Emergency Sam Neill Appreciation Post

If you're on social media, you, like me, undoubtedly saw dozens of tributes pouring out for the recently departed actor Sam Neill. I got multiple texts early in the morning from people upset in a way that is rare even for celebrity deaths, but it probably helps that in addition to being a stellar star, there are basically no stories about him being anything less than a joy to work with and be around.

Neill was one of my very favorite actors, and he made everything he was in better by virtue of his presence. There's an honesty and approachability to all of his performances that works just as well when he's playing a villain as when he's the hero (or when he's sometimes both in the same movie). He uses his considerable charm to disarm the audience, and I can't think of a time that it doesn't work, whether he's delivering one of the least authentic Russian accents ever committed to film* or pantomiming dissemboweling an obnoxious kid who doesn't put enough respect on the name Velociraptor.

My point is: You could watch any Sam Neill movie and enjoy his performance at the very least. But the Sam Neill movie you should watch is In the Mouth of Madness.

In the Mouth of Madness is, I would argue, the last and best of John Carpenter's Apocalypse Trilogy, the other entries in which are The Thing and Prince of Darkness. Both earlier films are a lot of fun, and The Thing in particular is terrific, but there's something about this 95-minute self-aware piece of metafiction that I find so delightful, so transcendent, that I've bought it in every home video format it's ever existed in, and have probably seen it more than a handful of other films, and unquestionably Sam Neill's performance is a big part of it.

In the Mouth of Madness opens with John Trent (Neill) in an insane asylum, covered in hand-drawn crosses and narrating the events that led him here to the seen-it-all psychiatrist attempting to evaluate him. In flashback we see his work as an insurance investigator who busts a philandering arsonist for insurance fraud. This leads almost immediately (this movie is 95 minutes long and has no fat on it), to a new gig: trying to locate the world's most popular horror writer, Sutter Cane (Jurgen Prochnow), and retrieve his new manuscript, a novel that has turned the only person to read it, his agent, into an ax-murdering madman. Trent smells a publicity stunt and spends the remainder of the movie chain smoking and yelling at small town New Englanders that he knows they're trying to Candid Camera him, as they are devoured by or turned into monsters.

It rules.

The movie has the vibe of a classic noir meets cosmic horror meets Looney Tunes, as the world's most cynical PI becomes increasingly aware that the world he's known and believed in might only be the tip of the reality iceberg. Neill is in virtually every scene in the film save one, and it's his POV that we view the increasingly bizarre events of the film through, leading to what I think is one of the best endings in cinema history, which I won't spoil on the off-chance you haven't seen it and decide to give it a whirl (It's free with ads on Tubi!).

So RIP Sam Neill, who was incredible in everything, but extra super good in Until the End of the World, Possession, Event Horizon, and, of course, In the Mouth of Madness.

*- Although somehow not the least authentic one in that particular film.