IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS
A film review by Jon A. Webb
Copyright 1995 Jon A. Webb
John Carpenter's "In the Mouth of Madness" Directed by John Carpenter Written by Michael De Luca With Sam Neill, Julie Carmen, Jurgen Porchnow, Charlton Heston
IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS is one of those story-within-a-story movies, like THE LAST ACTION HERO and the last Freddie film. Given the only occasional success of these films, one wonders why they keep getting made; perhaps writers like the fun of writing, effectively, about themselves.
The problem with this kind of movie is that it is very hard to motivate belief in the characters, because they are portrayed as being nothing more than a fiction. In the absence of belief there is no reason to care about what happens to them and hence no reason to care about the film. The result, in spite of whatever technical skill the director shows for horror films, is that the film falls flat.
Another problem with the film is John Carpenter's failure to make any of his characters outside the central one three-dimensional. Sam Neill is the complete character here, and he is right up until the end, when he finally succumbs to the arbitrary manipulations of the script.
Julie Carmen is okay through about half the film, when she starts acting odd. I suppose this is supposed to be the result of the book taking her over, or something like that, but it comes across as dull and strange. Charlton Heston and Jurgen Porchnow have small, inconsequential parts.
I did like quite a bit of the film, though. John Carpenter is a real expert at making you jump; he excels at the technical aspects of horror film direction. And there's some oddness early on, when the Sam Neill character comes on to the Julie Carmen character and she turns him down. It's just a little creepy and unmotivated and you get the feeling something odd is going on, but you don't know what. I don't think that Carpenter intended the scene to play this way but it is effective in advancing the theme of the film nevertheless.
The main technical problem underlying all of this is that making a film where you would actually care about the characters and plot would require too much background. You would have to be familiar with "Sutter Cain"'s novels, know about the plots the characters in the film think they're caught in, etc. This is far too much background for a feature-length film.
I have, however, a solution. It would be for the filmmakers to drop the shallow and perhaps legally actionable (assuming King wasn't involved in this movie; somebody King did the production, so maybe I'm wrong) pretense that they're talking about someone other than Stephen King when they refer to the best-selling author of all these horror books and successful movies. Instead, they should've made a film where Stephen King really is the author and the town Sam Neill and Julie Carmen end up in is Castle Rock (not "Hobbe's End", which is a reference to "Crouch End," a Stephen King short story); let the dog the children are chasing be Cujo, and the children themselves those of the corn. Then those of us who follow Stephen King's prolific career would have familiar characters to care about and the fun of finding references to his novels and other films; the rest of the audience would at least have a few points of reference. It could have been a great, fun film instead of this technically good but in the end disappointing piece.
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