Self-flattery masked as self-criticism. Readers of the horror novels of Sutter Cane ("You can forget about Stephen King. Cane outsells them all") are not, let us say, unaffected by them. And readers of his latest, not coincidentally called In the Mouth of Madness (soon to be a major motion picture), invariably turn into homicidal maniacs: the end of civilization as we know it. (Just what the moral watchdogs have been baying at us!) Before that can happen, an insurance-claims adjuster, in flashback, has to track down the missing novelist and his incomplete manuscript in the make-believe village of Hobb's End, somewhere in New Hampshire, more exactly the Twilight Zone. The drive down a country road at night attains a genuine spookiness, and the mutating painting in the hotel lobby has an M.R. Jamesian quality. These are outbalanced by cheap shocks and apocalyptic escalation. With Sam Neill, Julie Carmen, Jurgen Prochnow, Charlton Heston; directed by John Carpenter. (1995) — Duncan Shepherd
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