Horror flick fails to deliver on promise

By LARA HYDE
Collegian Arts Writer

Picture a world where the frame of reference is reversed. Insanity becomes the norm and the works of a horror writer who sells more books than Stephen King become the Bible of a new world. All who read his books go insane and if a person doesn't read the book, she or he can always catch the movie. In the Mouth of Madness looked promising, but fell short of that interesting premise.

With such an intriguing story line, the film should be a thrilling cranial challenge. Instead it is doomed to suffer bad acting -- the true horror of this horror film.

Sam Neill, protagonist/insurance investigator, does a particularly poor job. His idea of acting is chain smoking and going around with the same squinty-eyed, cynical look on his face, saying "This can't be real." Apparently that's all it takes to act in a film in today, and it's really pathetic. What's even more pathetic is he got paid for his lousy performance.

Although believability is not a prerequisite for Hollywood fare, Neill goes as far as to be irritating. Audiences may begin to hope that he'll get a chainsaw right through his thick skull.

Then there are other characters that are just as poorly developed. The female book company liason, played by Julie Carmen, follows Neill's lead by hopping on the train to irritating-performance land. All of her lines come off sounding contrived and disjointed. It's actually a relief when the evil takes her over and mostly out of the film.

The weakness of the movie's flow adds to the poor acting to make for overall disappointment. Neill spends the longest time driving in circles so that not only does the audience get a little tired of it, but the whole time passage issue becomes a confusing point. Maybe this was meant to create an impression of Neill's and the world's developing insanity, but all it created was one big headache.

The film borrowed heavily from Stephen King films, but it did so in a poor way by not using the ideas to their full potential. There was a lot of corn and evil children right out of King's Children of the Corn and the premise of a writer's words coming true was borrowed from, among other films, King's The Dark Half.

The ending of the film is possibly it's biggest weakness -- providing no resolution, just an abrupt halt to the action. It probably could have been cut altogether and nothing meaningful would have been lost.

In the Mouth of Madness has one redeeming value as being a thinking film. The whole question of whether or not reality and sanity are based on frame of reference was intriguing. The idea that popular novelists will one day replace religion with their fictional worlds was thought provoking. But such ideas were just paid lip service. Bad acting and weak flow made what should have been a remarkable film into a tedious flick to sit through.