In The Mouth Of Madness
John Carpenter had an unprecedented, unblemished run as a director in the 1970s and 80s, coming up with one classic after another. In the 90s, he started to falter quite a bit, starting in 1991 with Memoirs Of An Invisible Man, an unfunny Chevy Chase vehicle which tried to reinvent Chevy as some kind of a Science Fiction Action Hero playing it straight and completely failed in that regard. The decade continued being hit or miss for Carpenter (with his last great film being 1998’s Vampires) but at least in 1994 he managed to come up with one of his best films, a surreal, apocalyptic mind bender that paid homage to the true vision of the writer H.P. Lovecraft (whose greatest cinematic adaptation had been the cheesy yet fun ReAnimator which nonetheless had been a deviation from the types of stories that he had usually written). Lovecraft in his purest form as a writer was best known for penning tomes about ancient, evil gods who had been trapped or barred from controlling our world for some reason with the stories always implying that some greatly horrific, all powerful evil would one day be unleashed upon our world on some unforeseen future date with the idea being that the human race would be considerably worse off when that actually happened. Whether or not Lovecraft literally believed that himself or just merely thought that it was a great hook for telling his stories is open for debate, but Carpenter positions this movie as wondering what it would be like not only if Lovecraft were alive and writing those stories today, but also if those stories were hugely successful enough to have a following along the same lines as Stephen King (whose name is referenced in the dialogue). Here renamed Sutter Kane and played by the underrated Jurgen Prochnow, the character is portrayed as being so prolific and widely read that his work has caused a worldwide epidemic of madness mostly because his readers have interpreted his fantastical creations AS being real (something which many believed happened with L. Ron Hubbard’s work and led to the creation of the Scientology movement). With the famous horror writer character now in place as the seemingly God-like villain, we need to see a hero who can match up from a intellectual standpoint and fortunately we get just that in Sam Neill (in one of the best roles of his underrated career) as John Trent, an insurance claims investigator whose goal in life would appear to be always figuring out the angle whenever someone tries to use a phony claim to get themselves easy money by scamming an insurance company, with his widespread belief being that anybody is capable of anything or any kind of scheme if it means that they can collect a large benefit and he’s the best in the business when it comes to figuring these types out with his greatest weapon being such a strong grounding in reality that he can come up with a rational explanation for almost anything. This makes him the perfect foil in this type of story when he’s brought in by Kane’s publisher (Charlton Heston, bringing his grandiose presence to a rather small role). Turns out that Kane has gone missing before delivering his newest manuscript and that his only known contact to either the company or the outside world has just gone on a crazy axe rampage (attempting to take down Neill at that) before being shot dead by the cops after reading only a few pages of it and so Neill is assigned the task of tracking him down to determine either if he’s dead (which results in a large insurance settlement payoff to Heston) or alive (which means that Heston gets his book and can start counting the money which comes from having the most famous horror writer in the world under contract). Neill preps for the job by reading some of Kane’s previous work and is struck by just how shitty they are, being thoroughly unimpressed by the unoriginal stories and concepts and thinking that they’re just like any other two bit horror writer’s work. Saddled with having Kane’s editor tag along (Julie Carmen, an actress who was super hot in the 80s but at this point was already losing her appeal), they head towards a place that Neill has surmised to be the author’s possible location, a town that is directly depicted in the books themselves (the same as Stephen King’s oft used Castle Rock). And once they arrive, a series of weird and spooky events occur that Neill tries to rationalize as being a promotion for some kind of tourist attraction celebrating Kane’s work, complete with the same cheesy forms of evil he had read about in Kane’s books. The beauty of the concept is that it doesn’t REALLY get going until almost halfway through the movie as Neill’s own very firm grip on reality starts to become unglued and then the creepy atmosphere and battle of wits between he and Prochnow’s Kane gets under way, with Kane openly declaring himself to be a god in that he can make anything happen just simply by writing it and Neill’s continuing insistence that not only is Kane completely out of his mind, but also that “God’s not supposed to be a hack horror writer”, always dismissing what he is hearing until a entire new reality seems to form around him. Many of the most interesting ideas here consist of the concepts of fate, as even while Neill remains steadfast that he will not “play his role” in Kane’s storyline due to having his own powers of choice and free will, in the end really he is just another helpless, manipulative pawn in the writer’s imagination who will do exactly what he is written to do whether he likes (or realizes) it or not. Likewise, Prochnow as Kane seems to enjoy giving off the air that he is supremely omnipotent and powerful, but he would appear to be more of a prophet instead doing his own part to prepare the world for the horrifying arrival of the Lovecraftian uber gods whose appearance would seem to mark the end of the human race on Earth. As for the supporting cast, Carmen as the editor sidekick is somewhat of a letdown, playing her pseudo love interest character as both boring and bland (perhaps as an accurate response to Neill’s accessment of Kane’s writing) but she also lacks any real spark and chemistry with her leading man and is presented as being so buttoned down here that any actual sex appeal that she could have had is greatly diminished. But on the plus side is the creepy townspeople that they meet including Francis Bay (Happy Gilmore’s Grandma) as an axe murdering little old lady innkeeper and Wilhelm Von Homburg (Vigo The Carpathian from Ghostbusters 2) as one of the haunted residents of the place. It all leads up to a delightful climax in a lunatic asylum (which is also used as a wraparound for the story) where Neill (who now fully believes that the end of the world is imminent at Kane’s hands) is examined by the doctors there (namely David Warner and John Glover, neither of whom are exactly slouches in the acting department themselves) as he tries to convince these still (at the moment) rational men that he’s not really crazy, but rather now all too fully aware of the truth surrounding the mass epidemics of violence and lunacy that’s spreading everywhere like a wildfire plague, as it would appear that Warner is actually some kind of a government representative on a fact finding mission trying to figure out just what in the hell is actually going on here. And it’s here that we realize that Carpenter has actually found his hook and it’s not necessarily a Lovecraftian one, with it being that those who are deemed to be truly mentally ill may in actuality possess some kind of insightful knowledge or foresight that for whatever reason is felt to be too damning by the powers that be and thus their being institutionized is really a form of suppression to keep a “crazy” person from spreading an inconvenient truth. That being said, it is not until the final moments that Carpenter hits us with one of the greatest endings of his career, one that is original, audacious, and yet strangely soothing, not only telling us in its own way that all of this is just a fictional story, but amazingly also telling NEILL that as well which somehow manages to release him from his burden (judging by his reaction) and which also explains the sometimes contorted sense of time, space, and reality that Carpenter has used to tell this story, proving that as with ANY movie, the director is the real supreme ruler of his realm, the true Sutter Kane, and that his perceived skill in doing so is readily measured by our overall enjoyment of whatever it is he comes up with…
9/10