In the Mouth of Madness (1994)

Director: John Carpenter                                   Writer: Michael De Luca
Film Score: John Carpenter                               Cinematography: Gary B. Kibbe
Starring: Sam Neill, Jürgen Prochnow, Julie Carmen and John Glover

John Carpenter’s career as a director has been all over the map, and not in a good way. From the perfection of The Thing, and the near perfection of Escape from New York to the abysmal remake of Village of the Damned and the subject of this post, In the Mouth of Madness. Everything about this film is bad, from the deceptive title, the poor script, the ho-hum special effects and the terrible directing--it takes a pretty terrible director to make Sam Neill look bad on screen, but that’s exactly what Carpenter does.

The story involves a reclusive author who has yet to deliver his new horror novel to the publisher. In walks insurance investigator Sam Neill to make good on the publisher’s investment in advertising and promotion. Neill starts by reading the author’s previous books and begins to hallucinate that he is part of the stories. He gets an idea from the covers of the books, but before he can chase it down, chief editor Charlton Heston teams him up with Julie Carmen and the two set out to find the author at a small town that is not on any map . . . with predicable results. The problem with hallucination films (Videodrome comes to mind) is that the hallucinations within hallucinations become tedious after a short time, to the point where soon nothing is a surprise.

The title, I’m convinced, is a direct reference to H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness. This is unfortunate, as that is what led me to watch the film in the first place, and of course the story has absolutely nothing to do with Lovecraft or the Cthulhu mythos. But by far the biggest problem with the film is Carpenter’s directing. The script has Sam Neill as a know-it-all who makes inappropriate jokes and refuses to even acknowledge the possible supernatural implications of his hallucinations. Instead of what could have been, a slow realization of the truth of his situation, and the accompanying horror that goes along with it--something like Dead Calm--the script is just a series of jack-in-the-box surprises that make no sense at all until the final twenty minutes of the film. But by then it’s too late.

The reason I lay the blame on Carpenter’s shoulders is that he has written scripts for nearly all of his films and either he worked with the screenwriter and wanted it this way, or didn't change what was bad. Either way, he should have known better. All of the actors, except for Carmen, come off as cartoonish and one-dimensional, and Jürgen Prochnow is completely wasted by only having him appear at the end of the film. Why so many fans have called this a summation of the horror genre, or the ultimate horror film, is beyond me. There is almost nothing horrifying about it. When, as a fan, I see potential in almost every scene and it is ruined in every instance . . . that is the real horror. And in that respect In the Mouth of Madness is a supreme disappointment.