Product Description

A best-selling authors newest novel is literally driving readers insane. When the author inexplicably vanishes a special investigator hired to track him down crosses the barrier between fact and fiction and enters a terrifying world from which there is no escape. Special features: eng. Subitles & more Studio: New Line Home Video Release Date: 09/26/2006 Starring: Sam Neill Charlton Heston Run time: 95 minutes Rating: R Director: John Carpenter

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #25701 in DVD
• Brand: NEW Line Home Video
• Published on: 2000-02-01
• Released on: 2000-02-08
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 2.35:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Formats: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DVD, Full Screen, Widescreen, NTSC
• Subtitled in: English
• Dimensions: .0" h x .0" w x .0" l, .0 pounds
• Running time: 95 minutes

Amazon.com
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 phenomena Sutter Cane, a Stephen King-like author whose fans are literally made 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 zombielike townsperson. 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

DVD features
The DVD offers both widescreen and pan-and-scan editions of the film--like all of Carpenter's films, this is shot in CinemaScope, so widescreen is a must--and commentary by Carpenter and cinematographer Guy Kibee that fills every second of the audio track with observations, technical information, and production stories. --Sean Axmaker

From The New Yorker
John Carpenter's return to his favored terrain, the horror movie, is only a partial success-an awkward mix of the creepy and the silly. Sam Neill plays an investigator sent to find a man named Sutter Cane, the author from hell. Cane's junk novels sell by the million and drive his readers mad; half the population, apparently, is coming apart at the seams. It's a fine, provocative topic, fringed with Carpenter's political exasperation: any country that can go ape over a cheap potboiler-or a cheap politician-has got serious problems. But the outcome is nowhere near as cool, or as solidly scary, as his best work. (And Julie Carmen, as Neill's sidekick, is no Adrienne Barbeau.) Once the film tries to suggest that everything is happening inside Cane's imagination, it loses steam; Carpenter is surely not the man to tell us that fantasy is stronger than fact. What about the weirdo in the white mask coming up the stairs in "Halloween"? He looked pretty real. -Anthony Lane
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker