Starring: Sam Neill, Jurgen Prochnow, and Charlton Heston
Plot: John Trent, an insurance investigator, is tasked with retrieving a manuscript from a popular horror novelist, Sutter Cane, who has gone missing. He finds himself in Hobb’s End, the real life setting for Sutter Cane’s novels.
Review:
John Carpenter is always trying to reinvent the horror movie. He defined the slasher archetype, and than he transformed into a car. He redid Cold War paranoia with grotesqueness in The Thing and with sunglasses in They Live. He smashed East and West together in the most overt way possible in Big Trouble in Little Trouble. John Carpenter does it again here where he takes the haunting out of the haunted house as well as getting meta on horror fiction.
The script constructs an amazing mythology. Sutter Cane, a hodge podge of horror novelists such as Stephen King and H.P. Lovecraft, has a certain Beatlemania that follows him around. His fearsome books have been known to cause violence and schizophrenia. The center point of the film is that of Hobb’s End, a small New England town that only exists because Cane writes about it, as does the residents. Worst is they know about it and feel that their free will is compromised by Cane’s meddling. The motivation for Cane’s work is to open a gateway to a dark dimension and release the powerful beings who reside there.
Trent gets written in
In the Mouth of Madness has some serious logic jumps and editing and pacing issues that could come off as sloppy. I simply disagree. In the Mouth of Madness seems bent on creeping out the viewer scaring them at every turn constantly leaving them guessing.
Horror is an often criticized genre, and one that is constantly under the threat of censorship. Carpenter seems to believe that the power he holds is stronger than most censorship targets believe it to be. The whole film seems like a meditation on his sick images being able to reach beyond visceral entertainment, and the ultimate resolution is too destroy the medium that causes madness. It is more likely a postmodern look at the argument that horror causes real world issues, and the real resolution is to not get confused between reality and fantasy.
Don’t tell Sutter Cane your favorite color!
This is the third and final installment in the Apocalypse Trilogy as the fabric of our reality becomes threatened. I am not sure who dubbed it the Apocalypse Trilogy or if it was predetermined by John Carpenter himself, but it seems like such a random grouping of flicks. I feel like other Carpenter flicks could be forced into the trilogy like They Live and Big Trouble in Little China, yet they are just arbitrarily left out. For additional viewing, check out Carpenter’s Masters of Horror episode “Cigarette Burns.” It has a lot in common with In the Mouth of Madness and is probably my favorite episode of the series.
Rating: 9/10
