In the past year or so, I’ve become something of a fan of John Carpenter. I may not have liked all of his movies, but I’ve enjoyed enough of them to be generally satisfied by what I see. Among Carpenter’s filmography are a trio of movies he calls his “Apocalypse Trilogy”. The first was the superior The Thing. The second was the 1987 horror film Prince of Darkness which just so happened to be included in my Starz account.
The third, it should be noted, is In the Mouth of Madness, and I’ll probably get to that one eventually. It sounds the trippiest.
A priest (Donald Pleasence) invites a quantum physicist named Professor Birack (Victor Wong) to look into a cannister of mysterious green liquid found under a monastery in what looks like Los Angeles (where they filmed the movie), and I missed if they said that’s where the action takes place. Taking a group of academics in various scientific disciplines with him, Birack and the priest discover the fluid doesn’t behave the way fluid should. It almost seems to be alive, and it may be communicating with them. And what it’s saying isn’t very nice judging by the reoccurring dreams anyone who falls asleep in the monastery seems to have.
That isn’t the worst of it. Members of the group disappear only to come back seemingly possessed by the devil, and anyone who tries to leave the monastery is attacked and killed by a mob of homeless people standing around the building (that includes rocker Alice Cooper). All this may mean something awful and evil is coming, and if it gets there, it might mean the end of humanity.
The basic premise of this movie is rather fascinating. Carpenter was intrigued by quantum mechanics, so his characters posit that if every particle has its opposite, so does God. And the Devil was merely the son of the Anti-God, and Anti-God may be coming for all of creation.
This was one creepy movie. Granted, I’m not a fan of Carpenter’s form of electronic music in his soundtracks, but he sets up his rules, sticks to them, and maybe saves the day–as with The Thing, it isn’t clear whether or not the world is saved or not at the end of the movie–while using a cast of not particularly big name actors. Pleasence may be the biggest name in the cast, working with Carpenter again as the two did for Halloween while Wong and Dennis Dun worked with Carpenter on Big Trouble in Little China. Other than that, I didn’t see any faces I recognized from somewhere else (beyond Alice Cooper) and the main protagonist may have been TV actor Jameson Parker sporting the most 80s of 80s mustaches. And while the characters may not know exactly what’s going on at first, they aren’t dumb and know it can’t be good.
That’s where Carpenter’s plotting comes in handy. Outside is dangerous, so best to stay inside where at least there’s only a limited number of possessed people. They pop up where they need to, and not seemingly from nowhere. If anything, I didn’t really see why Parker’s Brian was quite so attached to the female lead played by Lisa Blount. The relationship didn’t really get much time to develop as we saw him ask her out, then them in bed together, and then later they went to the monastery. His reactions to her ultimate fate at the end of the movie didn’t match what we’d seen so far. That’s a minor quibble, and the movie over all is an entertaining bit of horror and quantum physics. It’s not as good as The Thing, but what is?
Grade: B
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