Apparently when In the Mouth of Madness was released HP Lovecraft received no credit of any kind. I can't honestly speak for whether the current IMDb credit that he gets is referring to a specific Lovecraft story, but it's clear that Michael DeLuca's script was heavily influenced by the general themes of Lovecraft's work, the blending of fact and fantasy and the doubt of whether there is such a thing as absolute truth and absolute reality.
Frankly, In the Mouth of Madness is a super concept and then very little more. It shouldn't be surprising that DeLuca's day job involves running New Line Pictures. This movie is a great pitch and then no real story telling, despite the game efforts of director John Carpenter.
Sam Neill plays John Trent, an insurance investigator who always know when people are lying. As the film begins, Trent is already several tacos short of a combination plate. He's been tossed in an asylum and you know that this is a bad asylum because John Glover (generally prone to playing crazy characters himself) is sitting at the front desk. And then, to make matters worse, David Warner (who absurdly is now best known to audiences as one of the heavies in Titanic...) is called in to get his story.
Apparently Trent was called in to track down a reclusive mystery writer who disappeared several chapters short of the conclusion of his most recent novel. Trent, of course, is a man you can't fool. You can't mess with his head. And the writer, Sutter Cane, has a reputation for writing books that drive people crazy. So it would be a battle of wills if it weren't so one-sided. Trent is sent off to a small New Hampshire town with Cane's editor (or agent, the distinctions get confusing at a certain point) and as soon as they get to the town they discover that something really bad is brewing. And to say anything more would probably confuse you, me, and anybody planning on seeing the movie.
In the Mouth of Madness has a very familiar feel for fans of Carpenter's work. The plot contains elements of Village of the Damned and the special effects look a bit like the nasty creature in The Thing. Everything, however, looks really cheap. The New Hampshire town looks like a two location set. There's a town square and a scary Byzantine church. The actors are all cardboard cutouts, from Neill, who's completely incapable of carrying the film by himself (in fact, including his best Australian films, has he ever been given so much responsibility on screen?) to the completely amateurish Julie Carmen as his travelling companion. The supporting performances by Warner, Glover, Jurgen Prochnow, and Jurgen Prochnow are all just awful.
The raises my major question: (And the is accompanied by a **MAJOR SPOILER!!!!**)
Is the movie supposed to be bad? Or at least tacky in the ways that I've mentioned? As the final scene involves Trent going to see In the Mouth of Madness, can we just assume that in a metatextual sense this movie is cheesy because it's a cheesy adapatation of a cheesy imaginary book? Is the Hobb's End silly looking because it's not even supposed to be a real city? Are the performances bad because the characters are intentionally one dimensional? Is the entire film just supposed to be a bad film within a film? And as such is it just an homage to the classic British science fiction tradition from Lovecraft to Quatermass, etc?
I think I may enjoy it more on that level. If there's a kind of multi-layered calculation that restricts quality than maybe it even succeeds for me. If you take the film as an examination of diminished audience returns, than it comments of low brow adapations of good books, etc. The evil force taking over the minds of everybody who reads Cane's books may capture the minds of the intelligent, but the film is supposed to attack people who don't read. It's low brow, then, for the sake of being low brow. And that may be very interesting.
Left to its own devices, though, I just found myself remembering how wonderfully scary The Thing, Halloween, and the Fog are. And how Carpenter at his best used to be the master of tightly wound action plots, like Escape from New York and Assault on Precinct 13. I also found myself appreciating Lovecraft's skill even though he's never been a favorite of mine. At least he was always more successful in examining the rips in reality that he depicted. DeLuca just isn't up to the challenge.
Since the movie did make me think and since I also accept the possibility that there is depth here that I'm not fully crediting, I'd give this one a 5/10. But even that may be a little high.
Frankly, In the Mouth of Madness is a super concept and then very little more. It shouldn't be surprising that DeLuca's day job involves running New Line Pictures. This movie is a great pitch and then no real story telling, despite the game efforts of director John Carpenter.
Sam Neill plays John Trent, an insurance investigator who always know when people are lying. As the film begins, Trent is already several tacos short of a combination plate. He's been tossed in an asylum and you know that this is a bad asylum because John Glover (generally prone to playing crazy characters himself) is sitting at the front desk. And then, to make matters worse, David Warner (who absurdly is now best known to audiences as one of the heavies in Titanic...) is called in to get his story.
Apparently Trent was called in to track down a reclusive mystery writer who disappeared several chapters short of the conclusion of his most recent novel. Trent, of course, is a man you can't fool. You can't mess with his head. And the writer, Sutter Cane, has a reputation for writing books that drive people crazy. So it would be a battle of wills if it weren't so one-sided. Trent is sent off to a small New Hampshire town with Cane's editor (or agent, the distinctions get confusing at a certain point) and as soon as they get to the town they discover that something really bad is brewing. And to say anything more would probably confuse you, me, and anybody planning on seeing the movie.
In the Mouth of Madness has a very familiar feel for fans of Carpenter's work. The plot contains elements of Village of the Damned and the special effects look a bit like the nasty creature in The Thing. Everything, however, looks really cheap. The New Hampshire town looks like a two location set. There's a town square and a scary Byzantine church. The actors are all cardboard cutouts, from Neill, who's completely incapable of carrying the film by himself (in fact, including his best Australian films, has he ever been given so much responsibility on screen?) to the completely amateurish Julie Carmen as his travelling companion. The supporting performances by Warner, Glover, Jurgen Prochnow, and Jurgen Prochnow are all just awful.
The raises my major question: (And the is accompanied by a **MAJOR SPOILER!!!!**)
Is the movie supposed to be bad? Or at least tacky in the ways that I've mentioned? As the final scene involves Trent going to see In the Mouth of Madness, can we just assume that in a metatextual sense this movie is cheesy because it's a cheesy adapatation of a cheesy imaginary book? Is the Hobb's End silly looking because it's not even supposed to be a real city? Are the performances bad because the characters are intentionally one dimensional? Is the entire film just supposed to be a bad film within a film? And as such is it just an homage to the classic British science fiction tradition from Lovecraft to Quatermass, etc?
I think I may enjoy it more on that level. If there's a kind of multi-layered calculation that restricts quality than maybe it even succeeds for me. If you take the film as an examination of diminished audience returns, than it comments of low brow adapations of good books, etc. The evil force taking over the minds of everybody who reads Cane's books may capture the minds of the intelligent, but the film is supposed to attack people who don't read. It's low brow, then, for the sake of being low brow. And that may be very interesting.
Left to its own devices, though, I just found myself remembering how wonderfully scary The Thing, Halloween, and the Fog are. And how Carpenter at his best used to be the master of tightly wound action plots, like Escape from New York and Assault on Precinct 13. I also found myself appreciating Lovecraft's skill even though he's never been a favorite of mine. At least he was always more successful in examining the rips in reality that he depicted. DeLuca just isn't up to the challenge.
Since the movie did make me think and since I also accept the possibility that there is depth here that I'm not fully crediting, I'd give this one a 5/10. But even that may be a little high.