In The Mouth Of Madness on PAL Laserdisc

• Cat.no: PLFEB 36761
• Cert: 18
• Running time: 91 minutes
• Sides: 2 (CLV)
• Year: 1995
• Pressing: 1997
• Chapters: 28 (1-14/15-28) – director approved
• Sound: Dolby Surround
• Widescreen: 2.35:1 (Panavision)
• Price: £19.99
• Extras : None
  

  ---

  Director:

  John Carpenter

  (Halloween, The Fog, The Thing, Village Of The Damned, Escape From New York, Escape From L.A.)

Cast:

Sam Neill (Jurassic Park, Dead Calm, The Piano, The Lost World)
Jurgen Prochnow (Das Boot, The Keep, Beverly Hills Cop II, The Seventh Sign)
Charlton Heston (The Ten Commandments, Ben Hur, Touch Of Evil, Planet Of The Apes)

From inside the asylum tended by man in the white coat John Glover (The Chocolate War, Robocop II), John Trent (Sam Neill) is noisily going nuts and crayoning crucifixes all over his solitary padded cell walls. Flashback to Trent’s days as an Insurance troubleshooter hired to investigate claims by publisher Jackson Harglow (Charlton Heston) of the disappearance by the latter’s disappeared bestselling hack horror novelist Sutter Cane, author of The Hobb’s End Horror and the (then) upcoming In The Mouth Of Madness. The only person to have seen Cane alive is his agent – now a mad axeman shot dead before Trent’s eyes. (Other bizarre apparitions – or are they? – also start appearing before Cane’s eyes).

Cutting up paperback covers specially designed by the author himself, Trent stumbles onto a map of part of new Hampshire detailing the wherabouts of the supposedly fictional Hobb’s End, promptly heads down there with publisher’s reader Lindy Styles (Julie Carmen), he convinced the whole thing’s an elaborate publicity stunt. But other occurrences in the town (previously detailed in Cane’s novels) – a procession of strange cyclists, a covered bridge which when entered in darkness leads to the town in daylight, a hotel clerk who murders her husband, a possessed hotel greenhouse and Cane himself (Jurgen Prochnow) busily typing his manuscript about The End – ultimately convince Trent otherwise.

If there’s one director whose work is suited to widescreen laserdisc, it’s John Carpenter, here (unusually) working with a script by someone else (Michael De Luca). One of the few of his films not to feature a helicopter (always a good test of a sound system), ITMOM nevertheless manages plenty of creaks and bangs on its DS sound mix to satisfy most home cinema enthusiasts, even if the score (produced in collaboration with Jim Lang) isn’t one of Carpenter’s best. As in the Carpenter-scripted Halloween III: Season Of The Witch, Quatermass And The Pit references abound.

Picture quality is a mixture of good and bad. Be forewarned that the New Line logo comes up in 1.85:1 before the film starts, because the feature is correctly presented in its 2.35:1 Panavision aspect ratio, so that heart attack you had if you didn’t read this review first turns out entirely unjustified.

The film’s mid-section takes place in Hobb’s End largely at night, and much of it – especially the numerous and near-subliminal quick cuts of special effects – are really hard to see (one of those occasions when a cinema print scores hands down over the home cinema experience). CAV would have been a real bonus here. The dark visual hues on the original source material (which looked great in the cinema) appear to be just that little bit too subtle for Pioneer LDCE’s print transfer. Our advice is, watch this disc at night time under blackout conditions.

Carpenter himself had a hand in the chapter stops – and it feels like it, with a stop exactly where you want one every time. Even the side break occurs at the end of a scene after a local beset with the town’s problem apparitions tells Neill, “Don’t let it get to you – just get out!” Mind you, chapters 19-28 could easily have been done in CAV, but aren’t – admittedly this would lose the nice sidebreak, but for this particular movie, that compromise would probably have been worth it. In the absence of CAV, Pioneer have continued the lamentable tradition with their recent Entertainment-licensed discs of not including the film’s trailer.

While no-one would recommend ITMOM as THE John Carpenter movie to buy – it may be better than Escape From L.A. but not a patch on either (to name but three) Halloween, The Fog or The Thing (all of which are out on PAL LD if not coming shortly), it’s still a serviceable horror outing packed with visual and audio shocks. Besides, anything by Carpenter has to be worth a look.

Film: 4/5
Picture: 3/5
Sound: 4/5