An insurance investigator is hired to track down a reclusive horror story author whose work is predicting the apocalypse.
Horror comic from John Carpenter has many faults, the pacing is off, a certain key actor is terrible and the monsters are a little rubbery...but the whole is a hilarious riff on the genre and the film is one of my favourites. Great score too.
-The Sloth
As Sloth said, there any many faults, but it works, mainly thanks to Sam Neill's performance. it has been theorized that the certain bad key performance is because she's supposed to sound like the badly written female character a Lovecraftian pulp writer like Sutter Cane would write. Interesting, but hard to say if it's true. At any rate, this one rewards careful rewatching to appreciate it's sly humor. Carpenter's main message here is "we're all doomed, so all we can do is laugh." Good advice. (And really? Only 48% on Rotten Tomatoes? The world has gone mad).
Whatever its faults, I love this movie, the last really good film Carpenter has made. But then, I have to - he wrote me this way.
-Dave W.
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