In the Mouth of Madness

While searching Netflix for a horror movie that might have slipped under my radar, I stumbled across In the Mouth of Madness.  The film was directed by John Carpenter, who I occasionally enjoy, and was released in 1995, right around the time when he made the silly but enjoyable Escape From LA and the James Woods-ian Vampires.  A director I enjoy in the midst of a film stretch I like?  That sounds like a reasonable bet.

In the Mouth of Madness begins with John Trent (Sam Neill) being taken to an asylum, where an inquisitive doctor (David Warner) asks to hear his tale.  This doctor also comments on how clever Trent is to cover himself and his cell in black crayon crosses; it's almost like he wants to stay in the psych ward.

He doesn't look crazy at all, does he?

The rest of the story is told in an extended flashback.  Trent is an insurance investigator that has a talent for sniffing out fraud.  He is hired by a literary publisher (Charlton Heston) to find his missing golden goose, the ridiculously successful fantasy/horror author Sutter Cane (Jürgen Prochnow).  Cane has disappeared just before turning in what promises to be his most successful (and, perhaps, final) script.  Trent, along with Cane's editor, Linda (Julie Carmen), begins to investigate.  At first, the investigation seems to go nowhere.  Trent can't see any angle to explain Cane's disappearance if the publisher is legitimately worried about its author.  Things start to fall into place as Trent begins to read some of Cane's work; it appears to be a blend of H.P. Lovecraft themes with a little Stephen King mixed in.  While engrossed in the books, Trent begins to experience symptoms that many Cane readers also suffer: hallucinations, lost time, and difficulty identifying reality.

Things only get more surreal when Trent has an epiphany; through a laughably convoluted scenario, Trent comes to the conclusion that Sutter Cane is hiding in a hidden town that is named after the fictional setting for his stories.  Oddly enough, Trent appears to be right; but is the town based on the fiction, or are the books based on the town?

The acting in In the Mouth of Madness is a little odd.  I like Sam Neill just fine, although I occasionally questioned his accent.  The rest of the cast, though...I'm less sure of.  Julie Carmen doesn't seem to match the script very well, playing a pretty boring character, even when things take a turn to the fantastic.  Jürgen Prochnow does his best to play up to the maniacal gatekeeper his character is written as, but it's a surprisingly non-sinister role that could have used more depth.  Also, his hair was distracting.

Evil is sometimes fluffy

David Warner was wasted in a role that amounted to little more than a cameo.  Ditto for John Glover.  If you have a sharp eye, you can spot the film debut of Hayden Christensen, although his part consists of a kid who thinks Neill is acting weird.

The obvious successor to Jake Lloyd

This is the third and final chapter in what John Carpenter refers to as his Apocalypse Trilogy; as far as I can tell, they are unrelated  except for the depressing endings (the other two are The Thing and Prince of Darkness).  The more I see of Carpenter's work, the more I appreciate him.  That's not to say that the man doesn't disappoint from time to time, but he is consistent in his own way.  For instance, In the Mouth of Madness is yet another plot-driven film with a largely unimpressive cast and some solid special effects.  One of the downsides to this film is that Carpenter chooses to only give glimpses of the underlying horror in the movie, instead of glorifying in it, like he does in The Thing.

Take a good look, because this is all you get

My problem with In the Mouth of Madness is with the story.  For starters, I don't particularly enjoy metafiction; I think it is usually used by less talented writers to disguise the depth of bad scripts.  This movie didn't change my opinion.  The fact that it is mentioned early and often that Sutter Cane's fans frequently believe that his fictional world is reality makes it a foregone conclusion that In the Mouth of Madness will eventually get to the question of "What is reality?"  That's a respectable theme, but John Carpenter isn't the director for it, and this isn't the script to explore it with.  There isn't a twist.  You see the basic developments miles away, and that negates the alleged cleverness of the concept.

