In The Mouth of Madness
(1994) 95 Min.
Rated: R (slight gore)
Country: USA
Director: John Carpenter
Starring: Sam Neill, David Warner, John Glover, Bernie Casey, Julie Carmen, Charlton Heston
Links: IMDB | Wikipedia
Rating: ★★★★★
Lovecraftian imagery abounds in this story about a missing horror novelist.
Synopsis:
John Trent (Neill) is forcefully admitted to a hospital for mentally ill. Dr. Wenn (Warner) visits him and promises to get him out of the hospital. Wenn asks John to tell him his story.
John sits down and starts to tell his tale of how he got into the hospital. He started out as an insurance investigator. He said everything started with the Sutter Cane disappearance.
He was discussing a case with his friend Robinson (Casey) when Robinson was telling John that he wanted him to investigate the disappearance of Sutter Cane the horror novel writer. Just as they are about to discuss it further, a man with red eyes walks up to their cafe window and shatters the glass with an ax. He then is about to strike down John, but is shot by a few cops nearby.
John visits the publishing company and meets Sutter Cane’s editor Linda Styles (Carmen) and the boss Jackson Harglow (Heston). She informs him that the man with the ax was Sutter Cane’s agent and that he was the only buffer between Cane and the publishing company. This means that John has to find Cane on his own. Linda encourages John to try to read Cane’s work and understand it.
He goes off to a trashed bookstore and picks up a few Sutter Cane books. A creepy kid with glasses tells him “he sees you”. John shrugs it off and goes home to read. He finds that the horror pulp novels are more enjoyable than he first thought.
As he reads he nods off and has a reoccurring dream. In the dream he sees a cop beating up a graffiti artist. Each time he dreams this the cop grows more grotesque and a crowd of people gather around the agent, they chop him up and the cop almost hits John before he wakes.
John looks at the covers and realizes that there’s a light red outline on each cover. He cuts up the covers and pieces together the “puzzle” which is actually in the shape of the state of New Hampshire. He tells Linda and Mr. Harglow this. He also proposes that he will go and investigate. Mr. Harglow claims they have nothing to hide and requests that Linda be sent along as well.
John believes that if they look hard enough they will be able to find the mythical town of Hobb’s End where the author is secretly hiding.
John and Linda have an exciting road trip in which John squeaks a toy horn on a sleeping Linda while he drives and she throws a bag of potato chips at him.
At night, Linda is driving down a long stretch of dark road and she suddenly sees a boy peddling his bike as quickly as he can. She passes him. Later she sees a another cyclist, driving towards her. He is wrinkled and pale with long white hair. She’s surprised. A third time the white man re-appears in front of her car and she hits him.
She stops the car to render aid. The guy is lying on the floor muttering “I can’t get out. He won’t let me out.” Linda’s gaze is momentarily distracted by a windmill and when she looks for the white man again, he is on his bike and pedaling away as if nothing happened.
Linda continues to drive and soon she is going through a tunnel with wooden boards. As the car exits the tunnel, it’s daylight and they’ve reached Hobb’s End.
The town is picturesque and quaint, but it’s also seemingly abandoned as there’s no one on the streets. They drive over to the Pickman Hotel and decide to stay there.
John speaks to the innkeeper. She’s a kind old lady who claims she’s never heard of Sutter Cane. Linda, on the other hand, believes that the town is exactly as Sutter Cane has written it.
Once in their room, Linda shows John how even nearby buildings are placed just as Sutter Cane has written in his books. So they decide to visit a nearby church where, in the books, the town’s evil originates.
A few towns people arrive to battle the evil and claim their children, but Sutter Cane himself appears, as a priest, and sets loose a few evil Doberman Pinschers on the townsfolk.
John and Linda retreat to their hotel room and bicker about whether or not this is all a staged act by the publishing company or whether it is legit. John says that there’s nothing about the townsfolk and children in the old book, Linda counters that the new book had that information, but no one had read it except for the agent and herself.
Linda also explains that the book was about the end of the world and it starts at Hobb’s End. An evil returns and takes apart Hobb’s End piece by piece.
Linda steals the keys and takes the car. John walks around the town at night. John stops in an empty bar and drinks a beer. A man from town warns him to leave the town and explains that evil is spreading like a virus, taking the children first. John returns to the hotel room.
Linda, meanwhile, goes to the church. There she sees Sutter Cane on a type writer finishing up his novel. He says that all along the evil creatures in the church gave him the stories and the power to make it real. Linda seems to be in a trance and he forces her to “see” his book. She rises back from the book with trails of blood from her eyes. She’s still in a daze.
