Shameless Self Expression

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...

A honeymooning couple in the 1960s (Ronny Cox and Bibi Besch) are stuck beside the road in a small town in Mississippi after their car gets stuck in swampy undergrowth. Whilst Cox goes in search of help, a prone Besch is raped in the nearby forest in the dark. Seventeen years later Besch and Cox are raising their son (Paul Clemens), who is in truth the product of that awful incident seventeen years ago. He has been stricken by very painful, unexplained illness. So the couple decide to head back to small town Mississippi for answers about Besch’s assailant, to see if the illness is genetic. Unfortunately, the townsfolk are a secretive lot, some even quite surly. Meanwhile, Clemens escapes from the hospital and heads for Mississippi too, whilst his body seems to be undergoing some very painful transformation. Katherine Moffat is a local girl Clemens meets and falls for, with John Dennis Johnston playing her lout of a father. L.Q. Jones and Meshach Taylor play the local sheriff and his de...