There are some good little moments here and there --- the makeup is good (when glimpsed) and I thought the insane asylum Carpenters (the band) joke was hilarious --- but there's just so much clumsiness.  For instance, Trent concludes that Sutter Cane is in New Hampshire by noticing a common red line on all of Cane's paperback covers; if you arrange the red lines just right, they make the outline of New Hampshire.  First of all, what makes someone look at a tiny snippet of a line and think, "Hey, that looks Hampshirian!"  Second, how many other shapes could have been made, using the images on those book covers?  Honestly, I don't care to know the answer.  This isn't an awful film, but it sets the bar high and doesn't come close to meeting it.  I'll give it credit for ambition, but the execution simply isn't there.

While researching this film, I stumbled across a blog that featured art for Criterion Collection DVD covers for movies that haven't been selected for the Criterion Collection yet.  Does In the Mouth of Madness deserve the Crtierion treatment?  Definitely not.  Still, this is a pretty cool cover.

Dune

Have you ever heard of Alan Smithee?  For a little over thirty years, it was the credit given to directors that wanted to disavow their work in a particular film due to the final version of the film not meeting their creative vision.  In other words, if the star or studio re-cut the movie, the director could protest by crediting the work to Smithee.  It's happened many times over the years, and Eric Idle made a terrible movie that joked about the process, so you may have heard of Smithee by now.  What I didn't know until I researched it for two or three minutes (I love the internet!) was that directors sometimes requested a Smithee credit for re-edited versions of their movies, like those shown in airplanes or on television.  Why do I bring this up?  I knew that one of the many versions of Dune that was aired on television had David Lynch's name removed from both the directing and writing credits.  While I haven't seen the Smithee version of the film (also known as the "Extended Version" on DVD), it can't be much worse than this approved version.

Dune is a high-concept science fiction yarn based on the excellent book of the same name by Frank Herbert.  Dune tackles a lot of serious themes and has an intricate plot that was thought, for many years, to be unworkable as a movie, and they may have been right.  This is a movie that delves into politics on a grand scale, ecology, Zen Buddhism, and revolution, all in two-and-a-half hours.  If that seems like a long movie, you're right.  It's still not enough time to develop all of those concepts simultaneously.  On the bright side, the movie soundtrack was done by Toto! They rawk!

Okay, now a quick quiz... What's the best part of this video?
A) The sweatbands on the keyboardist's wrists.
B) The singer finding Africa: The Book! and giving himself a satisfied nod.
C) The band singing a song allegedly about Africa and the video taking place on a large book.
D) That it manages to devalue an entire continent (54 countries!) in under five minutes.

The film begins with Princess Irulan (Virginia Madsen) explaining the state of the universe to the camera.  In the distant future, the universe is ruled by Padishah Emperor Shaddam IV (Jose Ferrer) and the most valuable resource in the universe is the spice melange.  Melange is kind of like a cosmic LSD, only useful; it expands the mind, prolongs the user's life, and is essential to space travel.  The Spacing Guild's Navigators use the drug to see the future and fold space, which makes space travel faster and safer.  The problem with melange is that is only grows on one stinking planet, Arrakis AKA Dune.  With this explanation, the Princess is not seen again until the last ten minutes of the film, where she might not have had any dialogue.

Are you with me so far?  Well, in an effort to smash a political rival, Emperor Shaddam is giving control of Arrakis to, um, his rival, Duke Leto Atreides (Jurgen Prochnow).  That doesn't make much sense, does it?  Well, the Emperor is arranging to have the Atreides' longtime rival, the Harkonnens, ambush Atriedes on Arrakis.  When the Spacing Guild's Navigators foresee these events, they demand that the Emperor kill not only Duke Leo, but also his son, Paul (Kyle MacLachlan).  These future-seers think that Paul is a danger to their melange supply.  So, the Emperor agrees to off the kid.  And with that, we are about five minutes into the movie!

From here on out, things pretty much fall into place.  The Atreides go to Arrakis and they get ambushed.  Paul and his mother escape into the desert and encounter the native Fremen, who manage to live in the desert and have learned how to live with the incredibly destructive sand worms that are a danger to everybody else.  But why should the Fremen help these strangers?  And, even if Paul and his mother get help, what is next for them?  Revenge?  That seems a little petty.  How about a step toward universal domination via guns that are powered by special words?  That seems a little ridiculous.  It's a little of both.