Linda returns to the hotel and panics, telling John that she saw the book and is losing herself to its power.
John wanders around looking for the innkeeper but instead finds her in the cellar as a tentacled creature. He rushes out of the cellar.
John looks for Linda, but she’s possessed and smiling, tosses him across a hall. He gets up and leaves the hotel, stopping once to look at a creature in the green house. He gets in his car and drives away.
As he’s driving into town, he sees a circle of townsfolk with torches and axes. At the center of the circle is Linda, standing there. John wanders into the nearby bar to hide. He sees the same town man as before, who commits suicide with a shot gun saying that Sutter Cane wrote him that way.
John goes outside to find Linda near the car. He knocks her out and puts her inside the car. the townsfolk draw near with their weapons. John manages to start the car and drive off.
While on the road, Linda starts to kiss John who is screaming for her to leave him alone. He stops the car and she gets out of the car, twists on her back into a crawl and tells John that Sutter Cane has a job for him. John flees the scene in the car.
As John continues to drive, he suddenly finds himself back in town in front of the angry mob of townspeople. He attempts to plow through the mob, but at the end, Linda is staring at him. He swerves the car to miss her and hits a parked truck. He’s knocked unconscious.
He awakes in the church with Cane who has just completed his novel. The book is titled “In the Mouth of Madness”. Cane hands off the manuscript to John and asks him to deliver it. Linda is there and meant to go with him. Cane tells John that he is also in the book, controlled by Cane and meant to deliver the book.
John claims he’s not a piece of fiction and Cane dares John to read the book if he has doubts.
Cane rips himself and the fabric of dimension to reveal book pages. Linda reads aloud the book as John reacts exactly how the book describes.
John backs away as creatures from aeons past start to reach the giant dimensional rip. Linda hands him the book and tells him she can’t go with him. He runs away from the creatures down a long long hall. As he runs, he trips on the floor and curls up in a fetal position.
John awakes in the middle of a road during the day. In his hands is the book’s manuscript. He stops a kid on a bike and asks if he’s heard of Hobb’s End, to which the kid shakes his head in reply. John leaves the book in the road and walks towards the nearest highway.
John is in a motel (which is playing scenes from Robot Monster) when he receives a package addressed to him. It’s the book manuscript. He takes it to his room and burns it in the bathroom sink.
Afterwards he takes a bus ride home. During the ride he nods off and in a dream, Cane tells him his favorite color is blue. When John awakes the entire bus has a blue tint. John screams and awakens from that dream.
So, finally John goes back to the publishing company and Mr. Harglow. He tells him the story, but Mr. Harglow has never heard of Lisa and also tells John that he delivered the book manuscript to him months ago. The book has already been in stores for seven weeks. John pleads with him to stop distributing it saying that the book will drive people crazy. Mr. Harglow tells John that a movie based on the book comes out next month. John leaves the office dumbfounded.
People queue up outside a bookstore. As a man walks out with a copy of the book, a disheveled John asks him if he likes the book. The man responds that he loves it. John reaches into his coat, pulls out an ax and attacks the man.
Of course, this leads to the current conversation that John is telling Dr. Wenn at the start of the film.
Dr. Wenn leaves John after he tells his story. As John waits in his cell he hears cries outside his cell. The door is broken open
John walks outside his cell to an empty world. There are no people, only vacant buildings and lots with trash strewn around.
He makes his way through town and finds a movie theater playing the film “In the Mouth of Madness”. He settles into a theater seat and starts to watch the film. It plays scenes which we’ve seen, but these are all new to John. It’s his reality that he is re-watching.
John starts to laugh maniacally as the scenes play. The film ends.
Review:
This is probably one of my favorite John Carpenter films. The constant hints of H.P. Lovecraft and the idea of an movie about a book that turns into the same movie the audience is watching. The fun twist which is sadistically satisfying. All of these elements make for a great story and of course Carpenter is good enough to pull it off.
The only weaknesses in the film are probably the slow pacing in the middle of the film. Neill’s character John is frustratingly cynical. He won’t believe anything is amiss despite being in a mysteriously vacant town with people randomly getting attacked by hell hounds.
This movie has a lot of great creature effects. Some of them are in the film for only the briefest of moments. Greg Nicotero’s great special effects were showcased here in the wall of monsters that appears to chase John. It’s a shame that they’re only seen so briefly.
There isn’t much in the way of gore here. It’s mostly just a good chilling story with some macabre twists.