Review of In The Mouth of Madness

Video

Horror films are always dark, I suppose that daylight horror wouldn’t be half as frightening would :). With this in mind a good picture is often essential to see what is happening. The image quality is good on this disc although not outstanding. There are certain scenes that would have easily been lost in the fuzz that is VHS inferior picture quality, mainly the extremely dark ones. This isn’t exactly a colourful movie for the most part but what colour there is remains clear with no bleeding. It’s hard to put your finger on why you think one disc looks better than another as there are so many factors to consider however I was left thinking that the transfer was good but nothing special.

The visual effects were a let down to be honest. There are some creature effects throughout the movie which simply can’t hold a candle those found in the The Thing, a movie 17 years older than this one. This is a shame as this, to me, is part and parcel of the main weak point of the movie but more of that later.

Audio

Now the Audio is very well done. As you would expect from a film about people going mad you get haunted by whispering voices from every corner of the room. The steering is excellent and there are times when you get a chill down your spine even though there is actually nothing happening on the screen. Several of the more spooky scenes are eerily silent except for certain key sounds and this selective silence often adds more atmosphere than sounds sometimes do, if you get my meaning.

The soundtrack . . . well to be honest nothing about the soundtrack really stuck in my mind apart from the fact it served the movie pretty well, helping to build up the atmosphere. Functional but nothing memorable.

Features

The only real extra here is a commentary with Director John Carpenter and Cinematographer Gary Kibbe. I enjoyed the commentary track on The Thing (John Carpenter and Kurt Russell) and this one is interesting also, just not as interesting. Worth a listen though.

Conclusion

John Carpenter’s film career has seen a very mixed crop of movies ranging from the excellent The Thing through to the average attempts such as Vampires and down to the poor ones like They Live. Where does this one fit in then? Well I would class it as slightly above average.

Sam Neil (sounding oddly similar to Pierce Brosnan) plays an insurance claims investigator hired to investigate the disappearance of the most successful writer horror in history, Sutter Cane. His search leads him straight into the fictional world of Cane and down a dark descent to the madness found in his latest book “In the Mouth of Madness”.

There are some excellent set pieces that really do get you spooked, particularly a scene involving a cyclist on a dark road (I won’t say anymore than that, don’t want to spoil it). Allot of the popular methods used to spook audiences are used here and a lot of them work however the movie has one major problem.

They attempt to introduce creatures and monsters into the normal world and they ruin it. The creature effects are poor and totally unbelievable to be honest. The movie was doing fine and spooking me out nicely right until the point where the creatures appeared, from then on it was a downhill ride. The scariest movies are often about just how disturbing human behaviour can be and this movie would have been so much better if John Carpenter had stuck to this and pursued the human descent into madness. It is what we don’t see that usually scares us most, not some lumbering tentacled creatures.

The movie does make you think though. One particular piece of dialogue in the movie was very interesting where the characters discuss that madness is only defined by the minority, should the truly insane outnumber the sane then who would be mad? The ending is thought provoking as well.

The best way to sum this up is as a missed opportunity. It starts well with an interesting idea but goes off the rails midway through. As a DVD it is above average but lacking in extras, only recommended if you really liked the movie. Definitely one to watch before you decide to buy.