Post by GRWelsh on Jan 16, 2013 10:37:05 GMT -5
I just watched this movie, and I was disappointed.
I don't know how I managed to go so long without seeing this. Somehow I missed this movie when it first came out. When I saw that it had some Lovecraft references, and it was by John Carpenter, you would think that would be right up my alley! I liked "Halloween" and "The Thing" so much, and I am a longtime Lovecraft fan.
But, it was a combination of not scary and incoherent. It played on one of those premises that I dislike when developed a certain way: "What if the writer isn't just writing fiction? What if his fiction starts to become... reality?" The horror writer in the movie, Sutter Cane, outsells even Stephen King (it is claimed). And, I recall a similar sort of premise in a book by Stephen King from 1989's "The Dark Half." In the King novel, the protagonist is a writer who kills off his "pen name" identity (a la Richard Bachman) who then supernaturally comes back to life and takes on an existence of his own, and causes all sorts of trouble. I never cared for this premise, it always seemed to me like one of those lame ideas that King picked up after already using a lot of good ones.
***SPOILERS***
In the "In the Mouth of Madness" movie, the Sutter Cane character is a horror writer who writes fiction that drives weaker minded people crazy and turns them into mass murderers and this turns into an epidemic that spreads across the country and even the world. And that's because, it turns out, he's not writing fiction, but is having all of this transmitted to him by "Great Old Ones" who are trying to re-enter our reality and people going insane has something to do with that, evidently. And as this ball gets rolling along, not only are people going insane, some of them are beginning to transform into tentacled, bloated, obscene horrors.
As described above, maybe it doesn't sound like that bad a premise, but perhaps it was the execution of it that wasn't done well. The special effects seemed rubbery and just not scary. There were too many hallucinations and jumbled scenes, too many "Boo! Gotcha!" moments. It all just seemed so ham-handed compared to earlier movies that I would call masterpieces -- "Halloween" and "The Thing." It's hard to believe they were the earlier efforts, and this was the later effort.
I could get a dim sense of another overall theme John Carpenter was after, which was "If enough people begin to believe something, doesn't that make it reality?" But somehow the movie didn't stay focused on that or really drive it home for me. I think that could be a scary premise in itself. Its religion, after all...
I don't know how I managed to go so long without seeing this. Somehow I missed this movie when it first came out. When I saw that it had some Lovecraft references, and it was by John Carpenter, you would think that would be right up my alley! I liked "Halloween" and "The Thing" so much, and I am a longtime Lovecraft fan.
But, it was a combination of not scary and incoherent. It played on one of those premises that I dislike when developed a certain way: "What if the writer isn't just writing fiction? What if his fiction starts to become... reality?" The horror writer in the movie, Sutter Cane, outsells even Stephen King (it is claimed). And, I recall a similar sort of premise in a book by Stephen King from 1989's "The Dark Half." In the King novel, the protagonist is a writer who kills off his "pen name" identity (a la Richard Bachman) who then supernaturally comes back to life and takes on an existence of his own, and causes all sorts of trouble. I never cared for this premise, it always seemed to me like one of those lame ideas that King picked up after already using a lot of good ones.
***SPOILERS***
In the "In the Mouth of Madness" movie, the Sutter Cane character is a horror writer who writes fiction that drives weaker minded people crazy and turns them into mass murderers and this turns into an epidemic that spreads across the country and even the world. And that's because, it turns out, he's not writing fiction, but is having all of this transmitted to him by "Great Old Ones" who are trying to re-enter our reality and people going insane has something to do with that, evidently. And as this ball gets rolling along, not only are people going insane, some of them are beginning to transform into tentacled, bloated, obscene horrors.
As described above, maybe it doesn't sound like that bad a premise, but perhaps it was the execution of it that wasn't done well. The special effects seemed rubbery and just not scary. There were too many hallucinations and jumbled scenes, too many "Boo! Gotcha!" moments. It all just seemed so ham-handed compared to earlier movies that I would call masterpieces -- "Halloween" and "The Thing." It's hard to believe they were the earlier efforts, and this was the later effort.
I could get a dim sense of another overall theme John Carpenter was after, which was "If enough people begin to believe something, doesn't that make it reality?" But somehow the movie didn't stay focused on that or really drive it home for me. I think that could be a scary premise in itself. Its religion, after all...
