ridiculous just plain works in horror movies sometimes).

The RyMickey Rating:  B-