Legend has it that David Lynch's final script called for this film to be a little over three hours long, but the movie studio forced it to be whittled down to a trim two-and-a-quarter hours.  I cannot find a way to suitably express my condolences to anyone who had to watch a three-hour version of this movie.  Two hours was all I could take, and that is only because I stopped questioning the plot.  This movie positively drags.  Well over half of the movie is pure exposition, with the ambush of the Atreides serving as a mid-movie huge action scene.  The odd thing about that battle is that very little of it is shown.  Then there is more exposition, and a whole boatload of weird stuff shoved into the last half hour.

The biggest problem I have with this film is its use of voice-overs.  Sometimes, they are used to explain plot.  Sometimes, they seem to indicate telepathy.  Whatever.  They are all just awful.  I don't need to hear Kyle MacLachlan's voice explaining more than his dialogue does --- I need the scenes to explain the plot, instead.  Voice-overs that explain plot are a lazy, cut-corner trick to salvage a movie that has become too expensive to re-shoot scenes, and the fact that this movie is full of them should indicate the quality of the movie.

Speaking of Kyle, I have to admit that I am not a big fan of his work.  He's actually not too bad here, but the things that the script forces his to say often sound really, really stupid.  Do you remember the Fatboy Slim song, "Weapon of Choice?"  It borrows one of Kyle's lines: "If we walk without rhythm, we won't attract the worm;" of course, Kyle then proceeds to walk normally.  Actually, I don't particularly dislike any of the actors in this film, with the possible exception of Kenneth McMillan who, as the evil Harkonnen leader, couldn't have been more comically evil if he had a six-pound handlebar mustache to twirl.  Brad Douriff, Sean Young, Linda Hunt, Freddie Jones, Richard Jordan, Dean Stockwell, Max von Sydow, and the already mentioned Jurgen Prochnow all played their small roles capably.  They looked and sounded silly doing so, but they took their jobs seriously and did the best they could in difficult circumstances.  Patrick Stewart has a small role in the film, too, but the aspect of his performance that struck me the most was the fact that he apparently grew a skullet as the movie progressed.  I can't say that I was particularly pleased by the young Alicia Witt (in her film debut) and her bizarre voice, but her character was pretty weird and the voice may have been changed in post-production.  Now, Sting gets a lot of attention on the various DVD covers for this film, and I'm not sure why.  Maybe because of this:

Umm...is that a bird...servicing him?

Whatever the case, Sting gets to overact and has an anticlimactic fight scene with Kyle.  I would critique his work, but I can't look at those weird fiberglass undies and keep a serious thought in my head.

So, at least the acting's not bad.  There's no great work, but it all fits the film.  For this movie to even come close to succeeding, though, it needs to look awesome.  As George Lucas has shown, if your movie is visually spectacular, nobody cares about the plot.  Sadly, Dune couldn't get that right, even with a large budget.  Problem #1: the stillsuit.

It's like they have Hitler 'staches, with a left sideburn connection

Everyone on Arrakis has to wear these things to survive; they recycle your body's moisture and fluids to prevent dehydration on the desert planet.  Unfortunately, that means that everybody spends substantial time wearing nose plugs.
Problem #2: the special effects looked bad, even by 1984 standards.

An actual frame from the movie.  No joke.

In the beginning of the movie, young Paul turns on his "bodyshield" for a sparring match; it is blocky, sometimes opaque, and it made Star Wars-inspired noises.  Awful.  Thankfully, this suit is never seen again after the half-hour mark.  The sets in general looked cheap, the costumes were lame, and the special effects were often not done to scale; when you see a human and a worm in the same frame, it's hard to tell how close they are supposed to be to each other.  For being a science fiction epic tale, there is surprisingly little imagination or innovation in the visual effects.
Problem #3: the story is damn near incomprehensible.

An actual page of script from Dune

I read several Dune books as a young whipper-snapper, and I was clueless when watching the movie.  I can only pity someone who approaches this movie out of pure curiosity or, worse, a devotion to David Lynch.  I choose my words carefully here, because I want there to be no misunderstanding: this movie is confusing, even by David Lynch standards.  That's right; it is easier to decode his movies where actors switch characters in the middle of the film than to follow this plot.

