In The Mouth Of Madness

 An insidious force of pure evil oozes into our world, turning seemingly normal people into raving maniacs and slowly bringing society - and the world - down to its level. And if that sounds familiar, it's because... wait, what? no, I'm not talking about the US 2024 presidential elections. Although...

...No. We're here to talk movies, and I'm not going to let an orange pall fall over one of my favorites.

 It kicks off in high style, with footage of an industrial printing press putting together a Sutter Cane book together to a cheesy/awesome butt-rock theme by director John Carpenter and Jim Lang that is decently tied to the rhythms of the machinery on-screen. The book's called The Horror on Hobb's End, but it features a blurb on the back promoting something called In The Mouth Of Madness.

 We then cut to John Trent (Sam Neill) being roughly brought into a mental asylum; "Look, I'm sorry about the balls" is one of his first coherent lines (to an orderly he hurt while resisting being put in a cell). Later, the head doctor (John Glover, an actor I'm always happy to see pop up) pipes in a muzak version of We've Only Just Begun, which all the inmates start singing along to... poorly. "Not The Carpenters, too" moans Trent, with near-infinite weariness. I did not remember this movie was this damn funny.

 By the time a mysterious doctor (David Warner) arrives to try and find out what happened to Trent - and alludes to it maybe tying into something that's going on out in the world, Trent's been able to obsessively redecorate the padded walls of his cell (with one black crayon). Impressively, he's managed to draw crosses all over his face - a lazy signifier of "this guy is craaaaazy!", but I'll let it slide because Sam Neill pulls it off somehow. His character, as it turns out, has no interest in getting out of the nuthouse and facing whatever's happening outside, but he's happy to tell his story.

 And suddenly we jump back in time and see Trent at the height of his powers as a high-end private investigator hired by insurance companies to look into fraud. A publishing company (run by Charlton Heston!) hires him to look into the disappearance of their star author - one Sutter Cane (Jürgen Prochnow), the world's best selling horror author. His deal... sounds suspiciously similar to Stephen King (a buddy of Carpenter's), but no, he's explicitly said to be much, much more popular, his books so disturbing they've caused people to go insane.

 This ties to an earlier incident where Trent was attacked by an axe maniac... who happened to be Cane's agent. So his task is to somehow track down the missing author with the help of Cane's beautiful editor (Julie Carmen), whom Trent hits on almost immediately in the sleaziest way possible.

 Trent is very good at his job and soon figures out where the fictional town of Hobb's End is located on a real map. Convinced it's all some sort of publicity stunt, he takes off to visit it along with the editor. There they find the source of all the spooky weirdness they've been facing for weeks; Reality, it seems, is under siege from vast, incomprehensible horrors, and they're using Sutter's work as a conduit to reshape our universe to something more to their liking.

 It's a deeply trippy, conceptually daring movie, one of the very few effective portrayals of cosmic horror on film. It even manages to be scary at a few junctions, but the tone is a little to goofy most of the time for the scares to stick. Writer (and producer) Michael De Luca's dialog gives his characters an almost screwball patter even when they're discussing the end of the world: When a creepy Sutter fan confronts Trent early on, saying "He sees you" with blood coming from his eyes, Trent's response is a pithy "Oh... great. Uh... tell him I say hi."
 It doesn't do wonders for the film's horror ambiance, but it displays a fair amount of wit and is hugely entertaining. It does grate at points - like the cavalier way Trent shrugs off an attempt on his life that leaves the attacker dead early on, but for the most part it works. Neill is an excellent actor, and I don't think he's ever been better than here; His transition from a smug, worldly know-it-all to an unhinged believer is a sight to behold. But it's Julie Carmen who actually sells the horror of the film; She's the one bright enough to recognize what's happening early on - a gradual shift in consensual reality, from our hands into the hands of something... other - and she communicates it powerfully.

 (Incidentally, I've been meaning to re-watch Prince of Darkness for ages, which seems like a lesser, but more serious companion piece to this movie - Alice Cooper impaling some dude with a bicycle notwithstanding)

 Carpenter is a true master of multiple genres - conventions he introduced on Halloween, The Thing and Escape From New York are still being studiously reproduced to this day, and The Fog remains an incredibly well constructed bit of pulp horror. This one's a bit sloppier, a lot goofier and relaxed, but it's full of seriously cool stuff: Dreams within dreams, a kindly innkeeper with a dark secret, and some neat reality bending stunts (one scene, foreshadowed by Trent tearing off pieces of a poster throughout the movie, is an all-timer, while another one demonstrates that sometimes a humble color filter can be the everything you could possibly need).

 Not all of it works - some business with an extremely shitty painting keeps rearing up (the punchline is pretty good, though) and, for a movie that paraphrases Lovecraft all the time (what we see of Sutter Cane's work owes a lot more to him than to King), it makes the near-fatal error of actually showing The Things That Should Not Be. The FX crew, led by the dream team of Greg Nicotero, Howard Berger and Rob Kurtzman does not manage to pull that off. But their results are hugely entertaining anyhow, just like the rest of the movie.

 And it ends in a perfect metafictional moment, handily illustrating that sometimes laughter is the only sane response when everything goes batshit crazy. Very apposite, given -ahem- certain very recent election results... not that it helps that much.

 Here's something crazy: a movie this good is only Carpenter's fourth or fifth best. The guy's a legend.