In the Mouth of Madness (1995)

I Think, Therefore You Are.

Remember my October Horrorthons?  Of course you don’t!  Why would you?  I apparently don’t.  Around the time I was reviewing horror movies for this Horrorthon, a movie review was requested of me by friend of the reviews Kendra that I never got around to.  And then it never really felt like a good time to review a horror movie because it was no longer October.  She probably forgot that she requested it.  I know that I forgot about it for a while.  But then it popped back into my head and I realized that I should not try to wait until October to knock this one out.  Let’s do this!  The movie is In the Mouth of Madness, written by Michael De Luca, directed by John Carpenter, and starring Sam Neill, Jürgen Prochnow, Julie Carmen, David Warner, Charlton Heston, John Glover, Frances Bay, Wilhelm von Homburg, and Bernie Casey.

John Trent (Sam Neill) is a patient in a Looney bin that recounts his story to Dr. Wrenn (David Warner).  Trent worked as an insurance investigator who is hired by the director of Arcane Publishing, Jackson Harglow (Charlton Heston), to locate popular horror novelist Sutter Cane (Jürgen Prochnow).  At first, Trent is not interested.  But he then inexplicably decides to buy all of his books and read them, giving himself nightmares.  And that is exactly the reason that any rational person would take up the case!  Also, he cut up the covers of the books and found a map that only people in this movie can read because it just looked like a collection of various book covers to me.  Anyway, it leads Trent and Linda Styles (Julie Carmen), editor of Cane’s books, to a town that doesn’t exist called Hobb’s End – the place where Calvin’s tiger died – where they find that Cane’s books are coming to life.

Uh … why did I watch this?  I don’t say that because this movie was “bad” per se, but I don’t really understand how this movie became requested.  The movie feels like it intends to be deep and psychologically scary, but was really only a slight step up from a regular “gore and makeup” horror movie.  I started thinking negatively of this movie right in the beginning as the movie opens with the most 80’s, Karate Kid-style rock music.  What have I gotten myself into?  And then it got into a lot of its nonsense.  Like the whole situation with the agent trying to kill Trent with an axe and Trent talking to Harglow and Styles about how he thought it was a publicity stunt.  A publicity stunt?  That guy is dead now!  How much did he believe in Cane’s new book that he’d take part in a publicity stunt that ended with him being dead?  Trent says a lot of stupid things in this movie though.  Near the end, he makes the claim that “every species can smell its own extinction.”  What are you basing that on?  How many now extinct animals have we interviewed about what they can smell?  And what does extinction smell like?  I like to think it smells like White Diamonds.  And then it gets into the story, which isn’t that interesting but felt like it really wanted to be.  Is the book causing all of this?  (Probably)  Does Cane have super powers?  (Sure)  Is Trent crazy?  (Seems to be)  Do I care?  (No, not really)  And then the movie ends with Trent in a movie theater, watching the movie we just watched like the horror movie version of Blazing Saddles.

I wasn’t really impressed with the performances in this movie either.  Sam Neill gave a good enough performance, but it felt like he was not good enough at hiding his accent yet.  He has one on the realsies, right?  Well, if not, he talks weird.  Also weird: his character keeps a squeaky horn in his glove compartment, specifically to wake up passengers that fall asleep while he’s driving?  That’s odd.  Especially since these vehicles actually have built-in squeaky horns of their own.  I spent the greater majority of the movie trying to decide if I wanted to bang Julie Carmen.  By the end of the movie, I decided that I wouldn’t kick her out of bed, but I also wouldn’t actively pursue it.  The only thing I really thought about her character was that she must’ve been SUPER dedicated to her job.  I know she’s Cane’s editor, but does that necessarily entail that she memorize every detail of his books?  She knows which direction the church is from the hotel in a made up novel.  Unless there’s a map or he just spends a lot of time describing the layout of the towns in his books, there’s really no reason to do that.  When I saw Frances Bay in the movie, I recognized her but didn’t know from where.  I thought she was the rapping grandma at first, but then I realized she was a grandma, but a grandma for Happy Gilmore.  That made me so happy.  She’s good too.  In Happy Gilmore, she was a sweet old lady that you wish was your grandma, and she starts out that way here, but shows some range too.

Because of my lack of expectations, In the Mouth of Madness was unable to disappoint me.  But I didn’t like it.  It’s not bad; it’s just average and insignificant.  The story wants to be special and deep but isn’t, and then it’s left to stand on its aging visuals.  The performances didn’t do anything for me, but the Grandma from Happy Gilmore is in it.  Besides her, I can’t think of any reason to recommend this movie to you.  Go ahead and skip it.  In the Mouth of Madness gets “Reality is not what it used to be!” out of “I’m sorry about the balls!  It was a lucky shot, that’s all!”

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Judge Dredd (1995)

I AM THE LAW!

Strangely enough, I had never gotten around to seeing today’s movie, even though it’s one of the classic representations of a big dumb action movie.  It wasn’t recommended or anything, but I know it would’ve been as soon as one of my readers thought of the movie again.  I decided to jump the gun.  When I was reminded of the movie by Kevin Smith and Ralph Garmin on Hollywood Babble-On, I decided that I should watch it post haste.  This is a movie based on a comic book that I’ve never read, so I’m going into this movie clean.  So here comes my review of Judge Dredd, based on a comic book created by John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra, written for the screen by William Wisher and Steven E. de Souza, directed by Danny Cannon, and starring Sylvester Stallone, Armand Assante, Jurgen Prochnow, Max von Sydow, Diane Lane, Rob Schneider, Joan Chen, Balthazar Getty, Joanna Miles, Mitch Ryan, and James Earl Jones.

