The Cthulhu Stories of Robert E. Howard

Necro Crom Icon

The Cthulhu Stories
of Robert E. Howard
Edited by Paul Di Filippo
Word Fire Press ISBN:  9781680570984

If you are into H. P. Lovecraft you’ll know that his most famous legacy, a common thread running through many of his stories recalling ancient, tentacle, aggressive God-like creatures known in its various guises as Chtulhu... was not just something that Lovecraft wrote himself. He freely gave friends and correspondents licence to also reference this, sometimes somewhat tenuous thematic tentacle, in their own writings... often published in similar pulp magazines as Lovecraft’s own tales. So you had people like August Derleth and, I believe, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert Bloch and Fritz Leiber. One of these writers and pen pals was the late, great Robert E. Howard, who would be best remembered for his tales of his Cimmerian barbarian Conan, not to mention such characters as Solomon Kane and Kull The Conqueror. And it’s some of his stories which feature, rather tenuously I should add, in terms of this selection at least (I hear there are many other examples of his tales with Cthulhu elements) in the volume The Cthulhu Stories of Robert E. Howard, which was published a couple of years ago.

Now, I am mostly only familiar with Howard's Conan and Kane stories so I was very pleased to have this. As it is, there is a lot of stuff in here which I find oblique in terms of accessing even the sometimes hard to pin down Cthulhu element of Lovecraft’s tales and I have to warn you that if you are expecting horror stories full of madness and creeping dread... well, there are a few of those but there are also a lot of other things which are less likely to make you think of one of Lovecraft’s slithering horrors. For instance, I’d read one of the tales in this tome before... a Kull story called The Shadow Kingdom, in an equally unlikely tome for it to be collected in... a complete Conan in Weird Tales collection (reviewed here). The most this and, a fair amount of the other twelve tales joining it in this collection, has in common with the spirit of Cthulhu is maybe a brief reference to an ancient alien race, perhaps originating from the stars. Some of the stories will make more pointed references to Lovecraft creations such as Dagon and the demonic book known as The Necronomicon and, yeah, others have almost no tenuous grip on the subject at hand, it seemed to me. There are, however, a few tales which are absolutely fitting  in with the spirit and atmosphere of the tales and, as you would expect, Howard has his own way of doing things...

The editor makes the point, in his introduction, that Howard’s version of this ‘horror brand’ is less likely to result in the descent into madness for his main protagonists... Howard being someone who would have his characters meet the lurking dread in a less passive and more heroic manner. Indeed, by way of an example, there is a ‘round robin’ collaborative story near to the end of this volume which was issued as a challenge to some writers from Fantasy Magazine. The story is called The Challenge From Beyond and it’s started off by C. L. Moore and the writers A. Merritt, H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard and Frank Belknap Long all add excerpts of the story as a chain to bring it to a conclusion...

It’s interesting to note that the authors of the piece really don’t do too much to hide their own style and although the story certainly gets from point A to B, the small chapters all seem to have a different energy to them. Once Moore has set things up and Merritt further has the main character’s mind transformed through the power of a well worn, black stone cube... we get to Lovecraft’s section where the whole thing is turned to absolute bleak terror and a fate worse than death for the main protagonist as he finds his mind swapped across the cosmos with an alien creature, with absolutely no hope of returning to his body. But then Howard comes in and suddenly, the hero is pretty happy with his lot because he is in an alien body with a human thinking mind and, taking just a shard of rock, overpowers the various aliens on their own world and becomes their God. So, yeah, not a passive madness but a conquering spirit for sure. What really annoyed me about this story, however, is that the year before I read a book called The Complete Fiction of H. P Lovecraft (reviewed here) and this tale certainly wasn’t included... how the heck is that complete then?

And it’s a hit and miss affair, as you would expect but there are certainly some things of note. For instance, Howard uses a black, monolithic stone to run a common thread between some of his unrelated tales and there’s more than one story in here which has people transformed from his present day in the 1930s and back to ancient times to have an adventure, before returning to their modern day guise. One of these is actually, although people may want to argue with me on this (and I don’t care), a Conan story. People Of The Dark was written a month or so before the first of Howard’s more widely acknowledged Conan tales and tells of a man who, on his way to murder a rival in love with a pistol, gets magically transported back to ancient times at the same location and spins a tale which is a metaphor for the one going on simultaneously in the 1930s. Granted it’s all told from the first person but much if it is told by the barbarian character Conan who also, of course, invokes his God Crom. So, frankly, I don’t know why this isn’t included in collections of the Conan stories just because it’s considered by some a prototype (perhaps even by Howard himself) because it seems pretty plain to me.

And talking of Conan, there’s even reference in another story in here, again set in more contemporary times to when it was written, where the black ring of one Thoth-amon is invoked. So, yeah, there are Conan references in these tales as well as the Lovecraftian mentions.

Now, in the 1970s, I remember there were one or more story collections which were basically tales of different Howard characters that were transformed, by unscrupulous publishers who shall not be named here, by changing the character and location names to ones found in the Conan tales and reprinted as Conan stories. I believe the story in this collection entitled The Gods of Bal-Sagoth may indeed have been a victim of this practice at some point over the decades... and possibly more than one of the tales in this story may have been further transformed, perhaps.

There are some other tales which almost seem like dry runs for Conan stories by Howard here too... as you might expect. More than one story included here is a little close in structure or idea to existing Conan tales which may have come later and, certainly, the tale here entitled Worms Of The Earth, which tells a tale of Bran Mak Morn, the king of the Picts... and his vengeance unleashed on certain agents of the Roman army, seemed to me to bear a striking structural similarity, in a much simpler and less round about form, to Howard’s one and only Conan novel, The Hour Of The Dragon, if I’m not mistaken. I can see where he may have built on the idea at play in this tale.

My favourite story in this collection, however, has little to do with Cthulhu. It’s called Skull Face and it’s obviously been ‘inspired’ by Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu stories, if Fu Manchu was called Skull Face and was a hideous, resurrected Egyptian sorcerer mummy. Starting in the opium dens of Limehouse, the main protagonist actually starts off as a henchman, of sorts, owing the titular character the debt of his life but, soon, the beauty of an oriental girl and the heroism of another character inspire him to attempt to kick his hashish habit and team up against the atrophied but powerful, demonic wizard. It’s one of the longer stories in this volume but certainly the jewel in the crown, as far as I’m concerned. Although, I did find it interesting that, in another story called The Fire Of Asshurbanipal, the two adventurous heroes have to avoid looking at a demonic manifestation causing destruction around them to their enemies, much like the climax of Raiders Of The Lost Ark.

And that’s about it from me on this one. The Cthulhu Stories of Robert E. Howard is a handsome tome with a beautiful cover (on the hardback at least) depicting a Cthulhu terror and, on the wraparound, a man fleeing for his life as it doggedly pursues him. The tales are not all nearly Cthulhu enough, for my liking, for the tome to use such a title but, it doesn’t really matter all that much as it’s a fine collection and Howard is as good a writer when he’s telling tales that don’t involve his famous Cimmerian, as when he’s depicting the Hyborian Age. Definitely worth a read and some space on your bookshelf if you are a Robert E. Howard fan, for sure.

Minore

My Big Fat
Greek Cthulhu

Minore
Directed by Konstantinos Koutsoliotas
Greece 2023 Melancholy Star
Screened 26 August at FrightFest, London

Konstantinos Koutsoliotas’ new film Minore had its European premiere at FrightFest this year and, blimey, I had a strange reaction to this one. If I was to sum it up as a quick snapshot I’d say... it’s what you might get if you crossed a 1980s/90s Jean Paul Gaultier perfume advert with an abundance of alien tentacle monsters. So... hmm.

