Imagine a movie where the plot centers on the release of a book of the same name as the movie, and in fact tells a similar story as the movie. and then in the movie universe, a movie is adapted from the book and when a character goes to see said movie, he watches himself in a scene we saw earlier in the movie (the real movie, not movie based on the book in the real movie). Still with me? It's okay, I wasn't really either. But that's In the Mouth of Madness for you, a mind-bending, Lovecraftian psychological horror.
The movie opens with Sam Neill being admitted to an insane asylum. Despite looking disheveled and resisting his confinement, he is speaking (or rather shouting) fairly coherently that he doesn't belong here and that he's not insane. After some kicking and 'bow-throwing, the orderlies subdue Neill and get him in to a cell. Shortly there after, a doctor arrives to evaluate Neil and discovers that he has drawn crosses on every inch of surface area in his cell, including all over his person. He also now seems complacent with his new imprisonment.
"There's a guard with a pair of swollen testicles who swears you wanted out of here."
The doctor then convinces Neill to explain the events that led up to his admittance to the asylum, which acts as the bulk of the plot for the movie. Pre-crazy Sam Neill, known as John Trent, is an insurance fraud investigator called in to determine the validity of the disappearance of famed pulp horror novelist, Sutter Cane. Trent believes the whole thing to be a scam, a publicity stunt to drum up sales of Cane's last book in preparation for the new one, which he is supposed to be finishing up.
Trent doesn't get what all the fuss is about with regards to Sutter Cain, but the editor explains that some of the less stable readers find his work disorienting, and can lead to them losing their connection to reality, or more specifically to the reality we all subscribe to, but might not be what reality actually is. Again, sometimes it's hard to speak clearly about this movie. As the editor says, "A reality is just what we tell each other it is."
So in order to get into the mind of the potential scammer, Trent buys Cane's books and starts to read them, only to begin to have strange delusions. Eventually, he notices something in the cover art of the series, art that Cane himself insisted on creating. When put together like a collage, a map of New Hampshire appears, indicating where Hobb's End, the seemingly fictional town where all of Cane's works take place, is in real life. So Trent and the editor decide to find this town to hopefully prove that Cane truly is missing and not just another hoax.
Spoiler time!
On the drive down, the editor experiences strange happenings occur, like the road disappearing and the car seeming to be flying above the clouds. She comes to in broad daylight on the edge of Hobb's End with no recollection of how they arrived. The few inhabitants that the two meet are all characters in Cane's books. Trent believes them all to be actors, still thinking the whole town is a huge publicity stunt, but the editor seems to know what will happen with certain people and places in the town.
She reveals that she knows this because the events all happen in the sample chapters of Cane's new book. Trent is still a non-believer, but is somewhat swayed after the editor returns to the hotel acting insane because she met with Cane, who exposed her to the entire book. He tries to leave the town, but every time he leaves on the highway, the road disappears and he finds himself back in Hobb's End facing a mob of townsfolk. After two attempts to leave, he drives through the crowd, crashes, and wakes up in the church where Cane has been hanging out, writing his book. Cane, unsurprisingly, is a bit of a nutjob, basically explaining that because his books have become so popular, been read by so many people, his work has literally been brought to life.
In fact, John Trent himself is a character in the book, forced to do what Cane has written for him. This explains why he was unable to escape the town. Cane instructs Trent to take the book to the publisher so that the madness it instills in readers will spread through society, allowing ancient beings from the unknown to reign again just as was written in his books. Trent resists, destroying the copy. He arrives back in New York where the publisher says that Trent turned the book in weeks ago and that there never was an editor (Trent believes her to have been written out).
Succumbing to the will of the book, Trent murders someone with an axe, which seems to be what landed him in the insane asylum. Back to the present, the doctor dismisses the whole thing as a mild hallucination. Trent wakes up to find his room unlocked and everyone is gone. It looks like a riot happened. He hears warnings on the radio telling of riots and mutations, and sees that the movie theater is playing In the Mouth of Madness. He goes in and has a hysterical breakdown while watching his own life on screen. Boom. Credits.
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| I'm jealous he had the theater to himself. |
Important note: Hayden Christensen is in it for like 10 seconds and it's awful, just like the Star Wars prequels. But seriously, the reality bending in this movie was really cool, although not the most nerve-wracking "is this real?" movie I've seen.
Also! Because I'm really dumb, I've been watching (read: fast-forwarding) the credits to make sure there's no post-credit business, which there sometimes is. There wasn't for this movie, but there was something even more strange. It mentioned the "no animals were harmed" stuff follow by:
"Human interaction was monitored by the Inter Planetary Psychiatric Association. The body count was high, the casualties are heavy"
Like what? Who puts a weird meta joke at the end of the credits? John Carpenter apparently. Oh also, this is the final film of a spiritual trilogy which Carpenter calls his "Apocalypse Trilogy." The first is The Thing and the second is Prince of Darkness. I've seen the former but not the latter and I still really enjoyed this one, so I really don't think there's a huge need to watch them in a particular order. Plot-wise, they aren't related, they are just thematically linked.
Rating on the Spook-o-meter: 4 out of 10 boos
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