What if YOU were nothing but a fictional character?  What if YOU were simply a figment of an author's imagination?  What if reality, as you know it, ceased to exist?  What if you were the creation of Sutter Cane?  This is the premise for John Carpenter's 1995 classic, In The Mouth of Madness.  "Do you read Sutter Cane?"

Sam Neill stars as John Trent, a freelance insurance fraud investigator.  Trent is the best in the business, and has just debunked an insurance claim for his friend and colleague, Robbie (Bernie Casey).  After his job is done, Robbie wants Trent to investigate an insurance claim that has to do with the disappearance of best-selling horror novelist, Sutter Cane (Jürgen Prochnow).  Though, their meeting is cut short by an axe weilding maniac with a very bizarre look in his eyes.  This maniac nearly kills Trent, and in a few moments, we discover that this maniac was actually Sutter Cane's agent!  Trent learns this during his meeting with Jackson Harglow (Charlton Heston), the head man of the company who publishes Cane's books.  Harglow explains that Cane disappeared a few months ago without a trace, and the only one to have viewed any part of his newest novel, In The Mouth of Madness, was his axe weilding agent.  Harglow introduces Cane's editor, Linda Styles (Julie Carmen), to Trent.  She says that Cane's work outsells everyone, and that his writing tends to have a strange impact on its readers.  With the masses clamouring for Cane's next novel, Harglow is deseperate to find Cane, and more importantly, the complete manuscript for the novel.

Grounded in reality, Trent believes this is all some elaborate publicity stunt by Harglow, and even concocts his own theory of it all.  Trent reads through all of Cane's novels, and even he can't deny that there is an uncanny and disturbing, realistic element to it all.  Following a map created from Cane's own cover artwork, Trent takes off with Styles to find the supposed fictional town of Hobb's End, New Hampshire.  But slowly, reality begins to come undone as Sutter Cane starts to take control.  The pair strangely arrive in Hobb's End, and from the get-go, slight strange occurrences seem to plague this town.  No matter how much Styles tries to sway Trent's perspective of everything going on around them, he stands strong in what he believes to be real.  Eventually, they find Cane, but to their horror, he has tapped into an ungodly power.  Pages from Cane's books start coming to life in the most horrific ways.  Cane says that more people believe in his work than the Holy Bible, and poses the question of what would happen if the world believed in his work so much that it became reality?  "God's not supposed to be a hack horror writer," says Trent.  Soon, space and time become lost concepts to Trent because no matter how far he runs, no matter where he goes, no matter what he tries to do to stop Cane's horrific plan, he is still trapped in a reality controlled by Cane.  Will this unraveling of reality around John Trent drive him straight into the mouth of madness?

I haveto say, first off, that this may feature one of Carpenter's very best main title themes!  Carpenter teams with Jim Lang to produce a fantastic score, and a very blusey, yet extremely catchy main title theme.  If you like Carpenter's score for Vampires, this theme will be right up there with it!  To re-enforce this, I have legally downloaded the entire score CD from Emusic.com!  Carpenter really kicks off this film right with this opening credits sequence, and really sets a great tone for the whole film.  Now, this final installment in John Carpenter's "Apocalypse Trilogy" (which also consists of The Thing and Prince of Darkness) features a fantastic cast!  On top of Sam Neill (Jurassic Park / Event Horizon), Jürgen Prochnow (Beverly Hills Cop II), and Charlton Heston (Planet of the Apes), you've got the great character actors in David Warner and one of my personal favorites, John Glover.  Warner starred in the late 80's horror classic, Waxwork, has had several parts in the Star Trek film & television franchises, had parts in the two Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles feature film sequels, a small part in Scream 2, and worked previously with Carpenter on the anthology TV movie Body Bags.  John Glover you may know from the 1999 Mel Gibson revenge actioneer Payback, as the Devil on the short-lived FOX series Brimstone, from Gremlins 2, or more recently, his role as Lionel Luthor on Smallville.  And both have employed their voices for the 90's Batman animated series.  It's just a stellar cast that I think only Carpenter could cull together.  I mean, he even got Vigo (Wilhelm von Homburg) from Ghostbusters II!  And all of these actors put in great performances, and Julie Carmen (Fright Night, Part II) is no exception either!  Sam Neill puts in a superb performance as he always does, and grounds Trent well into the bounds of reality.  Even when a normal person would've given into some form of dementia, Trent continues to weed out the con, and Neill makes it truly convincing.  He fits right into the character, and knows the character.  Knows his reasoning, and understands how the character's mind works.  He's so dead set on finding some level of a con in all that's going on around him that to give into the illusion around him is not a possiblity.  But when Trent eventually does go past the brink of sanity, he sells it well, but not by playing it as a crazy, but as a prophet of doom.  He knows the inevitable truth, can do what he wants to stop it, but knows that it's all a futile effort - the world is going mad, the end is near.

Some say John Carpenter had lost his style and talent by the 90's, and there ARE examples of that, but this is not one of them.  He directs and shoots this film as well as Escape From New York, The Thing, or even Halloween.  Carpenter really entrenches you in the world of Sutter Cane, and presents Cane as the imposing, frighteningly powerful figure he's been built up to.  The cinematography by Gary B. Kibbe is fantastic here, and fits well with Carpenter's style.  It allows for dramatic tension and certainly conveys the entire 'unraveling of reality' element that builds through the entire film.  This is one of John Carpenter's best films ever, and it's only a shame that it doesn't get as greatly noticed or appreciated as it deserves to be!  The only detractor I find are the 'unspeakable abominations' that are unleashed from 'the other side' late in the film.  Not to say anything bad about the usually fantastic makeup and creature effects of KNB EFX Group, but it may have played a little better if we never actually saw these creatures.  Keep them hidden, and left in shadow.  I just think that unspeakable abominations are better left to the imagination of the audience.  They just don't sell well with me here, but their sequence is a minute long, at most, and only in quick cuts.  So, it's nothing to ruin the film for you.  I could say that that's the only thing that keeps me from giving In The Mouth of Madness a full-on 10 mark, but I just can't let that hold me back from doing so!  This is far too exceptional and frightening of a film to have such a minor thing like that overshadow it.

In the 90's, John Carpenter hit some duds: Village of the Damned, Memoirs of an Invisible Man, and eventually, Ghosts of Mars in 2000.  But In The Mouth of Madness is, without a doubt, a Carpenter classic, and is as deserving of all the praise as his other classics.  He weaves a story that is strong with setting up characters, a reality, a plot, and then, slowly deconstructing it piece by piece.  What remains in the end is madness, and a thought-provoking, but still entertaining horror movie.  There are images within that will disturb you, and make you cringe.  One of the main influences for much of the film was the works of H.P. Lovecraft, and I have read a good deal of The Shadow Over Innsmouth, and the imagery and feel of this film truly conveys much of what Lovecraft expressed in his work.  Thank KNB EFX Group for creating such dead-on creations that really hold to that influence, and once again, we end the film with the same kick ass main title riff!  Truly a Carpenter classic, in every sense.  DO NOT overlook this one!  Finally, I can't overlook Michael De Luca's fantastic script, and I give him monstrous praise for the imagination it took to conjure together such a well-woven story of surrealism.  Also, check out TheOfficialJohnCarpenter.com for some great multimedia and artwork from the film (including the Sutter Cane book cover artwork)!