And I found myself a little bit conflicted with it at first. The film slowly sets up its characters... and I mean slowly. So slowly that for the first third of the movie I got kinda bored fairly quickly although, the beautifully ‘muffled’ bursts of colours... everything looks like it’s been shot using strange filters and coloured lighting... were just enough to maintain my interest. It’s a real scene setter which focuses on all the characters in a coastal town in Greece as we learn of the musicians and dancers of a local café and their various friends and regulars, while a lone sailor has come to the town to seek his father... who walked out on the family when he was a mere boy. However, the slow burn coupled with some lengthy singing and dancing sequences did, I admit, begin to lose me but, then again, it’s certainly a quirky film and that kept me going.

And then it started to get really interesting and then, I’ll be honest, it couldn’t get more quirkier if it was a quirky quirk being quirked over with a quirksome quirk machine on Quirkyday. To say the humour and personality of this movie is unique would be an understatement because... about a half way through, things get decidedly surreal, bloody and, somehow, even more humourous. And, ultimately, beautiful too.

Some ancient monsters which, given some of the dialogue are probably more than a little inspired by The Ancient Ones from H. P. Lovecraft’s many Cthulhu stories, attack the town... slowly at first, over a number of days. Some people go missing... perhaps, like the lady played by beautiful actress Daphne Alexander... they have walked into the sea as a result of a dreamlike state siren song of one of the creatures. Luckily, the sailor played by Davide Tucci pulls her out of harm’s way before she is engulfed by the ocean and whatever lays beneath. But it’s what flies above which is giving a rag tag bunch of heroes (and the villanous local crime kingpin) a battle, as the town’s people put up a fight armed with the knowledge of dreams, where the police and the military have failed. People are being tentacle injected with a substance that quickly eats them from inside, so the flying creatures can suck their bodies up like fluid (among other gory treats on display).

Despite my earlier reservations, by the time I was two thirds of the way through the thing, I was totally into it and was invested enough in some of the ridiculous characters... one of them even does a direct parody of the sword kata scene from the John Milius movie Conan The Barbarian... that I really cared when they lost the odd limb or head going into battle. It doesn’t hold back on the gore, for sure and even includes a memorable ‘face peeling’ sequence.

But throughout this, the film is also very funny and has a strange, dream-like, surrealist state underpinning the narrative which both looks gorgeous but also, yeah, is somewhat obfuscating in terms of the clarity of... well... of what the hell is going on. Some of it was easy to understand, such as the desire to hook big speakers up to kill the monsters in a way, perhaps a little inspired by the movie version of Mars Attacks but, as the movie finished and I moved from the darkness of the cinema housing this phantasmagorial art and out into the light of the crowded FrightFest lobby, I realised I had absolutely no idea of how a lot of it got resolved by the end.

That being said, I didn’t really care either because, by this point... I’d had a really good time with it and, yeah, I think I’d even revisit it again a few years down the line. I need to think on it some more.

Would I recommend Minore to others? Well, like I said, it’s got a pacing all its own and the narrative, such as it is, doesn’t exactly rush but that being said, it’s such a unique little film and, you know, quirky (I mentioned that, yeah?), so I’d have to say that if you are a cineaste who’s seen pretty much everything, then this movie at least has it’s own kind of surrealistic atmosphere and dream logic which is individual enough for you to lift the lid and take a peek. I’m really glad I saw this one because, well, who knows if it will get some kind of cinematic release over here anytime down the line.

The Rig

The Day The
Rig Stood Still

The Rig
2023 UK
Six episodes January 6th release

Warning: The spoilers wake...

It’s funny.... I’ve never been that happy with Iain Glen as an actor for some reason... before now, that is. I guess I saw him playing a bunch of villain roles in Hollywood movies and always confused not liking the character with the actor playing with him. I’m ashamed for making that very obvious mistake, especially at my age in life but, there you go, that’s how it is... or rather, that’s how it was. Now though, I’ve seen him play a kind of anti-heroic, could go either way character in the new TV show The Rig and, I have to hand it to him, he’s excellent in this and I respect him a hell of a lot more as an actor. I’ll need to keep an eye out for some of the other stuff he’s done. He’s great here.

That being said, The Rig is not primarily Glen’s show, for sure. It’s one of those stories which has several ‘heroes’ (for want of a better word and before I start to wear out ‘protagonist’ as my regular substitute) and it’s a brilliant ensemble piece which lets you figure out just who the heroes and villains are and, well, like all good drama, it’s not that black and white with a lot of the characters.

Now, apart from Glen, I didn’t know any of the other names in this show but I sure recognised a lot of them. I’ve probably seen most of them here or there in other things so we have the likes of Emily Hampshire (oh right, just looked her up, I recognised her from Chapelwaite, the review of which will eventually pitch up here on this blog when I can schedule it in), Molly Vevers, Abraham Popoola, Rochenda Sandall, Martin Compston, Mark Bonnar, Mark Addy and Owen Teale. And they all, including many others in the cast (hey, I’m not going to do a huge list here), seemed like old friends to me. They are all obviously classic character actors and are absolutely perfect as an ensemble cast for this kind of thing. And Owen Teale, especially, should win the award for most ignorant and sustainably angriest man in existence here... he plays the wild card roguish element very well but, it’s the old ‘heart in the right place’ character option for him and I kind of appreciated the bluff and powder keg element he brings to the show.

The story is a slow burn of sorts although, when you think about what’s covered, you realise that there’s actually a fair amount going on in terms of character progression. The show appealed to me because it looked like it was going to play as something like another variant of The Thing, just set on an oil rig but, yeah, it’s actually a little more than that and, like a lot of the elements in the show, the perceived threat to the crew is not necessarily what it seems. The fact that Mark Bonnar’s reading a copy of John Wyndham’s The Kraken Wakes in the first couple of episodes is a bit of a giveaway and there’s definitely an ‘ancient ones’ Cthulhu vibe going on in the show as well. Without giving too much away, I would call this a kind of aquatic version of The Day The Earth Stood Still but, with the ‘alien’ life form pulling no punches and not hesitating in wiping out life on the planet if it’s not being listened to. So, yeah, there’s obviously a strong, environmental, ‘save the planet’ kind of thread running through the tale too.

One of the things which, at first, disappointed me and then fascinated me is that, as I intimated earlier, the characters are not clear cut. For example, Iain Glens character towards the end of the show seems to be vacillating between different courses of action in terms of attempting to find a way for his crew to survive a certain threat. One minute he’s going to go with the lead of the obligatory ‘human villain’ character, introduced at the start of episode four and then, suddenly looking at another option which presents itself. And then I realised that this is a nice touch by the writers because, asides from the tension created by not knowing with whom his character will side with, it certainly reflects the stresses and lack of clarity of real life, to some extent.

At the end of the day, I have to say that while The Rig isn’t the most spectacular show on television (although it does have some amazingly well designed shots, such as the longish opening shot of the first episode), it is quite good science fiction and the gradual unfolding of the story coupled with, as I said, a whole host of great actors, kept me entertained. What mainly disappointed me was the fact that it turned out to not be a mini series but, instead, leaves it all on a bit of a cliff hanger as to what will happen next. Thankfully, the show has just been renewed for a second season.

