“In the Mouth of Madness” Review
Sam Neill and Charlton Heston in a John Carpenter horror movie with Loftcraftian themes. Sounds like a pretty good start.
Neill plays an insurance investigator that goes after fraudulent claims. He ends up working for the head of a publishing company that has managed to lose their premiere horror writer just before the completion of his most highly anticipated novel. Problem is that readers of these particular horror tales tend to go just a little bit nuts.
The entire movie is set up as a flashback as Neill explains to a psychologist in the looney bin how he has come to be in a straitjacket with crazy googly eyes. As all tales told in the nuthouse do, this tale begins when everything is perfectly normal. Things progress to kind of strange, and then drop off the map into crazy town. Neill and a female sidekick from the publishing company travel to a fictional New Hampshire town where they encounter the writer and hordes of mutated, unspeakable horrors.
The sad part is that this seems like a concept that should work but throughout the entire movie just comes off as exceedingly lame. I absolutely love Carpenter’s “The Thing”, enjoy “Halloween”, and kind of like “They Live”. But “In the Mouth of Madness” just doesn’t live up to the promise of the premise. It’s not as bad as “The Fog”, but it could be much, much better.
If it ever is remade, the basic skeleton is okay. Improve the dialogue, acting, setting, costume, and makeup designs. Make the scary set pieces scarier and the unspeakable horrors more horrifying. But most of all, make sure that the author has a reason for doing everything. His books became so popular that he has gained power from all of his believers. The power drives him mad along with all of his readers, but he never seems to have any plan or goal or anything for our heroes to fight against. Neill has nothing to fight against. He goes from not knowing what’s going on to running away. It just left me feeling like the story was a little directionless.
Good luck on the remake, Hollywood. I know you’ll get to it eventually.
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