Would that prose had the power attributed to it in "In the Mouth of Madness"! In a culture in which most books perish like unwatered daisies, this wacky movie actually ascribes the end of life on Earth as we know it to a novelist.
His name is Sutter Cane, and can it be any coincidence that if you say it fast with your fingers in your nostrils it sounds almost like . . . Stephen King? No, it can't. Cane is the hugely successful horror novelist who dominates best-seller lists and whose next book is awaited by a breathless reading public.
But he's disappeared with the manuscript. He's vamoosed. Rumors circulate. Is it a publicity hoax? Or has Cane's intensity of vision driven him over the edge? Did he elope with Anne Rice? Is he writing Freddy screenplays for New Line Cinema? Is he looking for an agent at ICM? Is the new novel so horrible that even to gaze upon its blasphemed pages is to give up your own sanity?
To answer these questions, the publisher (Charlton Heston, who seems to be posing for Mount Rushmore) hires insurance detective John Trent (Sam Neill) to investigate.
The casting of Neill is a curious choice that gives the movie a large part of its nutty sense of being not quite all there. Michael De Luca's script conceives the character as a flip, irreverent, hard-boiled shamus of the Humphrey Bogart school, as American a figure as can be imagined. Neill, with his New Zealand accent, old-movie star good looks and smoothly moussed hair, never seems remotely right for the part. He's about as believable as Paul Hogan as a cowboy.
The movie never pauses to notice this oddity because it's so full of other oddities. With editor Linda Styles (dreary Julie Carmen) in tow, Trent heads to central New Hampshire to find the town where Sutter Cane was last reported. Getting there, however, proves not to be a question of states on a map but states of mind: It's like trying to get to Brigadoon.
At last, after a journey that's not nearly as amusing as filmmaker John Carpenter thinks, they arrive in the sparsely populated New England town of Hobbs End, where the local sport is beating up tourists and keeping people away from a Russian Orthodox church, where strange things have been known to happen.
To anybody familiar with the works of H. P. Lovecraft, nothing that does happen will be of any surprise. Indeed, many of the names in the film are variations of Lovecraft invention: He once wrote a book called "At the Mountains of Madness," for example, and in some sense, the film is conceived as an homage to the master. It takes off from Lovecraft's original conception of a dual universe, the boring palpable one in which we all live out our grim little lives and, just beyond the screen, a demon dimension, populated with nightmare creatures long on warts, jaws and fangs and short on the milk of human compassion.
And who has discovered the secret of the place and come to act as its guardian but Sutter Cane himself? Alas, this proves to be Jurgen Prochnow, the brilliant German actor (from "Das Boot") who has yet to find a niche in American films. He still hasn't. With his hair puffed out like a ballerina's tutu (his hair-dryer is the scariest thing in the movie), he stands eternal guard at the quite literal "mouth of madness," a passageway into the demon dimension.
None of this makes much sense, and it certainly lacks the rigorous logic and eerie menace of the Lovecraft works (which I heartily recommend). Rather, Carpenter keeps rattling off into disassociative, free-association montages where we're not sure what reality we're in: Is it real or is it Memorex or does anybody care? "It's all about one's perception of reality," the director helpfully explains in the press notes, adding, "Reality isn't what we think it is." Duh.
He plays this dreary game so many times it grows wearisome. Worse still, he lacks the pictorial imagination for visions of the profane that has propelled other horror directors, such as Wes Craven and Clive Barker, to the highest realms of the craft. His "demons" are all mucus-slathered extras in latex masks, and his briefly glimpsed vision of the hell just beyond the curtain reminds one more of Halloween in the '50s than anything.
"The Mouth of Madness" soon opens to yield a yawn of boredom.
"In the Mouth of Madness"
Starring Sam Neill and Julie Carmen
Directed by John Carpenter
Released by New Line
Rated R (violence, offensive language)
**