The thing is... and this is where the spoiler warning comes in folks, stop reading if you don’t want to know... I’m just not sure what more the writers could possibly have to say about the subject to sustain another series. At the end of the show, we witness a handful of survivors being taken away in two helicopters at the prelude of an ‘extinction level event’, as a huge tidal wave, the grand daddy of tsunamis, is about to wipe out Great Britain and, quite possibly, the rest of the world too. The Rig is quite badly destroyed by the start of this wave and then the survivors in the helicopters get hit with the revelation that the helicopter isn’t taking them home (probably wise, actually, since their homes are about to exist only under many fathoms under water) but somewhere else. But where? Such mystery. Well, I hate to be one of ‘those’ people but, since the majority of the land is about to be wiped out and the title of the show is... well... The Rig... I’m putting my money on the helicopters landing at another rig before long because, yeah, where else would they be going unless they want to change the title of the show and lose viewers who wouldn’t realise? We shall see, I guess. I’m hoping series two isn’t all that far away because, post pandemic (yeah, right, like that’s over), the gaps between seasons in TV shows seem to be getting so large that I often forget what happened last time around, in many cases. But, yeah, I think The Rig is worth a watch and I’m glad I saw this one.

Call Girl Of Cthulhu

Crafty Love

Call Girl Of Cthulhu
USA 2014
Directed by Chris LaMartina
Midnight Crew Studios

Warning: Some details of specific
scenes in a spoilerish manner.

Ha! This is a fun movie. It’s one of those “this was okayish” recommendations I saw strolling through in a conversation by two of my followers on Twitter so, since the title of the movie, Call Girl Of Cthulhu, was obviously referencing H. P. Lovecraft’s Eldritch creations I thought I’d give it a go... even though I’d already seen another comedy horror inspired by his writings, The Last Lovecraft (reviewed here) only a couple of years before.

This one follows a similar plot to that one, actually, with a group of Cthulhu worshipping cultists (pretty much tentacle heads) who are after something which they need to summon ‘the Ancient Ones’ and bring about the end of the world, with a group of reluctant heroes headed up by main protagonist Carter (played by David Phillip Carollo) trying to stop them and simultaneously figure out what the heck is going on. Carter is a virginal artist who’s obsessed with pornography and who accidentally stumbles on a call girl called Riley (played brilliantly by Melissa LaMartina), who happens to have (although she doesn’t realise the significance of it), a specific Cthulhuian birthmark on her backside. Carter goes on his first proper date with her, despite the misgivings of his flat mate Erica (played by Nicolette le Faye). A group of people determined to stop the cult get Carter to make a copy of a stolen book used to open a portal (I can only assume it’s supposed to be a version of Lovecraft’s infamous Necronomicon) but don’t know that he knows the same call girl who they have also been looking for, to try and stop the incoming apocalypse. That’s the plot and I won’t go into that any further...

But it’s a really fun film for sure. It’s one of those films where some of the humour comes from the main protagonist’s innocence in the face of suddenly being thrust into the entertainingly sleazy underbelly of commercially exploited sexuality but, also, the film entertains with its completely over the top levels of proportionately inappropriate goriness. And it really doesn’t hold back on either of those elements either. The gorinesss is truly outstanding in both its quantity and inventiveness but there’s also loads of nudity, which is something I’d expected the film’s producers to shy away from.

Some of the special effects (which all looked practical to me, as opposed to CGI... but I may be wrong) are pretty good while others look really cheap, do-it-yourself ‘amateur hour’ and, although I’ve no doubt this is partially due to budgetary reasons, I have to say that I suspect that some of this stuff was left the way it was to help aid the humour of the movie... it does have a certain Heath Robinson kind of appeal to the effects.

As you would expect, there are a fair few Lovecraftian joke references scattered throughout such as Rick ‘The Dick’ Pickman who, due to some plot developments, grows a monster cock with teeth which threaten to kill his victims... and a nice moment where we see the that Carter (not Randolph Carter but, of course, that’s who he’s named after) has saved a special H. P. Lovecraft ‘Deep Ones’ branded condom for that someone special who comes into his life.

And there are lots of gory sex jokes too, such as a man being given a golden shower by the title character after she’s been ‘Cthulhu’d up’ only to have his face melting off from the experience... or a nice moment where the porn model on Carter’s computer suddenly reveals her breasts to be twin snapping monsters that come out of his screen and try to eat him.

The actors in this are all great too, especially the three leads I’ve already mentioned who have certainly realised that they need to give a certain tongue in cheek style, heightened performance to make some of this ridiculous but, it has to be said, hugely entertaining material work. I’ve read that people think this movie has some bad acting in it but.... no, I think it’s very much a deliberate, stylistic choice being made here and I think some people may be trying to take this material too seriously... which is something the cast and crew definitely are not. They are all having a lot of fun with it, I suspect and that comes out in the performances and just made the film all the more enjoyable.

So yeah, a shortish review for Call Girl Of Cthulhu but, only because I can’t find much of anything bad to say about it and I thought most of the artistic decisions in the presentation were spot on, truth be told. If you like Lovecraftian tentacle horror with a fair amount of nudity and absolute buckets of fake blood then you should find yourself having a good time with this movie. A good ice breaker for an all nighter screening too, I would think.

The Last Lovecraft - Relic Of Cthulhu

Cthulhu You Think You Are?

The Last Lovecraft - Relic Of Cthulhu
USA 2009 Directed by Henry Saine
Kaleidoscope Home Entertainment DVD Region 2

The Last Lovecraft - Relic Of Cthulhu is a movie I bought for a couple of quid at a Film Fair, maybe ten years ago... and then promptly forgot about. However, my recent re-reading of The Complete Fiction Of H. P. Lovecraft (reviewed here) reminded me that I still had this comedy horror film to watch.

The film starts off with two pre-credits sequences, the first of which shows the Cult Of Cthulhu in Egypt, unearthing a part of a relic which is needed to be present when the Cthulhu monsters from H.P. Lovecraft’s short stories retake the Earth from humanity... something which should be happening pretty soon in the story’s timeline. The second sequence shows two guys on a fishing boat, drinking beer, being picked off by an unseen Lovecraftian fish monster, so the audience can see for themselves how deadly these creatures can be. The second guy is hoisted through a doorway and up out of shot before we see his bloody intestines dropping to the floor in a moment which is over the top enough to produce laughter, maybe, rather than horror. That’s the idea, though.

Then, after a short animated opening credits sequence which relies mostly on the tentacles of the Cthulhu creatures, we meet the film’s two main protagonists, Jeff and Charlie, played by Kyle Davis and Devin McGinn (Devin also wrote this movie). Jeff’s second name is Phillips and, it turns out, he is the last in line of the Lovecraft bloodline. He is sought out and entrusted by a guardian from the Miskatonic University to protect the second part of the relic from the Cult of Cthulhu... who are made up mostly of a telepathic tentacle monsters and a bunch of fish-men (also some humans but, you know, when the fish-men arrive they need someone to eat). Jeff has never heard of H. P. Lovecraft but Charlie is heavily into comics and explains everything he knows about Chtulhu. Then, a visit from some cult members who attack the guardian sends them on the run with the relic, where they pick up someone they used to know from high school who is a Lovecraft specialist/nerd (played by Matt Bauer) and then go on a road trip to seek out Captain Olaf, who they hear has had some experience of The Old Ones and the fish people of the Cthulhu mythos.

Now, as horror comedies go, it’s not exactly the funniest I’ve seen but it did make me laugh inside heartily a few times and I couldn’t say I wasn’t entertained by it. The film starts off really strong and, maybe dead ends itself towards the finish but... it’s got a lot of charm and I was certainly kept enthralled for the majority of its short storyline.