I'm not even going to go into Lynch's direction, except to say that this film looks awful, and that's usually his strong point.  Did you know that Lynch was considered as a director for Return of the Jedi?  He opted to make this mess instead.  I suppose that's a good thing, because his fondness for strange dwarf characters would only have lead to some bizarre scenes with the Ewoks.

The one good thing I can say about this movie is that it approaches the source material with respect.  The final product may resemble the diarrhea of someone who digested the book, but the intent to honor it was there.  I don't even want to blame anyone in particular for this monstrosity.  I just want to forget about it.

House of the Dead

Movies that are based on video games are not usually very good.  Double Dragon?  Super Mario Bros?  Street Fighter?  These are movies that make you shake with self-loathing after watching them, because you know you would have enjoyed yourself more if you had just sat in a bathtub filled with butterscotch pudding and ate raw bacon all day.  Again.  House of the Dead makes those movie watching experiences seem like viewing Citizen Kane while getting a body massage.

The first clue that this movie will unabashedly suck?  Clint Howard gets third billing.  Yeah.  This guy:

When you make Ron Howard look like a Chippendale's dancer by comparison, you know you're ugly.  Well, let's not pick on a guy for being less than pretty.  Ugly people often make positive contributions to society, right?  Ron Perlman and Willem Dafoe are good examples of this.  Maybe Clint will turn in a surprise break-out supporting role in this movie.  Let's see...Clint's costume is a Gordon's fisherman outfit with a hook hand.  Not a good sign.

Maybe the story is better.  It takes place off the coast of Oregon on the Isla de Muerte, which translates into "Island of the Dead."  Apparently, this is an educational film, because I didn't know that the Spanish had ever colonized, named, or even visited any part of the Pacific Northwest.  No wonder the British could never find the Isla de Muerte in Pirates of the Caribbean --- they were looking in the wrong ocean!  A group of roughly college-age kids are trying to get the the Island of the Dead for a rave.  Unfortunately, they missed the last boat leaving for the island and are forced to charter a boat (the one that Clint Howard works on) owned by Victor Kirk (Jurgen Prochnow); yes, that means that he is called Captain Kirk, and yes, the script notices that hilarious joke.  The boat gets them to the rave a little late, but it is still daylight, which makes me wonder how awesome this rave was if it was outdoors and started around lunchtime.  Aren't raves supposed to have deafening levels of music and trippy light shows?  How does that translate well into an island setting?  I guess I'm just not a raver.  The kids show up to the rave site, only to find it absolutely deserted, with a lot of the tents and equipment knocked over.  How you respond to a deserted party where many people went to great lengths to attend indicates the type of person you are.  Do you...

• A) look around and conclude that the party doesn't start until you walk in!
• B) say, "He-e-e-y, Scoob, looks like we got a mystery on our hands!" 
• C) decide that, despite the total lack of blood, that something very wrong has happened here and needs investigating!
• D) thank God that there is still lots of beer left in the kegs!
• E) go home as fast as you can, THE END.

Well...?  What kind of person are you?  Here's the answer key: (A) - a mangy, scabby whore and/or a Marmaduke fan (B) - a typical stoner and/or Casey Kasem (C) - a horror movie idiot and/or an insurance liability (D) - alcoholic and/or a frequent user of the term "Dude" (E) - a survivor.  The only correct answer is E, but this group splits between C and D.    Stupid rave kids.  

Some of them opt to wander around the island in the dark (because it got dark all of a sudden), while some decide to stay behind and have sex in a random tent.  Not to be overly prudish, but isn't that kind of what got Goldilocks in trouble?  "Somebody's been sleeping in my bed and...eeewww!!!"  In accordance with the Horror Movie Ethics Code of 1978, those lusty young adults that partake in premarital sex and/or abuse drugs are the first to die, so zombie-ish creatures attack the tent-sex girl and drag her body away, while the tent-sex guy is off peeing in the woods.  I wonder if the National Park Service has statistics for how often peeing on trees saves lives.  As this is happening, the others find a shack in the woods and decide to check it out.  After all, is there anything more inviting at night in an unfamiliar place than a dilapidated shack?  Or maybe this the titular House of the Dead?  Actually, no.  It's the place where the remaining original ravers took refuge, including the main character.  That's right...the main character has not even made an appearance in the movie so far.  The only reason you know it's the main character is because he delivered an ominous monologue (in the past and present tense) at the beginning of the film and gave brief insights into the other characters, so the script didn't have to waste time developing them.  Anyway, these ravers explain that zombies attacked the rave (killing future television actress Erica Durance) and suggest leaving the island on Captain Kirk's boat.  The rest of the movie has the kids trying to leave the island and fighting the zombies.


