Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #10769 in DVD
• Released on: 2000-02-08
• Aspect ratio: 2.35:1
• Formats: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Colour, Dolby, DVD-Video, Full Screen, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 95 minutes

Amazon.co.uk Review
The mind-bending worlds of author H P Lovecraft have long interested horror directors but the films have rarely successfully captured his nightmarish mix of madness and mythology. John Carpenter's In the Mouth of Madness is not directly based on Lovecraft's work but screenwriter Michael De Luca draws his inspiration from Lovecraft's Cthulu mythology and then adds his own ingenious twists. John Trent (Sam Neill), an insurance investigator recently fitted for a straightjacket, tells his story to a psychiatrist. Hired to track down the missing pop-horror phenomenon Sutter Cane, a Stephen King-like author whose fans are literally mad for his books, Trent finds the supposedly fictional Hobb's End. He watches the town collapse into madness, murder and monstrous transformations: the fantastic horrors of Cane's novels played out in front of his eyes. "Reality isn't what it used to be", deadpans one zombie-like towns person. In fact, it is how Cane writes it--but is he Devil, dark oracle or simply a preacher in the service of an evil that grows stronger with every soul his books convert? The script never quite gets a grip on the blurry relationship between fact and fiction but those details fade in the face of Carpenter's demented imagery, shiver-inducing twists and dark wit. It's more eerie mind game than straight-out horror, a portrait of a world gone mad, and Carpenter relishes every hallucinatory moment. --Sean Axmaker

Customer Reviews

Lovecraft
Great underrated cosmic horror. This is possibly the closest anyone has got to filming Lovecraft's style and tone, even though it has a modern setting and a slghtly disappointing ending.

cheese slices anyone?
In an ongoing quest to find genuinely unnerving, scary horror films I found this film extremely irritating. Not because it was completely of the mark, but more because the potential of the opening quarter is completely unfulfilled by the latter direction of the film. The earlier scenes suggest `In the mouth of Madness' is going to be a competent albeit rather shallow horror film, based upon the fear of altered perception and the helpless claustrophobia it can induce. However immediately after the best scene in the film (the cyclist trapped for ever in a loop) the sense of fear and the overall atmosphere unravels into a state of comical foolishness. The monster effects have not aged well and just look silly, the acting is terrible and some times laugh-out-loud funny and the author of the insanity inducing novels (Sutta Kane is it?) is so over the top and cliched the horror element just disolves. I bought this film as some reviewers suggested it was Carpenters scariest work to date, in my opinion it is not, in fact to even suggest this film is in the same league as Carpenters `The Thing' is madness (in the mouth of....).

Carpenters best
This is my favourite John Carpenter film, possibly equalled by 'The Thing'.

Sam Neill is brilliant as a cynical insurance claims investigator, showing his gradual descent into madness as the normal world becomes consumed by the dark imagination of a highly popular horror author.

Inspiration for this film comes from the world of HP Lovecraft, and is in my opinion the most faithful adaptation of his work I have seen; it gives you that same unsettled feeling you get from reading Lovecraft's work.

This film poses interesting questions about the nature of reality, and is well worth a watch if you are after a horror with a bit more intelligence to it than your average slasher.