In the Mouth of Madness

IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS (1995)

I can't really say that I've always loved insurance investigators, but I have loved them for a long, long time. Probably because of Double Indemnity, which not only made insurance investigators seem cool, but also accomplished the impossible feat of making Fred MacMurray seem cool as well. Then there was the ultra-hip insurance investigator in Thomas "Tommy the Rug" Pynchon's Vineland. And long-time readers of my site will remember the acute disappointment I felt when Jean Reno turned out not be an insurance investigator in that wretched American version of Godzilla.

So how could I not like this tale of an insurance investigator (John Trent, played by Sam Neill) sent, essentially, to Lovecraftian New England to find out what happened to best-selling horror author Sutter Cane? Double Indemnity meets The Dunwich Horror with a dollop of Borges as directed by John Carpenter. What's not to like?

Well, see, here's the thing. If you're going to do a horror movie about people becoming stuck in a horror author's milieu, and about the fictional world of Lovecraftian elder gods taking over reality as we know it, you've really got to work the frission between the real and the unreal, and you have to do such a subtle job of mixing the two that by the time that the viewer finally catches something, they realize with a shock that the two have been crossing and re-crossing much longer than they thought.

So in the very first scene, when a mad-eyed Sam Neill gets wheeled into a really fake-looking asylum run by cheery Out of the 120 images of Sam Neill, I picked this... scene-chewer John Glover, we've got problems. As we flash back to get the whole story, we don't have any real sense of reality in the fake dialogue of the opening scene of Trent exposing an insurance con, in Neill's mannered, too-knowing performance (he seems like he's playing a subtle riff of Fred MacMurray's character), and particularly in the bad, fake sets (a real and recurring problem for Carpenter in his later movies, I've found). Then after Trent improbably finds a map in the covers of Cane's paperback books, he goes to find Cane with Cane's editor (Julie Carmen) in tow. And here's where things get really rough as far as the reality department goes, because Carmen gives the awful performance of a lifetime. The only reason that I can figure for her ever being cast is that with her glasses off, Carmen looks an awful lot like Jessica Harper of Argento's Suspira.

Maybe this would have worked if Hobb's End, Cane's fictional town come to life, had then been hyper-real, like the eerie Twin Peaks of Lynch's Fire Walk With Me. But, no: Hobb's End looks like the main street of Disneyland, and the inhabitants are such well-recognized B-movie character actors that you've seen in dozens of low budget movies and commercials.

And finally (and this is the sort of thing that you can probably skip unless you're a horror fiction junkie) you just can't mix Stephen King and H.P. Lovecraft; you just can't. As great as both horror writers are, they're from very different traditions. Lovecraft was writing deliberately anachronistic stories in the '20s and '30s; his big influence for horror was Poe. King's strengths come from an essentially modern standpoint; his big influence is Matheson (with a certain amount of sentimentality cribbed from Bradbury). When King himself has done his version of Cthulhu mythos stories, for example, he's done it on Lovecraft's terms.

There are pleasingly King-like moments in In The Mouth of Madness, such as a bicycle with playing cards in the spokes, and there's actually a few Lovecraftian moments that catch Lovecraft better than any movie I've seen, but the pieces just don't fit.
There's always a few good moments in a John Carpenter movie of course (although I remember the good old days when those few good moments lasted the length of the movie) and I was very fond of the scene where the editor encounters a group of evil, mutated children.

"Who's your mother?" She asks them.

"You are," a leering twisted little girl says to her. "You're our Mommy. And it's Mommy's day." It's one of those great moments you don't get in horror movies very often, where your flesh rises from something like genuine dread for reasons you can't directly point to.

And there's some nice Borgesian touches that I liked at the end, and I always get a kick out of what a clever cheat Carpenter is, still, with his people-popping-into-the-frame shocks.

But that's it. In the Mouth of Madness is otherwise a cake that never rose, a singed gelatinous mess that leaves a not unappealing smell for hours afterwards, making you regret the waste of some good ingredients and your time. Even for fans of insurance investigator protagonists, In the Mouth of Madness will not satisfy.

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Images on this page taken from the Official Sam Neill Home Page, Whose Endless Pictures of Sam Neill I Actually Found Much More Disquieting Than This Movie

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