One of the characters is heavily into comics and is writing and drawing one... and this informs the movie a lot of times, giving it a kind of quirky, comic book sensibility. For example, there’s a lovely animated sequence near the start, when Charlie is explaining about the Cult of Cthulhu and their war with the ancient ones at the mountain of madness (yeah, if you’re a Lovecraft fan you can see the way this goes already, right?), which is quite funny and, like the rest of the film, treats the source material in a witty and irreverent way while still, in the case of this scene, giving a fairly good if overly prescriptive interpretation of the Cthulhu mythos and back story. Indeed, the film is so into bringing in a comic book feel to it that I was wondering for a while if this film had actually been based on a comic book itself, although it appears not.

This is a short review perhaps and the film itself is no masterpiece... but it is fast paced, keeps you interested and also dishes out an unexpected, often gory death, at times. The guy playing Charlie, who I confused with someone much more famous while I was watching this and didn’t realise who he wasn’t until after I’d finished the film, has got a lot of charisma and is a fun actor to watch. I don’t know why Kyle Davis got the part of the last of Lovecraft’s bloodline but I suspect his looks didn’t hurt here. He does look vaguely like some of the photos of H. P. Lovecraft you see from time to time and, like Lovecraft, he has those kind of ‘fishy eyes’ which might, if the fictional world ever collided with real life, mark him out as a native of Innsmouth from HPL’s tale The Shadow Over Innsmouth. There’s also a huge reference to this tale in the movie too but... I don’t want to put too many spoilers up.  

Indeed, apart from the occasional physical resemblance, there are a fair few references to Lovecraft in this, including a kind of epilogue scene where our protagonists end up... At The Mountains Of Madness but, unless there are some really subtle references in here I didn’t spot, there are also, I believe, elements/characters which are made up and are not native to the writings from which the movie takes its inspiration. It’s all a bit of a romp anyway and so mostly this is not really important. Also, you may remember if you read my review of The Complete Fiction Of H. P. Lovecraft that I was definitely aware of a strong streak of self-aware humour running through the ‘deadly serious’ writings of this writer on my latest read through so, I don’t think Lovecraft would have minded so much.  All in all, I’d probably recommend The Last Lovecraft - Relic Of Cthulhu to friends who are into the comedy/horror hybrid genre and, like I said, while it’s no masterpiece, it is funny and I had a fairly good time with it. The film seems to leave itself open for a possible sequel but, I shouldn’t think anyone is particularly holding their breath on this, least of all the writers and I’m guessing the epilogue sequence was there more to appease the distribution company that there could be more of these if it somehow made phenomenal amounts of money which, considering the way I found it, probably isn’t the case. A nice little movie though and something which I think some people will really get a lot out of. Maybe give it a go sometime.

The Complete Fiction Of H. P. Lovecraft

HP Source

The Complete Fiction
Of H. P. Lovecraft
by H. P. Lovecraft
Knickerbocker Classics - Racepoint Publishing
ISBN: 978-1631060014

I write this account of my recent researches into The Complete Fiction Of H. P. Lovecraft, not to serve as a caution or celebration to such explorers of literary intent who come after me but more as an accurate account of my findings that stand as testament to the slip into the mind shredding insanity that may be lifted wholesale from the sweet and slow miasma of his enthusiastic portent.

The facts simply, as I see them, are that I have been reading the works of one Howard Philips Lovecraft, off and on, for almost four decades of my life in one form or another, conveyed by various and fantastical lurid covered compendiums of his words in varying forms up to about ten years ago, when the Penguin Modern Classics published three collective volumes of his work in paperback form. However, I then came, a year or two ago, upon a handsome looking hardback tome proclaiming the entirety of his fictional output, minus the poetry which is of less interest to me and without samples of his non-fictional articles of which, I have to confess to the world now, that I know very little about. My hand was drawn to this heavy edition, comprising some eleven hundred pages of his fantastical gnarly brain windings in a foil blocked and embossed slipcase, because I felt that, despite the brilliance of the Penguin editions, this would be both everything in one venue and also may contain, which upon reflection I’m sure it does, small stories which may not have been included in the various other chilling anthologies from which I have partaken over the years.

So it was then, that I chose the two weeks of the summer recess from my working environment in the year of our Lord 2020, when the accursed Covid plague that has breached the livelihood and sanity of my fellow man lay lurking outside the city population’s front door like a shadow lurking in the whispering darkness, to further delve into these cosmic mysteries. Each afternoon, after my morning’s ponderous and sometimes sinister early activities, I organised a brief sojourn into the summer house at the far end of my garden and sat with the volume in question as the sun ate away at the day and the squirrels peaked in past the double doors of my preferred exile.

The works, I realised, as I began to devour them with less trepidation than I perhaps should have exhibited, were organised into some kind of chronology reminiscent of the order in which Lovecraft wrote these tales of other worlds and his legendary Cthulhu mythos - often peppered with the effects and paraphernalia of the Elder Gods and their alien brethren - as opposed to the ragged order in which they, indeed, found commercial publication to the general public at large, some posthumously in the long wake of success after this writer’s tragically early demise in 1937,  at the tender age of 46 and one half years old. This gives one a sense of the honing and development of both the author's skill at crafting his yarns and also of the rising degree of sophistication which such tales of questionable implication can be considered to have some great merit or accomplishment. Which, I might add, for the most part, the majority of these narratives certainly demonstrate.

As I began to approach the half way mark, where loosely recurring characters such as Charles Dexter Ward and Richard Upton Pickman, in whatever form, human or otherworldly, they appear to be manifesting in each subsequent tale, I began to realise that there was both a pattern to the general nature of his works but also, as I read further, I realised that there was one unflinching truth which was astonishing in its occurrence in the majority of this man’s work. I should perhaps hold my tongue, or at least stay my keyboard, rather than utter the central contrivance upon which I stumbled at this time. I have read various volumes in my studies of the dark worlds beyond our human recognition over the years but I had not made such an alarming discovery even in such tomes as the Liber Ivonis, the Cultes de Goules or the De Vermis Mysteriis. Nor, even, had my dabblings with a certain ‘hard to find’ French translation of the Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred revealed a similar ingredient to that which I had stumbled upon in my appreciation of this much ‘influential beyond the realm of sleep and death’ writer who is H. P. Lovecraft. I will not write of this again unless I feel, later in my ramblings, that I am forced to reveal this fateful ‘trick of the wit’ which I can scarcely consider without a troubled frown reshaping my outer visage.

That Charles Dexter Ward could be considered a cypher of that very writer is perhaps not problematical until one finds mention, without actually meeting, a quick reference to a character in Through The Gates Of The Silver Key... which he wrote with the help of one Edgar Hoffmann Price... known simply as ‘Howard Philips’. Of course, the fact that these are where the source of Mr. Lovecraft’s initials spring, perhaps should in no way make the former any less of a stand in for the latter, thoroughly unexplored character. I did, however, find it startling in his use of the nomenclature in this instance.

As I continued my explorations I had, as I made clear, found a pattern to his work and this seems to take the form of three kinds of tale made manifest in his writings. The first type, which tend to develop to almost unendurable lengths, a curiously intense sense of foreshadowing of things to come, are the tales of terror of either a supernatural or alien design. These I find honest and noble but, although my mind could recall almost no details of Lovecraft’s fiction which I had previously perused, they held no real surprise as to the nature of the twist in the tale... an outcome which is sadly shared by the entirety of his output, although truth be told, my revelation as to the nature of his strategy and the layers of continually creeping portent certainly doesn’t help the potency of his ultimate ambition.

