Review: In the Mouth of Madness (1994)

Psychiatrist David Warner visits a mental patient (Sam Neill) in his padded asylum cell. He’s an insurance investigator named John Trent who was hired by a publishing company to track down a missing horror novelist named Sutter Cane (Jurgen Prochnow), kind of a mixture of H.P. Lovecraft and Stephen King. Cane believed that his works had a drastic effect on his readers…fiction was starting to turn real! He also came to realise that the fictional town he wrote about had suddenly sprung up in the real world, not featured on any map. Trent says he attempted to travel there with his editor (Julie Carmen) and what they encountered was truly the stuff of nightmares. Charlton Heston plays the publishing company head, John Glover turns up as the asylum administrator, Peter Jason is an insurance cheat, Frances Bay plays a creepy hotelier, Bernie Casey appears briefly as a client of Trent’s (in perhaps the film’s most famous scene), and a young Hayden Christensen can be seen as a paper boy in his film debut.

Like many John Carpenter (“Dark Star”, “Halloween”, “Big Trouble in Little China”, “They Live”) films, this 1994 film certainly has a following, if not as large as some in his filmography. I’ve never quite managed to get all the way on board with it. Not when I was a teenager, and not now in my mid 40s. Scripted by Michael De Luca (“Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare”), this is the most interesting of the three apocalypse films Carpenter made, much as I understand that most consider “The Thing” a bonafide classic (I’m not a fan, it’s my fault entirely). The paranoid, unhinged worldview here is really interesting and mostly well-conveyed, it’s hellish, insane stuff. We get a cool music score by Carpenter and Jim Lang (“Wrestlemaniac” and TV’s “Hey Arnold!”), which is some of the best in any Carpenter film, and the cinematography by Gary B. Kibbe (“Prince of Darkness”, “They Live”, “Ghosts of Mars”) is top shelf. Meanwhile, John Glover is in fine scene-stealing form, and there’s an excellent cameo by Carpenter regular Peter Jason as well as a fun small turn by Frances Bay. Jurgen Prochnow is perfectly cast as Sutter Cane, but also a pretty good indicator of an inferior product. Outside of “Das Boot”, what quality films has he been in? There’s “The English Patient” and…a lot of junk.

There’s quite a bit to like about it, especially in the bizarro second half. Yet it always comes up just short for me. Why? Primarily due to the casting of Sam Neill and Julie Carmen in the lead roles. The late Sam Neill seemed like a truly top bloke in real life, but as an actor I’ve rarely connected with him outside of “The Final Conflict: Omen III” and maybe “A Cry in the Dark”. Here he’s flat and I just didn’t buy him in the more suave and cocksure mode of his character, though he fares better in the more paranoid aspect of his character. Julie Carmen never quite did much because she never quite brought much and that’s true here. I guess she’s a little less wooden here than in “Fright Night II” but she’s boring, amateurish, and shares zero chemistry with Neill.

I can see why people love this film. It’s very, very different and very, very weird. It’s got atmosphere and an interestingly chaotic, paranoid vibe to it. Unfortunately it’s headed by two people I didn’t give two shits about, played by miscast actors. I like some of this very much, but it’s hard to recommend a film with two empty vessels at the fore. I would certainly put it ahead of “The Ward”, “Village of the Damned”, “The Thing”, and probably even “Prince of Darkness”. But this one’s a near-miss for me. 

Rating: C+