With such big names like Sam Niell and John Carpenter, this movie has been on my list for a long time. This movie’s title also pays tribute to H. P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness, and I’m always down for some good old fashion insanity horror. I have yet to see a Carpenter movie I didn’t like, so naturally I was pretty hyped for this movie going in.
In the Mouth of Madness is a 1994 American supernatural horror film directed and scored by John Carpenter and written by Michael De Luca. The efficient and skeptical freelance insurance investigator John Trent is hired by the publisher Jackson Harglow to find where the famous writer Sutter Cane might be. After writing a series of best-sellers in the horror genre, affecting the reason and causing disorientation, memory loss, and paranoia in readers, Sutter has simply vanished near the release of his new novel, "Horror in Hobb's End." There is mass hysteria of his anxious fans waiting for the new release, and John believes that his disappearance is a marketing strategy. John follows his instincts and travels with Cane's editor, Linda Styles, to New Hampshire, seeking for the apparently fictional town of Hobb's End. While driving along in the night, Linda reaches Hobb's End, and John discloses that Sutter Cane has unleashed a powerful evil force in the black church of the mysterious town, and his twisted imagination is changing the reality and perception of those who read his novels.
Once upon a time, in the distant land of Red Deer Canada, I found myself in a shitty mood. I was walking around the Hotel I work at running various errands, and I started to notice the farther I dove into my own anxiety and fear the faster I started walking. I stopped myself before breaking into a full sprint, and that feeling is exactly what this movie feels like.
This shit is crazy dense for an hour and a half long movie, and I love the way it keeps one upping itself. Before the crazy shit starts this movie is an avalanche of familiar faces who all give amazing performances, and based solely on the first 20 minutes you might think this was a fairly tame thriller. It’s a fairly standard missing person’s case at first, then little by little the total insanity slips in. a crazy ex publisher with an axe, some crazy dream sequences, wild shit for sure but nothing too crazy for act one. It’s only once we enter the fictional town of Hobbs End that shit really starts to get bat shit insane. The shear amount of practical effects is quite literally larger than THE THING in scale, and the effects here are beyond hall of fame worthy. It can be tricky as fuck to make good looking Lovecraft style monsters, and this movie keeps them coming hard and fast in act 2.
Long story short, this movie is amazing.
10/10
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