Some time ago the author of this review met certain individual rumoured to be of questionable mental sanity. The man in question seemed normal from the outside, but the source of rumour claimed that he couldn't because he had spent all of his free time reading books by Stephen King. Few years later I remembered this anecdote when I watched In the Mouth of Madness, 1994 horror film directed by John Carpenter.
Protagonist of this film, tough and cynical insurance investigator John Trent (played by Sam Neill) is hired to find Sutter Cane (played by Jürgen Prochnow), mysterious author of wildly popular horror novels that are prone to cause interesting mental side-effects among some of their readers. The novelist has recently vanished together with the manuscript of his latest novel, and the publishers wants him found before enraged fans realise that the said item won't arrive in bookstores. Accompanied by Cane's editor Linda Styles (played by Julie Carmen) they begin the search for the missing author and end in the sleepy little town of Hobb's End. The real problem is in the fact that the said town doesn't exist anywhere else than in Cane's imagination, which apparently began to literally invade real world.
There are many great novels by Stephen King that turned into major disappointments on the big screen. It seems that even the film that tries to approach Stephen King through the parody of his work can't escape such curse. Instead of comedy we are presented by utterly serious by-the-numbers horror in which the series of shocking and brutal scenes increases viewer's unpleasantness as rapidly as the protagonist loses his ability to differentiate between real and fictional world. In the second half of film scriptwriter Michael de Luca makes another mistake by introducing motives inspired by the works of H.P. Lovecraft, another great writer of horror genre. In some cases, this combination of horror parody and horror hommage could have worked, but John Carpenter, once considered to be the greatest film director of the genre, sticks by his trademark 90-minute format. As a result, the plot develops too rapidly, the characters are undeveloped (or not particularly interesting, like in the case of the one played by Julie Carmen) and the ending is rather predictable. Although there are few interesting bits and pieces (like Orthodox church being chosen as the symbol of utter evil – the detail which would definitely bring attention of the audience in certain parts of Southeast Europe), the general of impression left by In the Mouth of Madness is disappointment, unworthy of Carpenter, King or Lovecraft.
RATING: 4/10 (+)
(Note: The text in its original form was posted in Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.movies.reviews on July 10th 2001)
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Movie URL: https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/2654-in-the-mouth-of-madness?language=en-US Critic: AA