The second type that he demonstrates is that which I can only think of as his travelogues. These tend to take place in the shadowy world of dreams, in which the central characters - most of Lovecraft’s aspects tend to narrate proceedings in the first person form - describe the architecture and psychological feel of certain wonderlands and forbidden places in a realm entered by sleep but with sometimes less of an obvious return in sight. These I find perhaps the dullest of affairs in all this writer’s canon although, I have to say, that I finally took some small enjoyment from his somewhat gruelling and long work The Dream Quest Of Unknown Kadath, where none was found before.

The third type is the happier fusion of these two styles with the travelogue nature of certain styles of the second archetype supporting and making more concrete the diabolical nature of the account and it is these that tend to make up a proportion of my favourite of his tales. I might mention here that of my two absolute favourites, At The Mountains Of Madness and The Shadow Over Innsmouth, the former exhibits the third type of yarn spinning while the latter is perhaps, in some ways, a much loved throwback to his earlier tales of terror, albeit one which demonstrates that a sense of humour, though not readily apparent in the po-faced nature of his written form, is certainly not lacking in the heart of the artist.

As I read through this mad mountain of erstwhile fantasy, comprising examples of varying human transformation such as of fish or ape, reanimated corpses stumbling about in varying degrees of success, body swaps from one realm to another and the hideous, lurking horrors of Lovecraft’s fantastic imagination... I also found there to be the profound influence of such writers as Edgar Allan Poe, Bram Stoker and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, not to mention the name checking of certain friendly contemporaries and the stuff of their tales such as Robert E. Howard and young Robert Bloch. There is even a tale, ghostwritten as the popular Harry Houdini, which was a commission for the esapologist’s own magazine, where his central ‘real life’ character certainly takes up the familiar visage of a typical Lovecraft protagonist and this, too, tends to slip into the less dreamstate version of his travelogue template.

In addition to these references and, perhaps the reason for the successful incline and influence of this wordsmith in later years, was the weaving together of many of his ‘weird tales’ into a single, if loose fitting, cloth. The metatextual nature of which nobody can deny and perhaps this knitting together of different parts of his tales with the many references to the Necronomicon, Cthulhu and places in Arkham such as Innsmouth and Dunwich, is what made the workmanship so proudly displayed now an appealing prospect for the preservation of his life’s work. There's even a tale, The Thing On The Doorstep, that acts as a direct sequel to The Shadow Over Innsmouth... although the concept explored therein is much different.

All this I took in as I continued to read, afternoon upon afternoon, with a fervour no alienist could cease, until I at last reached the final tale which, once again, proved my terrifying deduction about the structure in which this consummate artist presented these antediluvian phantasmata to his potential readers. This is the one thing which made me shudder and which has haunted my dreams when I think back to those sunny afternoons of reading these chill and casually unspeakable terrors, rewarding the efforts of my matutinal activities. As Lovecraft himself wrote at the opening of his famous tale The Call Of Cthulhu, which I quote here for the understanding of the reader... “The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.”

Alas, such correlation was not destined to be stifled in mine own case as I reveal now to you, patient reader, my one terrible discovery of this writer’s eerie and powerful works which will forever mock me when I revisit his fantastical realms - otherworldly or terraqueous. And it is this.

For the majority of these stories found in The Complete Fiction Of H. P. Lovecraft, the writer crafts the tale in such a way that, since we usually know the outcome of the final fate of the central character given the tremendous amount of foreshadowing employed by the artist, that character will usually make a dreadful and groundshaking discovery about two thirds or three quarters of the way through and then, after this has happened, will give excuses as to not reveal that dark secret until such a time as it needs to be truly known. Hiding this information in plain sight from the reader, he waits until the very last paragraph, sometimes the very last sentence of a tale to... REVEAL THE NIGHTMARISH TWIST OF THE THING THAT HIS WHOLE DISCOURSE RESTS UPON.

Professor Nuts4r2
Miskatonic University
Arkham

Colour Out Of Space

Drag Me To Well

Colour Out Of Space
(aka Color Out Of Space)
Portugal/USA 2019 Directed by Richard Stanley
Screening at the London Film Festival 8th October 2019

Okay, so the sixth and final film of my London Film Festival experience this year was also a treat, in the form of a new H. P. Lovecraft adaptation. Now, I’ve always had a soft spot for Lovecraft but he’s a hard writer to get up on screen. Mostly, I suspect, because the majority of what he wrote used the short story form so it’s hard to expand out into a feature anyway. Also, Lovecraft’s preoccupation of describing ancient, ‘nameless’ horrors or alluding to the unspeakable things which happen rather than actually giving you full descriptions... the literary equivalent of hiding your monsters in the shadows so nobody can see how bad your creature costume is... doesn’t help potential film-makers when it comes to trying to adapt his stuff. I do, however, tend to enjoy a certain amount of what passes for ‘screen Lovecraft’. I could happily rewatch Die, Monster, Die, a 1965 attempt at bringing The Colour Out Of Space to the screen and I was even tolerant when they insisted on presenting one of his key stories, The Case Of Charles Dexter Ward, as Edgar Allan Poe’s The Haunted Palace... I still don’t know how they got away with that one, though.

So, yeah, I was chomping at the bit to see this new movie but not, necessarily, because it was based on Lovecraft (although that was always going to be one of the plus points) but because this was the triumphant return... and having seen the film I can certainly confirm it is ‘full on triumphant’... of much loved director Richard Stanley. I loved his movies ‘back in the day’ when he directed Hardware and Dust Devil but, it appears that this is the first feature film he’s attempted to make since, by my reckoning, 1992. I’ve seen a few shorts and documentaries by him since then but he’s been hiding in the shadows for a while now due to various reasons, some of them personal, and now somebody has let him have another proper crack at making a low budget feature and... well, good idea. I just wanted to see it regardless because I know how special his first two films are.

So I was delighted to be in attendance at one of the two screenings that Colour Out Of Space got at the London Film Festival this year and even more happy that the great man was in attendance himself, to give an intro to the movie and then get into a question and answer session with the audience afterwards. He’s got one of those hypnotic voices I always find so easy to listen to for long periods of time which, in a way, is just as well because he is a bit of a talker.

So anyway, based on a work by Lovecraft, a writer who Stanley said in the Q & A that his mother got him into at the age of seven, Colour Out Of Space stars Nicholas Cage as Nathan, the head of a secluded homestead in New Orleans where he keeps a farm of tomatoes and alpacas and lives with his wife Thereza, played by Joely Richardson and his three children Benny (played by Brendan Meyer), young Jack (played by Julian Hilliard) and Lavinia (played by Madeleine Arthur).

The film is re-set in modern times but as the film’s ‘outsider’ character, a water surveyor played by Elliot Knight, walks into the forest and finds Lavinia, she is dressed in antiquated looking clothes and standing by her horse as she is trying to ‘summon up a spell’. It’s a lovely opening actually because, it’s not until Knight walks in on her and you can see him wearing modern clothes, that you are able to get a better time fix on the thing. It’s almost like you are looking at something which Roger Corman might have made in the mid-1960s for a minute. Knight’s character is called Ward Phillips which is, of course, a shortening of the original writer’s first two initials, Howard Philips.

Actually, the film is absolutely cluttered with allusions to the life and literature of Howard Phillips Lovecraft, with references to Dunwich and Arkham and all kinds of things. It didn’t bother me too much though because this production is so well put together. I was a little disappointed, truth be told, that the Necronomicon, the fictitious, extremely rare and demonic tome mentioned in many a Lovecraft tale... and quite a few other tales in both literature and film over the years... was reduced to being a small paperback volume in this. I got over it fairly quickly though. There are also a fair few references, I think, to the previous films of Richard Stanley ‘hidden in plain sight’ on occasion, such as the graffiti scrawled on the eldest son’s bedroom wall stating that... “No Flesh Shall Be Spared”... which is, of course, a reference to Hardware.

