IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS

****

Directed by John Carpenter.

Starring Sam Neill, Julie Carmen, Jürgen Prochnow.

Horror, USA, 95 mins, Certificate 18.

Released in the UK on Limited Edition 4K UHD & Blu-ray by Arrow Video on 27th October

Sutter Cane is a horror author who is outselling Stephen King as the name in macabre novels, but the mysterious author has disappeared. Insurance investigator John Trent (Sam Neill) is hired by Cane’s publisher Arcane to try and find out what has happened to their cash cow, and he is joined by Cane’s editor Linda Styles (Julie Carmen) who suspects foul play, but as the pair try and put the pieces of the author’s disappearance together they discover that Cane’s books seem to be having an otherworldly influence on his readers and the real world, or is the real world really the real world?

Coming as it did in 1994, after John Carpenter’s untouchable run of cult hits that, arguably, ended with 1988's THEY LIVE, IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS was not well received upon release but has gained many fans over the years for its mixing of Lovecraftian mythology with Carpenter’s unique cinematic style. This is a trend that most John Carpenter movies have followed - just look at how revered THE THING and BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA are nowadays compared to when they originally came out - but despite this movie being given a little more respect it has never quite gotten the love that those other movies have.

This is most likely because IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS is a difficult movie to follow and make sense of, but maybe that is the point. The core plot of an investigator looking for a missing author seems simple enough, but when you bring in the interdimensional ghouls and monsters that blur the lines between fantasy and reality it all gets rather muddled. Sam Neill gives a strong performance as John Trent, a confident and charming character who appears to not get flummoxed by difficult situations, but by the end of it all even Neill looks like he is seconds away from turning to the camera to ask what is going on.

Doing the ‘is it real or is it in my head?’ thing has been done hundreds of times over the decades, but in the 1990s this particular type of storytelling took on a new life as filmmakers had the budgets and the technology to bring these ideas to the screen, and IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS does deliver when it comes to its horror elements, with various latex and rubber creations being superbly rendered by the legendary KNB EFX, along with some early CGI effects - courtesy of ILM - that aren’t that terrible when put into context. It is telling that Wes Craven returned to the A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET franchise that same year with NEW NIGHTMARE, which could serve as a sort-of companion piece to this. That movie however had an established character and mythology to fall back on, whereas IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS feels more random in its weirdness, with John and Linda going from one scene of insanity to the next without any real connective tissue to make even the slightest narrative sense. When Sutter Cane does finally appear, actor Jürgen Prochnow cuts a commanding presence and you hope that his monologues will tie together all of the strange events we have already seen, but they don’t and the character feels a little wasted, like he should have been a part of something bigger that never really comes to fruition.

But despite the nonsensical story it works, to some degree. Thanks to the overall look and the ‘strangers in a strange town’ plot it does feel very much like a John Carpenter movie - albeit with a rockier ‘90s theme tune (apparently Carpenter wanted to use Metallica’s ‘Enter Sandman’ as the main theme to play over the opening credits, but couldn’t secure the rights so he opted to compose his own song that sounded similar) - and it was the goriest movie Carpenter had made since the 1980s, plus the decent cast manage to keep things moving along with entertaining performances.

The new 4K restoration is gorgeous, bringing a richer colour grading that lifts the reds and greens of the blood and exterior shots, and the skin tones all look natural with a nice level of detail, plus there are various essays and interviews on the disc that put the movie into context with where Carpenter was in his career at the time. The 1990s were not kind to many of our beloved genre filmmakers of the ‘70s and ‘80s, but somewhere after THEY LIVE, John Carpenter’s movies went from being essential to interesting, and this movie is definitely that. IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS is not top drawer John Carpenter, but it is somewhere around the top of his B-league movies, which is still a respectable place to be. 

Chris Ward