IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS - That's quite a weird title, isn't it? What does it mean, where does it come from? It sounds like it might be a quote, perhaps from a psalm or something, I don't know... my googling patience runs thin these days. Anyway, I kept waiting for a mouth with some madness in it to appear, but what I got was Sam Neil as a gumshoe who cracks up in a small creepy horror town after the target of his investigations, rogue horror author Jurgen Prochnow, starts messing with the fabric of reality (not sure how really, if he had a magic typewriter it wasn't expanded upon). If references to S King and HP (talk of 'The Old Ones' and Hotel Pickman) shore up the literary angle of this tale of otherworldly woe, the main thrust is cinematic - it's basically one of those 'what if reality was just a dream / madness / virtual reality / insert sketchy plateau of consciousness of your choice' movies that were rife in the eighties and nineties in the wake of 'Videodrome' and the rise of potheads with computers. It's commonly spoken of as John Carpenter's 'last good film, but they'll be saying that about 'The Ward' in a couple of years. ITMOM takes a horror funhouse / 'one weird scene after another' type approach, which I endorse even if some find it bitty, and if it can't quite measure up to its nearest antecedent ('Prince Of Darkness') it has a good laugh trying.
MIKEY - A fresh-faced kid moves from home to home after bad things happen to the ones who take him in. Will his new teacher discover the awful truth? This DTV-era 'Bad Seed' has that slightly caricatured aspect common to mid / low tier horror films of the early nineties, and it makes the sight of murderous orphan Mikey wielding a crossbow or pulverising some step-dad's head with a baseball bat pop all the more. I could've done with a bit more mayhem - most of the midsection is build - but the crossover between meanspirited bad vibes and cardboard, self-mocking video store schlock worked for me. The BBFC demonstrated their wonderful taste and great sensitivity by effectively banning it in the UK post-Bulger, which seems like a case of hijacking human tragedy in the name of a trivial cultural war waged by dicks.
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