What is wrong with horror fans? Really? I mean, damn! A lot of you think John Carpenter lost it with In the Mouth of Madness, but the fact is — note: fact, not opinion — that this tip of the hat to H.P. Lovecraft is one of the director’s most intriguing movies.

Sam Neill is John Trent, an insurance investigator called in by a publisher (Charlton Heston) to track down missing author Sutter Cane (Jürgen Prochnow). Cane is a horror writer whose work frequently has a maddening effect on less stable readers. His new novel, only part of which has been delivered to his publisher, is reputed to be the one that will drive everyone mad. Trent believes that the whole situation is a publicity stunt, so he takes Cane’s editor (Julie Carmen) on a search for the town that is the book’s setting.

Mouth contains several set pieces that blend Lovecraftian concepts with Carpenter’s vision to create an unsettling atmosphere that grows more and more surreal, twisting reality, religion and fantasy around each other like an insane caduceus. The film is loaded with references to Lovecraft’s tales, and maybe that’s why it has never been particularly popular. It may be too old-school and literary for teen horroristas. Perhaps, too, Carpenter’s devotion to prosthetic rather than CG monsters makes it seem quaint. The director calls it the final film in his “Apocalypse Trilogy,” along with The Thing and Prince of Darkness, two other box-office underachievers.

But Mouth contains a great laugh line. After going through hell, then getting strapped into a straightjacket and slammed into a padded cell, Trent is forced to listen to elevator music designed to quiet the lunatics. As “We’ve Only Just Begun” plays over the asylum’s speakers, he slides to the floor moaning, “Oh no — not The Carpenters, too!” —Doug Bentin

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In Japan, Steel Trap is titled Jigsaw: Tower of Death, which is appropriate, because this is nothing if not another Saw-inspired game of gore. Mind you, that’s not a complaint, even if its twist ending is telegraphed early on and executed poorly.

During a rockin’ New Year’s Eve party in an abandoned office building, seven really attractive people — including a celebrity chef and a couple of coke-snorters — are invited to the 27th floor for an invitation-only after-party. Food and drink are just the tip of the knife, too, as a clue informs them that this shindig is a treasure hunt — you know, just like those Nicolas Cage movies, but shorn of historical documents and replaced with viscera.

The table’s place settings sport not only the guests’ names, but unofficial titles like “Loser,” “Heartless” and “Two-Faced,” yet they don’t see anything wrong with that. The clues are given in nursery rhymes, yet they aren’t the least bit creeped out by them. The first one takes them to a disembodied pig’s head wearing a crown, yet they keep on going.

I won’t spoil the deaths; they’re kind of creative in that Final Destination sort of way, and that includes being utterly implausible. But realism isn’t what I ask of films like Steel Trap. Nor crisp dialogue, as this is not: “Signal blocked? What the hell’s that mean?” “It means somebody blocked the signal.” —Rod Lott

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J.T. Petty’s well-made look at the underground world of pseudo-snuff horror movies troubled me more for its final thesis than for what it actually shows onscreen. While featuring interviews with real-life filmmakers, actors and academics (including a personal hero of mine, Men, Women and Chain Saws author Carol J. Clover), the film’s dominant narrative comes from the fictional investigation into the cinematic activities of a doughy loser named Eric Rost (Eric Marcisak).

As the man behind the titular S&Man (pronounced “sandman”) series, which consists of him stalking attractive women on camera before killing them onscreen, Eric is reluctant to give away his filmmaking methods — afraid that doing so will undermine his reputation and mystique. Unable to contact any of the women who have appeared in the films, Petty (playing himself) is faced with the very real possibility that Eric’s product is the genuine article.

It’s no easy task to combine the real and the fictional as well as Petty does here, but ultimately, I found myself troubled by the conclusions he reaches. In his final narration, he tells us that we watch horror movies knowing that the violence is fake, while wishing it were real — which, in my case, simply isn’t true.

The fact is, I am generally indifferent to the violence in horror movies — I enjoy them for other reasons I don’t have the time or space to go into — and I am able to watch them without self-inflicting psychic trauma because I am able to take comfort in the knowledge that what I am seeing isn’t real. To suggest otherwise is to indict myself with a cultural crime I have not committed.

The other problem with Petty’s thesis is that in order to fully exploit it, he ruins the film’s delicate balance between journalism and fiction. It simple isn’t credible that a conscionable documentarian wouldn’t, at a certain point, take what they have learned about Eric’s activities and report them to the police. And while Petty’s inaction is meant to support his apparent contention that there is little difference between real and staged violence, it instead only works to prove how ultimately misguided that contention is. —Allan Mott

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Call me easy, but I like director David R. Ellis’ movies. Yes, even Snakes on a Plane, and especially Final Destination 2. Sophisticated cineastes-about-town like me can’t live by Eric Rohmer alone, you know. We need a little Sarah Roemer to liven things up.

And with that back-scratching out of the way, I can say that the Ellis/Roemer collaboration Asylum is awful — dreck so powerful, it would take a barrel of soft soap to wash it away. Roemer plays a college freshman assigned to a new dorm. Well, not so much new as the renovated wing of an asylum for troubled teens that hasn’t been used since the youth revolted in the mid 1930s and killed the doctor who had been torturing them by shoving lobotomy needles into his eyes.

Now, the doctor’s ghost is roaming the halls and continuing to prey on young people with troubled pasts. The un-renovated wing in ruins — which, after 75 years, still has file cabinets containing patients’ histories — is attached to the dorm, so all it takes is about two minutes worth of computer hacking for the six kids who seem to be the dorm’s only inhabitants to gain access to the old section of the building.

Ellis is known for his wicked sense of humor, but it is entirely lacking in this hodgepodge of supernatural slasher clichés and clueless jump moments. You won’t believe a word of it, although “The” and “End” will be mighty welcome. —Doug Bentin

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Even if it weren’t the only British supernatural horror film involving hippie bikers and a frog demon, Psychomania would likely be the best British supernatural horror film involving hippie bikers and a frog demon ever made.

The Living Dead is a group of young bikers with custom-made skull-and-crossbones helmets that make them look like cartoon characters. They’re led by the well-to-do Tom, who’s itching to commit suicide because he believes he’ll rise again and become invulnerable. Because his mom is a spiritual loon who has made a pact with the aforementioned frog demon, he does and does (after his compadres bury him on his hog and wearing his full biker regalia).

When he informs the others of his newfound power, one girl says, “Oh, wow! What are we waiting for?” and drives herself straight into a moving van. When she, too, resurrects not long after her funeral, the other members off themselves as well — in an absurdly comic sequence — by jumping off buildings and chaining bricks to their bodies as they swim. Meanwhile, the police are pissed because the now-true-to-their-name Living Dead delight in murdering innocents and destroying grocery stores.

What’s not to love? —Rod Lott

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