Trent is an insurance investigator hired by publisher Jackson Harglow (Charlton Heston, in an inspired bit of casting considering his roles in the apocalyptic films Beneath the Planet of the Apes, Soylent Green, and The Omega Man) to explore the disappearance of horror novelist Sutter Cane (Jurgen Prochnow). Cane is Harglow's crown jewel, with a ravenous readership that riots at bookstores when copies of his books are in short supply, and the publisher desperately wants his latest manuscript, "In the Mouth of Madness." Trent, who had earlier been attacked by Cane's axe-weilding agent (supposedly driven insane by reading advance chapters of the new novel), smells a publicity hoax and eagerly accepts the job. What follows is a convoluted, pseudo-philosophic tale in which Trent slowly finds himself trapped in one of Cane's novels ("I think, therefore you are," Prochnow proudly proclaims at one point), only to unwittingly deliver the insanity-inducing manuscript back to the "real world."

While clever in concept, it is Carpenter's execution which does the film in. ITMOM never builds toward anything (or anything satisfying, at least), never achieves the suspenseful pacing of Carpenter's finer films like The Thing. Rather, it lurches forward in fits and starts, propelled either by moments of montage depicting the violence to come, or by sudden instances of incongruity which suggest that Trent now resides in Cane's fictional world. While initially intriguing, these moments become so repetitive, and contribute so little to Trent's stubborn refusal to believe what is happening, that they ultimately become trite and insufferable.

It doesn't help that the script, despite its interesting ideas, provides some truly lame bits of dialogue between Trent and Linda Styles (Julie Carmen), Cane's editor, and by whom Trent is accompanied. (Neill, an inconsistent actor, and Carmen deliver awkward and unconvincing performances, with Neill acting all the while as if he's in on the secret of Trent's predicament, making his eventual madness unlikely.) Perhaps most disappointingly, Carpenter never fluidly juggles the shifts between the worlds of reality and fiction-cum-reality, resorting to cheap tricks like dream-within-dream sequences and ever-changing paintings on walls.

Finally, the film defies even its own sketchy logic when Trent makes it back to Harglow to demand that the novel not be published, only to learn that it had been published months earlier and that the film rights (!) had already been sold; if this were the case, why was Trent even necessary? Trent's fantasy might make sense if he was a Cane fan at the film's outset, and therefore predisposed to the poisonous literature, but he is depicted as being oblivious to Cane and his writings.

Perhaps the only level on which the film works (and just barely) is as a self-reflexive horror film, before Scream turned the concept into a genre and made it hip. All the while I questioned the extent of Cane's impact on readers (obvious references to bestseller extraordinaire Stephen King notwithstanding) because, let's face it, who the hell really reads so passionately these days? Well, the film addresses this by asserting that "In the Mouth of Madness" is being filmed for those who don't read and, in its final moments, Trent stumbles into a theater to view the film we have just seen; while not a dramatically satisfactory ending, it's at least good for a chuckle.

New Line Home Video has released a rather adequate DVD edition of ITMOM. I viewed the 2.35:1 anamorphically enhanced transfer on a 16x9 set, and the image was somewhat inconsistent. The more brightly lit scenes looked stunning, while the darker scenes lacked the kind of detail exhibited in the best recent transfers. The image was occasionally plagued by slight "shimmering" near objects with strong horizontal lines, like venetian blinds, and was at times somewhat soft. Still, it's a very good transfer, with excellent color reproduction and stability, and it nicely handles the abrupt shifts in visual tone during the montage sequences. (The disc also includes a fullscreen transfer which, out of respect for Carpenter's stated allegiance to Panavision, I did not even sample.)

The Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtrack fares better, and is responsible for most of the film's few scares. The musical track, one of Carpenter's lesser scoring efforts (co-scored by Jim Lang), really kicks in during the opening and closing credits. There is little bass response in the LFE channel, and the surround channels are not extremely active, but on the whole the mix is enveloping and nicely detailed.

While not a full-blown Platinum Series disc, ITMOM contains slightly more than the bare-bones extras common among other studios' releases; unfortunately, they are not very good. The static menus enable one to view the film's rather effective trailer (also 16x9 enhanced and 5.1), as well as filmographies for Neill, Prochnow, Heston, Carmen, John Glover (who appears briefly as Dr. Saperstein in the asylum sequences) and Carpenter. While exhaustive (the Internet Movie Database is credited as the source), the filmographies lack any accompanying biographical information or career insights, a feature which I tend to enjoy. (On a thoroughly pleasing note, Prochnow's filmography branches to a magnificent, 16x9, 5.1 trailer for David Lynch's Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me; I can't wait for the upcoming New Line disc!)

Rounding out the package is a full-length commentary by Carpenter and cinematographer Gary B. Kibbe, which might just as well have been scrapped in the planning. Carpenter once did extremely insightful and enjoyable commentaries for the LaserDisc editions of Halloween (The Criterion Collection), Assault on Precinct 13, and Escape From New York. Here, however, he seems bored and content to merely describe the onscreen action, frequently imploring Kibbe (a less then engaging speaker) to explain how the images were lit.

While instructive to aspiring cinematographers, and mildly interesting to those with a knowledge of the craft of filmmaking, I suspect most fans of the film would rather learn how Carpenter came to be involved with the project (one of the few films he's directed which he didn't also write), how and which tales by Lovecraft were woven to comprise the film's premise, or even how Carpenter goes about scoring his films. Just about the only revealing comment Carpenter makes is to declare ITMOM one of a "trilogy" of films he'd refer to as his "apocalypse trilogy," along with The Thing and John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness. (Let me say that I find it tiresome for filmmakers to review their body of work and conjure "trilogies," out of entries never obviously planned as one of a larger body of thematically linked material.) All in all, New Line has done better by films, but this disc and its extras should please Carpenter completists.-Vincent Suarez