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In "In the Mouth of Madness", Sutter Cane is the world's best-selling novelist, translated into nearly twenty languages and having a billion books in print. What distinguishes him from Barbara Cartland on this count is that he's a horror writer, and his books have an interesting effect on some people. Namely, they go mad from reading them. Just as he's about to unleash his new book on the public, however, he vanishes before he can deliver the manuscript to his publisher amidst dark claims that the horrors of which he writes are not fictional. John Trent is a fraud investigator called in to track him down as an epidemic of madness sweeps the nation, and he finds that Cane's claims are not entirely groundless.
Director John Carpenter presents us with an interesting variation on the old reality-or-fiction theme. Although the central concept of being able to write something into existence has a William S. Burroughs tinge to it, H.P. Lovecraft is the stronger influence. I'm enormously enamoured of Lovecraft's works, hence the interest I had in this film; a good part of the film's fun if you're a Lovecraft enthusiast is spotting the HPL references (the title of the film recalling his "At the Mountains of Madness", another Cane title borrowed from him, books that drive people mad, the New England setting, etc). That said, Lovecraft has been somewhat adulterated and bastardised here with a few elements more suited to someone like Stephen King; and it would've been nice of Carpenter to actually credit him for his inspiration.
In the Mouth of Madness steams along at a fine pace and slides over easily for the most part, with moments of effective scariness and sundry items of weirdness. Unfortunately, Carpenter loses focus a bit in the last half hour or so, and the strangeness stops amounting to anything, leading to a conclusion which, though amusingly self-referential, is somehow not exactly satisfying. A curious feeling of having been made for the straight-to-video market hangs over the whole enterprise, and I could've lived without Carpenter's 1980s-metal styled theme music. Still, though not a great film by any means, In the Mouth of Madness is generally entertaining, and fans of the genre (particularly those with a Lovecraftian bent) should check it out.
9 June 2000 |
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