I like movies that mess with your mind. That make you believe that yes, you do have a social security number, pay your taxes, and you help your landlady carry out her garbage. But no! You’ve been living in a dream world, Neo! It’s all fake, man! Nothing is real! Not even reality itself! How about that! Damn that red pill…
Now, before computers created worlds, there were writers doing just that. So, what if Stephen King actually turned out to be Satan’s own henchman? What if what he writes has ‘a certain effect’ on people? Meaning that it makes you want to swing an axe at Sam Neill, sitting in a diner, in broad daylight? What if everything he wrote wasn’t made up by him but whispered in his ear by unspeakable demons from beyond? Well, as it turns out, it means that Sammy has to fight Cthulhu again. He seems to like doing that…
In this particular popcorny flick, he plays John Trent, an insurance fraud investigator. He gets tasked by a publisher with finding Sutter Cane (Jurgen Prochnow), the Stephen King analog of this movie: a hugely successful writer of horror novels whose work, as mentioned, seems to trigger strange reactions in some people. He’s gone missing, so they send him along with Linda Styles (Julie Carmen), who works for the company, to go and find him. And then all sorts of mess-minding mayhem ensues, of course.
Now, this movie has a lot going for it: directed by the great John Carpenter, it stars some good actors (Sam Neill does crazy really well, and I particularly liked Julie Carmen’s Xanax-induced display of insanity. And Jurgen Prochnow’s face is just as evil as his name…), it’s well made, with a lot of attention to detail and general creepiness, and yet… I’m having trouble taking it too seriously as an actual horror movie. I’m not quite sure why, though. The whole thing feels a bit… not campy, exactly, but more… camp-curious, shall we say. It wants to be this world-shifting, reality-cracking nightmare, but never quite commits hard enough to fully unnerve.
So, my advice to you, who hasn’t yet seen this movie and wants to: don’t take it too seriously. Take it as it is — a fun, well-made, slightly unhinged popcorny ride about cosmic horror, madness, and little old ladies who hack their husbands to pieces.
It’s all fiction, anyhow.
Isn’t it?
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