Obviously, this is a movie where several normal people try to kill zombies to save their own lives.  How can that possibly go wrong?  Well, for starters, you need cool zombies.  The zombies in House of the Dead are not your typical zombies.  They switch between the shuffling, moaning, classic movie zombies and the running zombies of 28 Days Later.  Oh, and then there are the water zombies.  Apparently, some zombies just spend their freetime just chillin' in the water by the island's only dock, waiting for some suckers to try and leave by boat.  Or, maybe all the zombies go to the dock to wash up after a messy kill.  That would explain the complete lack of blood anywhere on the island after the zombies attack.  That prissiness would also explain why the zombies seem to die, no matter where you shoot, punch or kick them.  This is a rare zombie movie where the headshot is hard to find.  I can't remember any, but sometimes I lose my short term memory after a trauma like this.


So the zombies aren't classic zombies, or even remotely cool.  This is based on a video game, so action is the key.  So how is the action?  It sucks.  Sucks.  It sucks worse than a kid that had a Novocaine shot to the lips and then tried to drink a thick milkshake through a coffee stirrer.  I would like to pause and congratulate myself for a great "sucking" analogy that was not vulgar; that brings my score up to Brian: 1, Rest of the World: presumably several million.  Here's a hint to the quality of this movie's action: despite dozens of explosions, the same result is seen every time --- some dude flying through the air in front of the explosion, flailing his arms.  And yet, the majority of the budget was clearly spent on the action.  Well, at least a few key scenes.  You will notice a few shots that suddenly jump into a low-rent version of The Matrix's bullet time, where everything freezes around an actor and the camera does a quick 360-degree spin around them.  That might sound totally awesome, but that's because I'm a damn poet; it is random, pointless, and doesn't even look that good.  And if you just couldn't get enough of those bullet time shots, don't worry --- when characters die, their character has another bullet time 360 spin, but this time, they aren't shooting zombies and just look sad.  Aww.


If you decide against following my (and probably your doctor's) advice and watch this movie, you might notice some symptoms of hallucination.  Don't worry.  Those two-to-three second jarring interruptions to your concentration are not actually your brain trying to punish you for watching this movie.  That will come later.  No, those interruptions to the film are actually snippets of somebody playing the House of the Dead arcade game.  The snippets do not have a direct correlation to anything in the movie; the environment and action in the game is completely independent of that in the film.  I would like to point out that the game footage includes instructions for a second player to insert quarters and press start to play.  I realize that this movie had a small budget, but a second player would have cost maybe five bucks.  It's not like they bought the arcade console; they probably just took a video camera down to Dave & Buster's.  Five dollars.  That's all it takes to make a crappy idea to insert video game footage in a movie look like it's not a cheap crappy idea to insert video game footage in a movie.


Sadly, one of the most redeeming features for this movie comes as bonus material with the DVD case.  The DVD insert has a character breakdown page, listing each character's position within the group (leader, scout, etc.) and their weapon of choice.  Hilariously, the brains of the group (according to the insert) is described as a moron by the main character.  Oh, and I'm pretty sure several of the weapons of choice aren't used by those characters in the movie.


That is the highlight of the movie for me, and it's not even a part of the movie.  How did this celluloid abomination get made, you ask?  Thank the Germans.  There is (or at least, there was in 2003) a law that allowed Germans to finance movies as a tax write-off; if the movies made money, then the investors had to pay tax on the profits, bu if it tanked, they got the entire investment written off.  Uwe Boll, you are a terrible director, but a brilliant man.  But this...this is a bad, bad, bad movie.  It's not even funny-bad.  This is, without a doubt in my mind, the most poorly made movie in the past decade to have widespread theatrical release.  Please.  Don't watch it.