Double Feature! In the Mouth of Madness and Dead Alive

 

So to catch up on having missed quite a few days this month I did a double feature today. Reviews:

The first film I started the day off with was John Carpenter's In the Mouth of Madness. I realized that with the end of October quickly approaching I hadn't seen a Carpenter film all month so I went for this H.P. Lovecraft-inspired story. And what a mindfuck it was. Essentially the story consists of a man who catches frauds for a living (Sam Neill) searching for the horror writer named Sutter Cane. Slowly he begins to find that Cane's very Lovecraftian (even down to the titles) stories just may be real and finds himself descending into madness. 

I guess the best way I could describe the movie is the horror version of Stranger than Fiction... minus Queen Latifah, fortunately. Carpenter here is constantly showing his immense love for Lovecraft and essentially the whole movie is a mash up of homages to him. You can almost feel the love coming out of the screen. The story is whack attack, twisting, and you never quite feel like you just what in the hell is going on--which is all a good thing. You as the viewer almost feel as though you too are descending into madness as you have no idea what is real. The "meta"-ness of the movie is intriguing--a reality in a reality in a reality. 

Another great Carpenter film that showcases his stellar horror ability and skill at special effects., if not as good as say The Thing. But really, how can you get better than the mother fucking The Thing?

9/10

The second film I finished the day off with was Peter Jackson's Dead Alive (also known as Braindead). Having watched The Frighteners earlier this month I felt I didn't have a great first experience at Jackson's horror so I gave Dead Alive a shot. This movie holds (or held? I think past tense now) the record for the goriest movie (i.e. most fake blood) ever. The amount of gore and blood is so over the top at times there's so much flying around you don't know what you're looking at. There's a zombie crotchety mother, a demon/zombie baby, a rat monkey--you name it, this movie seems to have it.

And it's a blast. I mean, sometimes Jackson goes a little too far in the ridiculousness but majority of the time it hits that over-the-top note perfectly. The gore despite being comically out there is actually really well done; for the time Dead Alive was made most everything looks comically realistic. The movie provides plenty of "Oh lord, really?" moments as you laugh at seeing, oh, say, a woman's head getting zombie punched and the fist coming out of her mouth or a set of intestines/colon repeatedly trying to kill the main character. It's fun, it's gross, and how I pity any actor who had an aversion to blood. 

The movie is a romp for what it is and I pretty thoroughly enjoyed it. My one other critique is that the movie was very obviously building to the last 25 or so minutes and the rest felt fairly "Ok, we have to fill up an hour to get to that 25" some of the time. But, the gorefest ending made even the slower parts worth it.

8/10