The film is... and this really isn’t surprising given as it’s Lovecraft... not entirely faithful to the original Lovecraft short. This is a movie and demands changes to be able to pass into this format, especially in a world where every film pretty much has to strive to be commercially popular now. However, unlike a fair few adaptations of the writer’s works, it is actually quite faithful in its own ways to the spirit and basic plot points of the thing. So yes, there are alpacas and crazy, almost Gigeresque... perhaps I should say Cthulhuesque in this case... monsters but various key points are put in place and faithfully maintained to anchor the film firmly in the source material quite overtly and positively so. In terms of modern adaptation, it holds up quite well. I was surprised when I heard the astonishingly low budget for this film too (around 6 million dollars) since it looks way more expensive, I think, than what it was actually put together for.

Beautiful shot set ups, of course, as you would expect form Stanley and the colours are, absolutely wonderful. There’s some nice purples in there. It probably doesn’t help matters for potential directors that, if memory recalls (it’s been at least ten years since I read this and probably twenty more before that even), the ‘colour’ out of space is an alien colour which has no equivalent on Earth so, given the challenge of an impossible colour palette to work around, I think the director here does pretty amazingly well.

I’m not going to say much about the story beats on this one... the meteor, the well etc... because you know, pretty much (and Mr. Stanley said this himself in his Q&A session, after pointing out the difficulties of adapting Lovecraft for the screen) that as far as human characters go it’s almost always going to end in either madness or death (usually both). There is, in fact, a last person standing moment in the film but I think this is very much in keeping with the original short and the nice ‘absence of colour’ in certain parts of the end sequence was also nicely done and enough to distract me on a visual level anyway.

If I had any criticisms of the film then I think, purely going on this first viewing, that things maybe do get a bit over the top towards the end... not in terms of content but in what they ‘show’ of the content. Of course, you expect that of a Nicolas Cage film now anyway but I was amused to hear Mr. Stanley saying, after the film had finished, that Cage “isn’t nearly as crazy as people think he is”. I always suspected as much but, of course, coming from a director as delightfully crazy as Richard Stanley anyway, I’m not 100% sure that’s a stirling endorsement.

Another slight criticism would be the title, which on the print I saw (even though I saw it in rainy England), was written as Color Out Of Space, in the American spelling. However, I did notice that the spelling was written in the English manner on the credit which read something along the lines of... based on the short story The Colour Out Of Space by H. P. Lovecraft... so that kind of mollified me a little. As did the appearance of Tommy Chong in the movie.

Oh... I almost forgot to mention the score by Colin Stetson, which I thought was pretty good. It does call attention to itself in various scenes but I don’t see anything wrong with that and it does well to help maintain a level of unease and strangeness to the proceedings. It’s a nice scene setter too, with the breathtaking opening shots of the surrounding forest before the meteor crashes down made somehow eerie by Stetson’s, almost ‘new age’ moments within the score. I’d grab this one quickly if only the thing was out on a nice CD.

And that’s me pretty much done with Colour Out Of Space and I can’t wait until this thing comes out on Blu Ray (hopefully sooner rather than later). It was a thrill to see a film I’d been really looking forward to more than most others this year and a very special cherry on top of the icing to actually get to see Richard Stanley ‘in the flesh’, as it were.

And that’s also me done with the London Film Festival this year. I’ve seen some truly remarkable films this time around and I had a great time with all of them. Looking forward, now, to the next festival I have tickets for... which is the mini FrightFest Halloween all dayer event at the start of November. Hopefully my ‘film stamina’ will prove its worth as I try and survive from 10am in the morning until 12.30am the next morning, devouring various new horror movies as they flash before my eyes. In the meantime, I hope you enjoyed my coverage of the films I saw at this year’s London Film Festival and normal review service of three a week should resume very shortly, with two new cinema releases up next, fingers crossed. Thanks for reading.

Spring

The Shapeshift Of
Springs To Come

Spring
USA 2014
Directed by Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead
Metrodome Region 2

Slight warning-ish: Okay, there will be a very minor spoiler in here but it’s nothing that the directors don’t make implicit fairly on in the movie and also a main feature of the trailer so... if you’ve already seen the trailer you don’t need to worry too much about this review.

Spring is the second of three feature films from writers/directors Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead and was made by them between Resolution (reviewed here) and their recent sequel to that film, The Endless (reviewed by me here). I was kind of on the fence about those two movies, to be fair but the trailer to this one looked much more engaging so I bought a cheap DVD copy of it and, well, now I wish I’d imported a Blu Ray of the thing from overseas because a) it looks fantastic and b) it's easily, for this audience member, the superior film and something of a minor masterpiece.

The film starts off with some brief, scene setting stuff in America with main protagonist Evan (played really nicely by Lou Taylor Pucci) looking after his mother and watching her die in bed in front of him. It’s a touching moment but the next scene, at a kind of wake after her funeral in a bar, something happens... the consequences of which are that Evan decides to get out of America for a bit. He ends up going to Italy and, for a while, he hooks up with a couple of British ‘townies’ who are almost half charming with their typical combination of football crowd thuggery and witty banter but after they leave for Amsterdam, Evan decides to stay around in Italy for a bit, getting a ‘work for room’ arrangement at a local farm. Some of that decision is based on the interest of an absolutely gorgeous looking woman called Louise (played by the astonishingly striking Nadia Hilker) who seems to take a shine to him.

Of course, as their relationship continues... well... the audience is let into the secret that there’s something not quite right with Louise. There’s something very ancient about her but what is it exactly? Vampirism? Werewolvery? Serpent lady? Well, there are times that you might think all three and each time you try and get a handle on things you are presented with something different. However, the explanation as to what is going on, as you will hear from Louise herself, is a fusion between science fiction and fantasy concepts with little hints of the horror film, all injected into what is essentially a romantic, boy meets girl kinda movie. And it really works at pretty much everything it does. The subtle holding back and tease of the main premise is timed just right and the way this is filmed, with long swooping camera drone shots of Italy used to punctuate the segues between scenes in certain areas, make this a work with more than one kind of eye candy to it.

It’s a beautiful looking film but, as well as that, it’s a great performance piece by the two central leads and it never really veers into ‘too intense to spoil the atmosphere’ territory. Indeed, there’s also a lot of humour and in one specific scene set in church towards the end of the film, the suspense is quite fraught. It’s also, however, a scene laced with laugh out loud humour and the way the directors/performers manage to hold both emotional states for a few minutes is quite special.

Another thing I would take my hat off to the directors for is a shot near the end where we’re looking up at Evan and a plane and its trail as it appears to go through the middle of his head in the background. I wonder how they managed to time that so precisely and whether this was a serendipitous occurrence or whether it was planned out and they somehow knew the flight paths.

The best thing about this movie, though, is the ending. Things are at their romantic best but, without giving anything away, the final shot of the movie, where the camera zooms into Evan’s face before zooming back out to return to the master shot, is absolutely brilliant and things in the tale could go either way at this point. It’s also fairly subtle as it relies purely on sound design and then a pull back into that master to tell the final piece of the narrative... the unconscious biological choice the audience has, by this point, been primed to anticipate. Now, there is another way this could have also ended beautifully utilising the same footage in a different way... by not employing certain sound effects and not zooming back out to the master... but the slightly less ambiguous ending the directors have gone for here works an absolute treat and, honestly, you’ll have to wait until the last few seconds of the movie to find out if you get the fairy tale ending you’ve probably been hoping for... Spring is pretty much an adult fairy tale, to be sure... or whether this is going to be a darker revelation. And I’m certainly not going to spoil anything here.

