Tag Archives: hp-lovecraft

The Color Out Of Space (2010)

A meteor crashlands on earth and disappears, poisening the soil of a farm and sealing the fate of the farmers. 86min imdb

Movie 85min

Trailer

Recap:

***SPOILER WARNING*** In the last 19 words of this I tell what a color out of space looks like.***


The son of a WW2 soldier hears that his father has gone back to germany, so he follows him. In germany he meets a german who who tells him how he met his father after the war. Then he tells him what happened before the war: there was this meteor crashlanding downhill of the Gärtener farm. Scientists examined it very diligently until they could declare with scientific precision that they were positively clueless about the nature of this meteor which over time had dissolved, it’s ingredients poisoning the soil of the Gärtener farm.

The horror! As the mother goes insane, the Gärtener family retreats to solitude, avoiding contact with the villagers, having nowhere to go, awaiting their fate…. This by the way is quite similar to The Secret Of Marrowbone (which unfortunately is not available on YouTube), a movie that I recently watched. It was so overwhelming to watch the story unfold because we only were slowly, bit by bit, exposed to just how terrible the fate of the Marrowbone really was. The Gärteners in comparison are quite annoying. This movie so totally resembles a german made for TV movie, insofar as the storytelling is sluggishly slow, the cast desperately avoids overacting to a point when they stop acting altogether and just say their lines, horror elements are reduced to the bare minimum and then some more, and of course the storytelling has to happen on three timelevels, present day, after the war and before the war, because one of the time levels is important and the other two are perfectly fit to do nothing for the story. The horrible fate of the Gärteners could have been a truly soultearing experience if only the makers of this movie had not decided waste this opportunity and to make a detached, uninvolved, merely observing and describing document of lameness instead. Purple. They shot the movie in b&w so that purple would look sufficiently like a color out of space.

Call Girl Of Cthulhu (2014)

Everybody wants Riley (or R’lyeh?) because she has not only an impressive personality, she is also the Callgirl that Cthulhu wants as a mother for his avatar on earth. Inspired by H. P. Lovecraft. 92min imdb

Movie 89min

Trailer

Recap:

What people want: the artist Dexter wants that very special escort lady, the cultist wants the very same escort lady for a ritual to bring Cthulhu to earth, and the professor wants Dexter to forge a nameless tome (the Necronomicon?) to prevent the ritual from working.

So much for the plot. The first review I read was quite salty, claiming that the movie was not true to the spirit of Lovecraft. This is true in so far that it doesn’t show the undepictable, it doesn’t give you a glimpse of the sheer size and emptiness of space and the futility of human existence, it doesn’t even show things so beyond the capacity of the human brain that the beholder will inevitably go insane (good thing, too).

Instead, it’s a parody, it’s loud and fast and trashy. However, this parody was clearly made by people who have read and love their Lovecraft. It wasn’t made with much of a budget and it wasn’t made by the most skilled movie makers, but it was made with diligence and with so much love for the spoofed that I even call it a hommage. Just look at the details: two important characters in this movie are Erica Zann (a musician) and Richard “Rick the dick” Pickman, the condom brand is “Deep Ones”, the febreeze is “Cool Air” and the viagra is “Celephais”.

This is a perfect example for a very good movie. It may not be great, but it’s so much better than just good. What bothers me is that the version I watched is shorter than the official length according to imdb. It may very well be that some of the funnier and/or grosser takes were edited. That would be a shame. But even this version is very good.

Dagon (2001)

Stuart Gordon’s adaptation of Dagon and The Shadow Over Innsmouth by H. P. Lovecraft. 98min imdb

(VPN:D)

Review:

The movie starts like a fantasy adventure: the opening credits are blue and golden, we see a scuba diver who discovers a golden underwater city and a mermaid, but she has bad teeth and he wakes up. Now we are on a small yacht with a crew of four which soon hits a reef, and before too long our hero (who wears glasses like Herbert West and a sweater from the Miskatonic U) is alone in a small village where the Spanish branch of The Esoteric Order Of Dagon is located. He spends most of the movie running from creepy folks who are definitely only semi human. An old bum provides the info dump, which is not a smart move, because how good can the English of a Spanish bum be? However he sticks very much to the stories from the Lovecraft books, so it’s okay. Running from the fishy Dagon cultists turns out to be difficult, especially since our hero has the habit to flee into houses instead of away from them, so as soon as he reunites with two of his crewmates, they get caught.

My hopes weren’t too high, because this movie is not located in New England as a Lovecraft movie should, it was shot in Spain, obviously for financial reasons. But guess what, the movie sure looks good and they were not cheap on the special effect make-up and CGI. Also, Stuart Gordon is a pro who knows what he’s doing. The whole movie is an exciting roller-coaster ride and I don’t think that the Lovecraft fan boys have a reason to be upset.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