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In the Mouth of Madness, 1994
John Trent (Sam Neill) is an insurance investigator who is hired by a publishing company to track down its missing literary star, a man named Sutter Cane (Jürgen Prochnow) who writes horror novels that have a strange effect on some of his readers. Accompanied by an employee of the publishing house, Linda Styles (Julie Carmen), the search leads to a strange town where the people are very much not alright.
There were things I absolutely loved about this movie and things that I thought were kind of annoying, and the end result was something that I was glad I watched, but wouldn't be tempted to revisit.
The positives include some really fun special effects and just in general some really disturbing staging of sequences, such as when we realize where the kindly inn owner's husband is, or what happens when the local children finally catch up to that dog they've been following. I liked Neill's performance, and I also liked Carmen in her slightly more limited role. (She took off her glasses and closed them with her mouth like three times. C'mon.)
I also liked just how openly off the town was, and the way that we see how Trent and Linda get trapped.
On the downside, Sutter Cane never really made that much of an impression on me. I appreciate the reasons behind leaving his writing mostly off-screen, but it feels like the movie is avoiding it which gives it the sense of a dodge. And while I can sort of vaguely appreciate where the film went on a meta level, the more it moved in that direction the more I felt distanced from it.
In the Mouth of Madness, 1994
John Trent (Sam Neill) is an insurance investigator who is hired by a publishing company to track down its missing literary star, a man named Sutter Cane (Jürgen Prochnow) who writes horror novels that have a strange effect on some of his readers. Accompanied by an employee of the publishing house, Linda Styles (Julie Carmen), the search leads to a strange town where the people are very much not alright.
There were things I absolutely loved about this movie and things that I thought were kind of annoying, and the end result was something that I was glad I watched, but wouldn't be tempted to revisit.
The positives include some really fun special effects and just in general some really disturbing staging of sequences, such as when we realize where the kindly inn owner's husband is, or what happens when the local children finally catch up to that dog they've been following. I liked Neill's performance, and I also liked Carmen in her slightly more limited role. (She took off her glasses and closed them with her mouth like three times. C'mon.)
I also liked just how openly off the town was, and the way that we see how Trent and Linda get trapped.
On the downside, Sutter Cane never really made that much of an impression on me. I appreciate the reasons behind leaving his writing mostly off-screen, but it feels like the movie is avoiding it which gives it the sense of a dodge. And while I can sort of vaguely appreciate where the film went on a meta level, the more it moved in that direction the more I felt distanced from it.