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Lovecraft multiplied by Pirandello, a masterful John Carpenter equation. The Halloween asylum has been upgraded (muzak pacifies howling patients), the padded cell is covered with symbols à la Polanski's The Tenant ("The crosses are a nice touch"). The insurance investigator in the straitjacket (Sam Neill) recounts the case of the vanished horror novelist (Jürgen Prochnow) while outside the apocalypse spreads. "A harmless pop phenomenon, or a deadly mad prophet of the printed page?" Neither scam nor stunt at Arcane Publishing, the search alongside the editor (Julie Carmen) segues from the void of the freeway to a placid New England hamlet, "picture-perfect" yet infernal. The monsters of creation let loose—the pastoral canvas withers, the wizened biddy sprouts tendrils, the church is a malevolent husk. Rise of postmodernism, idolatry of pulp. "What came first, us or the book?" Carpenter's beautiful system of shocks for the mutating topography of perception and genre, a companion piece to Prince of Darkness. "Main street U.S.A." is a Canadian simulacrum, out of the bookstore steps the bedeviled agent with axe in hand. The key is a manuscript, the author is equipped with rattling typewriter and hell hound, just a vessel for churning evil. The allusive welter encompasses the bulging door from The Haunting and the spider-walk from The Exorcist, even Neill's earlier Omen role is registered via hordes of beastly children. A paperback Armageddon, things "beyond description," that's where cinema comes in. The changing of the divine guard is a joke clinched by none other than Charlton Heston announcing the unholy best-seller's movie version, the punchline means bringing a tub of popcorn to the last picture show. "Reality is not what it used to be." The mainstay is Bergman's Hour of the Wolf, Romero's The Dark Half runs parallel. With David Warner, John Glover, Bernie Casey, Peter Jason, and Frances Bay.
--- Fernando F. Croce |