Ben Gilbert Movies
Hired to help locate a missing author, an insurance investigator discovers to his terror that the nightmarish events depicted in the writer's best-selling horror novels are coming true. Wishing to be both a horror film and a parody of the genre, John Carpenter's In the Mouth of Madness combines supernatural thrills with winking references. For instance, the vanished author, Sutter Cane (Jürgen Prochnow), is modeled on writers like Stephen King and Howard Phillips Lovecraft, from his great popularity to his obsession with small-town New England. Indeed, it is to one such hamlet that investigator John Trent (Sam Neill) and Cane's female editor (Julie Carmen) travel, discovering a town filled with terrifying scenes right out of Cane's books, from random axe murders to far worse. Have Cane's fans gone psychotic and begun imitating his writings, or are Cane's stories of an otherworldly evil invading the earth actually true? In the Mouth of Madness's mix of self-referential satire and real frights anticipates the later Scream (1996). ~ Judd Blaise, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Sam Neill, Julie Carmen, (more)
- 1984
In this stock, low-budget occult horror film, a tiny 2-inch-high Aztecan idol is stolen from a professor and ends up in the experimental hands of three high-school students who use it in some creative attempts to get in touch with the spirit world. Things start to go wrong when a cemetery worker dies during one of these spirit sessions, and everything goes wrong after the Aztecan god possesses the body of a young man who steals the idol for his own purposes. Special effects create the appropriate flying objects and body bulges where needed, and makeup is grotesque enough by anyone's standards, but these pluses cannot erase the lack of interesting characters or situations or the uninspired acting. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Susan Stokey, Warren Lincoln, (more)
