Director: Tibor Takács
Written by: David Chaskin
Starring: Jenny Wright, Clayton Rohner, Randall William Cook, Stephanie Hodge , Michelle Jordan
Music by: Michael Hoenig
Makeup effects by: Randall William Cook
Taglines: “is it fact, fiction, or your worst nightmare escaping from between the pages of a…”
“How can a dead man touch you?”
STORY
Virginia (Wright) is a girl working in a used book store who enjoys reading trashy thrillers alone in her apartment while waiting for her cop boyfriend (Rohner) to come home. Her store gets a shipment of product from a reclusive man named Malcolm Brand (Cook), who was himself something of an author, though he only published two books before disappearing.
Virginia reads one novel and finds it extremely vivid, almost real. Affected by the novel, she goes back to the store to get a copy of the second novel, entitled “I, Madman”. She can’t find it in the store, but finds a copy on her doorstep one night. Assuming it was left by a colleague, she starts to read it. However, she starts to be stalked by a man bearing a great resemblance to the killer in the novel, and nobody will believe her when she starts noticing that the victims of recent murders are mirrored by those in the book…
OPINION
This is a nice little movie, though it touched on a few of my personal bugbears about movie of this kind. I’ll get onto those in a moment, but for the most part this was a fine little thriller. The cast is fine, with Jenny Wright being especially cute (I was disappointed to discover that she did very little of any real note after her turns in this and Near Dark, apart from a couple of bit parts in the likes of Young Guns 2 and The Lawnmower Man). Randall Cook (also responsible for the effective make-up and stop-motion effects) is very good as the mysterious killer, who spends much of the movie reconstructing his own self-mutilated face from parts of his victims.
The movie also takes a nice meta fiction route to the story-telling, with the viewer regularly kept in the dark as to what’s really happening and what’s real. It also avoids the temptation to go too far down the path of suggesting that Cook herself is the killer (as well as any Candyman-like final plot twists), and keeps the surprising balance of being quite light-hearted but never drifting into spoof or comedy. This was the movie that Tibor Takacs made directly after the excellent The Gate and before his downward slide into his current Sci-Fi Channel “original” hell, so the look, feel and direction are all very decent.
There are a few problems, most of them personal to me. I have a problem with the “nobody believes me” kind of thriller, especially when the main character starts babbling to the police about the supernatural then acting shocked when they’re treated as crazy. Some movies (the aforementioned Candyman) do that well, but there were a few moments here where I was thinking “oh, come on…”, especially since everything’s connected to a book she happens to just start reading. Also, while the effects are great, the stop-motion is a little too similar to The Gate (a better movie, IMHO).
Overall though, it’s a neat little piece that’s worth rediscovering, especially as an example of a decent horror movie that’s amusing without spoofing itself . It’s also a great example of what the genre was still capable of, in the same year that the Freddy and Jason franchises imploded and a year before Hannibal Lecter convinced Hollywood to make “psychological thrillers” instead of horror movies for half a decade.
Rating: 