What I will say is that this is a truly great and, seemingly, hidden gem which deserves much more attention than I’ve seen it getting. I absolutely adored Spring and think more people need to know about it. It’s entirely different, thematically, from the other two films these people have made and if there are Lovecraftian undertones to the story in some respect, they’re altogether different from the hard Cthulhu sympathies of Resolution and The Endless. So there you have it. Spring is an absolutely brilliant movie for lovers of horror but, primarily I think, just lovers in general. I hope these two directors do more of this the next time around because, honestly, the world needs more of these kinds of pieces of art in it. Definitely pick this one up while it’s still around.

The Endless

Cthulhu Hoops

The Endless
USA 2017
Directed by Justin Benson & Aaron Moorhead
Arrow Blu Ray Zone 2

Warning: Some spoilers on this one, I guess.

Okay... so all I can say is that I’m really glad that I saw these two director’s movie Resolution (which I reviewed right here) before I saw this one. As it turns out, the low key approach that it shares a couple of characters and ideas with that earlier film is like saying The Empire Strikes Back shares some characters and ideas with the original Star Wars (resubtitled Episode IV: A New Hope for modern, post 1977 audiences). The Endless is less a shared universe movie and more a direct sequel to the original. The directors play the main protagonists in this one, who were minor characters in the first, using their own christian names as character names. However, the two main protagonists of the last film are seen in a sizeable sequence towards the end of this film too. This one also, kinda, explains what was happening to these two, how... or at least why... the artefacts that made up that story kept appearing and also, although set ten years or so after the first film, we get director Aaron Moorhead’s character Aaron watching the sequence we saw where Mike first arrives at the cabin in Resolution. Which will make more sense once you see The Endless.

Furthermore, although it’s a direct sequel, it’s a little bit like a rerun or almost a partial remake, in some ways, of the first and one wonders if the two directors are just reworking their ideas in a greater exploration of the Lovecraftian stew they concocted for Resolution. Indeed, The Endless starts right off the bat with a direct quote from writer H. P. Lovecraft, as though the two are instantly stating their alignment with the ideas, or at least style, of that writer for the audience... wearing their influences on their sleeve in pursuit of a more 'up front' movie than the first, perhaps.

The film starts in a very similar manner to the first but, in this instance, after escaping from a weird ‘UFO Death Cult’ ten years or so prior to the events in the film, Justin is sent some video tape footage which forces him to track down some old hardware to play it on at a local boot sale. I actually like the fact that the writing allows for the obsolescence of the technology to require effort to access it in the first place and I saw a similar ode to obsolescence played out in a scene in the combined Ringu/Ju On sequel Sadako VS Kayako a couple of years ago (which desperately needs a subtitled physical release in the UK instead of a stupid, corporate streaming version... my review of the Frightfest screening of the film can be found here). I also liked that buying the technology to access this means that Justin sacrificed the money saved for buying a new car battery and this will have consequences, or at least complicate things for the two characters, further on down the line.

After seeing footage of one of the people at the cult, Justin convinces Aaron to take them back for a visit and so the two go, only to find that all the people they used to know are somehow un-aged over time and with a, mostly, welcoming attitude. And there are some nice sequences in here...

Such as the felt (rather than seen) presence of some large, Cthulhuian monster roaming around the landscape and a tug of war game with, probably, the same creature. And the odd appearance of artefacts utilising what can only be likened to ‘missing time’ in the main characters. Also, it’s hard for our characters not to notice that there are now two moons in the sky in the area they’ve gone to... explained as a naturally occurring, mirage style phenomena by members of the cult. It’s nicely done, though and is possibly the most interesting effect in the whole movie. This is coupled with some cool design transitions every now and again focusing on circular shapes which hints at what is really going on here.

However, when those double moons I mentioned suddenly become three moons, things start to go wrong for our heroes, who have become separated from each other due to an argument and who are now wandering around the local landscape trying to find each other. However, what they find instead is... time loops created by the ‘ancient unspeakable presence’ that we glimpsed (or quite noticeably didn’t glimpse, in actual fact), at the end of the last movie. Loops where people are trying to break their personal cycles... whether they last months, seasons, years or, in one case, literally a few seconds, by killing themselves in various ways. Furthermore, the two central characters from the last movie are more than aware now they must be caught in one of these time loops and Aaron, kindly, doesn’t let Mike know that his wife, played once again by Emily Montague, is actually in the commune a mile or so away and very much in a kind of loop herself, one must assume.

The film has the same stylistic traits of the previous, with small, almost imperceptible hand held camera movement a lot of the time and lots of light contrasting with a slightly subdued colour palette. There is actually a score for this one by Jimmy Lavalle although, a lot of the time, it’s kept quite minimal. The acting is all pretty great and, joining the directors along with Peter Cilella and Vinny Curran from Resolution, we have some good supporting cast such as Callie Hernandez and Tate Ellington doing some nice work here.

And... I don’t really have too much more  to say about it than that. It’s less subtle than the first movie, perhaps a little over the top at times with a run time which could maybe have been cut by 20 minutes or so once all the points have been made. Like the first one, however, it rambles along at its own pace and, although I have nothing against films that take their time, I did find this one dragging just a little towards the end. If you liked Resolution then you’re probably going to really like The Endless because, I think, despite it being a bit more overt with its portrayal of events, it’s a slightly better movie than the first. That being said, I definitely think you’ll have a far richer experience and appreciation of this film if you see Resolution first so, if you’ve not seen that one then I would definitely seek them out in chronological order. Both worth a watch for people who like low budget horror with a strong mystery element in the DNA of the films they are watching.

Resolution

Cthulhu You Think You Are?

Resolution
USA 2012
Directed by Justin Benson & Aaron Moorhead
Arrow Blu Ray Zone 2

Okay so... this is a movie I’m watching that’s technically an extra from the film I actually bought. I wanted to see this new horror movie called The Endless because the trailer looked good and I knew Arrow were bringing out this limited edition set the day after its, almost impossible to see, cinema release. Well, looks like I made a good call on that one because the set sold out on its initial run (I think before it even got to some customers... they may be repressing, which of course completely kills the point of having it as a limited edition in the first place) and it turns out there’s an older film by the two directors included as part of this set called Resolution.

Then I found out that the film, although The Endless is not technically a sequel, shares two characters played by the directors in that the two leads of The Endless are seen for about a minute as the same people in Resolution. So, yeah, I say it’s technically not a sequel but, frankly, any movie which shares a character is a direct sequel as far as I’m concerned (which is why Scream 3 should be called Jay and Silent Bob 6).

Anyway, I wanted to watch these things in order and so I gave this one a spin and... you know what... I’m still not 100% sure how I feel about it.

I looked on the IMDB after I’d seen it to try and gauge the reaction and it seems to range from 1 star reviews calling it the worst film ever to 5 star reviews calling it a masterpiece. I don’t think it’s either of those things but the fact that I’m still thinking about it a day after means I probably kinda liked it, I guess. It also allows me to feel happy that I wouldn’t resort to giving anything a ‘star rating’ because, you know, what would even be the point of writing a review if you’re going to kill it off with a hierarchical rating system.

