Those gooey, gucky monsters with fangs and tentacles and flicky tongues are looking distinctly past their sell-by date in John Carpenter's dose of small-town horror. Sam Neill plays an insurance investigator asked to trace Sutter Cane (Jurgen Prochnow), America's vanished number one best-selling author, whose horror novels affect people in a way that triggers violence. Taking with him publishing assistant Julie Carmen, Neill sets off for the seemingly non-existent town of Hobb's End, which he reaches through what seems like a time tunnel between fact and fiction. Or maybe... but no, this is all too silly for words, and none of it seems to have any logic or connection with reality, as all the best chillers do. It's ridiculous, for example, that Neill should work out the way to Hobb's End by arranging sections of the covers of Cane's books. And, if civilization has retreated into pockets of resistance at the end, who is showing the film Neill enters a cinema to see?


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