As in most things from the future, Earth has gone uber-shitty and humanity is living in walled off Mega-Cities.  Justice is maintained by an elite group of police officers/judges/jury/executioners known as Judges.  One of the best of these Judges is Judge Joseph Dredd (Sylvester Stallone).  He shows up to end a riot and save Judge Hershey (Diane Lane).  He also ends up arresting the recently released hacker, Herman Ferguson (Rob Schneider), even though he wasn’t actually involved in the riot.  Rico (Armand Assante), a former Judge that went nuts, escapes from prison, dons a counterfeit of Dredd’s Judge uniform, and guns down a news reporter (Mitch Ryan).  This murder gets pinned on Dredd, but his mentor Chief Judge Fargo (Max von Sydow) intervenes by retiring in order to grant Dredd leniency.  Instead of death, Dredd gets life in prison.  On his way to jail, he reconnects with Leo Getz … I mean Fergee, in order to keep the audience nice and annoyed, then their ship gets shot down and Dredd and Fergee get captured by a group of cannibals, the Angel Gang.  Meanwhile, Judge Griffin (Jurgen Prochnow) works with Rico to create a lot of chaos and get the other council members to activate the Janus project to genetically engineer the perfect Judge, which in this case will be Rico because of his interruption.  I bet Judge Dredd is going to have something to say about that.  And it’ll probably be dumb.

For a big dumb action movie, this movie was acceptable.  Of course, “acceptable” for a big dumb action movie is pretty shitty for a movie in general.  The idea and the story of this movie are good enough, but the greater majority of the dialogue sucked.  I can’t really knock the movie for having a pretty typical dystopian future setting because (though it’s played out) I’ve liked some movies that use a similar setting, so I have to be fair to the ones that aren’t that great in those settings.  I also like the idea of them making the justice system more efficient by making their cops the judge, jury, and executioners.  The rest of the story was okay as well, with the whole cloning thing and the betrayal in the government thing.  This stuff is probably all taken from the comic books, so I give them no credit.  The dialogue is something that I imagine they wrote, and it mostly sucked.  90% of the things people said was, “I AM (insert any word here).”  “I AM THE LAW!” was the most popular, and they said it a lot.  Of course, there were many other things that were really stupid.  Take, for instance, when Dredd turns his gun to grenade mode (without the barrel changing size at all, somehow), and shoots a door five feet away.  One of the accompanying Judges applauds him with, “Nice Shot!”  Apparently, this other Judge is such a bad shot that hitting the broad side of a barn from five feet away is spectacular.  It’s okay, he gets killed shortly after this.  I felt better.  Later, when Dredd is fighting a robotically enhanced member of the Angel gang, and very angry because he just stabbed his mentor, he ignores the guns laying around the room, ignores the gun he was just holding, and chooses to fight the guy with a stick.  Of course, it’s unfair to assume Sly would do something intelligent.  Later still, Judge Griffin shoots himself in the arm with a pistol to make it look like Dredd attacked him, even though Dredd was carrying a shotgun and no one seemed to care anyway.  So he just shot himself in the arm for no reason whatsoever.  And near the end of the movie, Rico activates the clones to attack Dredd and Hershey.  The clones pop out of their containers to frighten people a time or two, and then are completely forgotten.  No one ever dealt with the clones!  They completely forgot to tie up that part of the story!  They didn’t even have Fergee and Hershey run in and say, “Oh man, it sure was difficult killing all of those clones while you fought Rico, but we did it.  You should’ve been there!”  The movie does look good though.  The graphics were way better than I would’ve expected from the movie.  I especially liked Rico’s robot body guard.  It had a nice look, but it never moved in a smooth manner.

The greater majority of the performances in this movie did not impress, but the other ones were plain awful.  So they have that going for them.  Sylvester Stallone was … in the movie.  Thankfully for him, the character he was playing was stiff and emotionless, so he didn’t have to try and fail at acting.  He was mostly there to deliver horrible lines and throw punches at people.  That mostly worked out for him, but at one point, when he was fighting Armand Assante, he threw a punch that was so ridiculously high so that Armand could duck under it that I thought he would dislocate his shoulder.  I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a movie with Armand Assante in it before, so I can’t compare the uber-hammed up performance he gave here to any of his other ones.  And oh boy was it over the top.  It couldn’t even see the top from where it was.  Even the music was confused by him.  When we first saw his character in prison, the music swelled up as he turned around as if we were supposed to have any idea who this guy was.  It’s like, “BUM bum BUM!  This is how you should feel now!  We’ll explain later!”  Diane Lane was pretty good in the movie, and attractive as always, but didn’t do that much.  She did get in a fight with another really attractive girl, Joan Chen (I wouldn’t have thought I’d have reviewed two things with her in them), and it made me wonder why a trained Judge was having such trouble fighting some random Asian lady.  Rob Schneider was the Leo Getz of this movie, and by that I mean that he was a failed attempt at comic relief that wouldn’t shut up, but still had to be around for almost every scene.

Judge Dredd isn’t a great movie, but it’s a fair enough distraction for two hours.  The premise is good, the story is fine, the writing is awful, and the performances are what you’d expect.  At least the thing looked pretty good.  Because it can’t be streamed from Netflix, I cannot, in good conscience, recommend you go through any trouble to find this movie.  If it was on Netflix streaming, and you had nothing better to do, I would recommend it as background noise, or something to make fun of, if you only had to click a few times to get to it.  But as it is, no real reason to watch this thing.  Judge Dredd gets “It’s better than prison” out of “Emotions … there ought to be a law against them.”

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