I think the main reason this film works is because of the chemistry between the two lead characters/actors... Mike (played by Peter Cilella) and Chris (played by Vinny Curran). And, apparently, these two characters also turn up in some capacity in The Endless too... although whether it’s just repeat footage from this film or something else is not a question I can answer yet (I’ll hopefully watch it sometime this week). These two seem to go great together and the writing is of a quality that it all just works... at least in terms of these two.

The plot set up is very simple. Chris the artist has managed to alienate himself from all of his friends and is slowly killing himself with drugs in a patch of desert land on an Indian reservation. Mike is sent a video of him in this state and drives out to try and get him to go into rehab. When he doesn’t, Mike tasers him (done for real, apparently, at the insistence of the actor) and handcuffs him to the radiator for a week, staying with him at his dubiously acquired shack as he goes cold turkey. However, as the week goes by, an unusual trail of artefacts start showing up which initially show some kind of strange, cultish rituals before things get a little closer to home in what they’re depicting such as an old, dusty, unearthed record (possibly a 78 RPM by the looks of it) which has a distorted conversation of it on there... which only took place a day or so before between Mike and Chris.

It’s intriguing and it almost made me forget that the movie doesn’t have a musical score, for a while. Time passes very slowly and... you do kind of feel that to a degree (the person I was watching this with couldn’t make it past the 20 minute mark before he wandered off to do something else) but it kind of holds together due to the fact that the two lead characters are fairly likeable. Also, it’s got one of those ‘almost but not quite subtle’ hand held camera things going on where almost every frame is moving but, often only a little bit in reaction to things going on in the screen (which television has been doing for a while now and which has almost become a cliché in itself). Although a cameo scene from Bill Oberst Jr. as a somewhat sobering character called Byron seems to call for a rock solid, unshakeable attention from the camera in order to make one clever(ish) shot with a mirror work better.

I think it would be true to say that the dynamic between the two characters and their possible descent into madness brought on by supernatural shenanigans could be called a trifle Lovecraftian and certainly, as far as I’m concerned (although this movie is way open to different interpretations) the film gets a little Cthulhu like in its denouement... if denouement is not too strong a word for the final sequence in this movie.

Also, there are a fair few times where the media we are watching this on kind of jiggles around and has little glitches which brings into question the whole nature of the reality of the thing we are watching and, combined with some of the stuff which shows up on Mike’s laptop in the last third of the picture, certainly gave me cause to think of the camera itself as maybe being a camera-eye version of one of H. P Lovecraft’s Ancient Ones. One almost wonders if one of the books that Mike finds is a battered, old copy of the Necronomicon.

At the end of the day, Resolution is not an earth shatteringly great movie and, neither is it that scary but, putting some of the clichés of the way the media relates to the found artefacts aside, it is a kind of thought provoking scenario, at least in the sense that it doesn’t try and dish out a specific set of answers to the questions it keeps asking. I would say, however, that the idea that Mike does not want to leave danger and almost certain death and go home to his wife at one point is kinda silly when the video email that he received at home is obviously already part of the events that have been set in motion. It’s already at your door, man... not going home won’t stop it from including your wife in events. That being said, it’s the kind of poor logic that doesn’t stop the movie from staying credible within its own set of rules... you just have to figure out what those rules might be as you go along.

So, not the best movie I’ve seen but certainly something I’ll be thinking about for a while and, hooray, now I can watch The Endless (which is something I’ll hopefully be reviewing on here sometime in the next couple of weeks).

Monsters - Dark Continent

Continental Drift

Monsters - Dark Continent
2014  UK
Directed by Tom Green
UK cinema release print.

Warning: Slight spoilers in here.

Monsters: Dark Continent is a sequel to the Gareth Edwards movie, Monsters, from a couple of years ago and which I reviewed here and which, like this one, had big, Cthulhu-like monsters as part of its main narrative thrust. It’s not to be confused with the upcoming movie Dark Continents which, I understand, is based on five stories by Cthulhu creator H. P Lovecraft and which, I suspect, may also have Cthulhu-like Monsters in it. Hmmm... so I guess the point I’m making here is... why release this movie with that title if there’s a much more famous, because of the directors involved, movie coming out with more or less the same title a year or so down the road? That makes no sense.

Now, this film can’t have had too much pre-publicity, I’m guessing, because the first I’d heard that they’d actually gone ahead and made a sequel was when I saw this included in the listings for my local cinema this week... and even then I had to look it up to find out that it was a sequel to Monsters (the original director is listed as a producer but I’ve really got no idea how much involvement he had on this one). To make things worse, I went to see this on the first Saturday, early evening, screening of its opening in my local multiplex cinema, a night and time when it should have been packed out, and found that there were only two or three other audience members in there watching it along with me. So, sad to say, I predict that the box office on this film isn’t exactly going to be great... especially since it was released a few weeks earlier in the USA and, as a dedicated Twitter user and follower of people interested in film, I still hadn’t heard of it until it was in the listings for my local cinema a couple of days before I went and saw it. That doesn’t bode well for it.

Which is unfortunate in some ways because, although I wasn’t personally happy with it for reasons I will elaborate, it turned out to be a highly competently made movie with a certain edge to it and, whether I personally liked it or not, it certainly holds the attention of the viewer and you will probably be as gripped by some of the sequences as I was.

The film follows on from the first film only by the inclusion of the titular characters. It’s ten years on and the world is fighting a losing war against the Monsters who have left “the zone”. This film follows a bunch of new recruits in the army who join up and go to the Middle-East to fight the Monsters, which are not evil and are just following their alien nature. However, because the US army have ben bombing hell out of the titular creatures in various areas of that region, they also have to deal with a population of hostile insurgents who would much rather the army were driven from their land than the monsters. When the new recruits are sent on a rescue mission to find some of their unit who didn’t come back from an operation, they are forced to fight their way through hostiles in order to try and locate them and tensions and frustrations soar.

Now, I had three main problems with it and I’ll get those out of the way before I get to the positive stuff.

My first issue is that the film is much more a “horrors of war” kind of story with the monsters acting only as a catalyst and background decoration to the conflict of the stupidity/violence men do to each other... which is kind of an interesting tack but, ultimately, it felt like the film was way too busy pushing the writer’s own political agenda with not enough of the monster focussed mayhem I would have liked to have seen. Sure, there’s a heck of a lot more of the monsters in this movie than their brief appearances in the first but, still, they really were only there as a plot device more than anything else... at least that’s how I felt.

Secondly, none of the main protagonists had my sympathies as people at all... they were all portrayed as, pretty much, young thugs who’d joined the army to have a better life than dealing drugs in their ghetto and the first quarter of an hour where, I believe, the director was trying to get me to identify with these characters, was absolutely doing the opposite of what was required. I didn’t like these people who used harsh language and demonstrated really crude, almost violent, male bonding rituals. They alienated me right from the start. But the flip side of that is, of course, whether the language and attitude of these people are accurate to those of modern, young soldiers or not... the actors were all really great at convincing me these were real people. I might have hated them all but, at least, I could suspend my disbelief to the point where I couldn’t sympathise with them. So... great acting job here by a lot of the people who are in this movie.

The third problem in this is the fact that it’s a conflict movie which does tend to fall back on the crutch of constant, war movie clichés throughout. For example, in the opening montage of the buddies who have “joined up”, the writers and director (not to mention the cast) are working hard to get across the importance of one of these friends returning home from duty by showing him helping his girlfriend give birth and all his friends promising they’ve got his back while they’re on his tour of duty. For anyone who watches these kinds of films, of course, that’s an instant telegraph that something bad is going to happen to this character and, I have to say, I was quite disappointed when exactly that happens and this character is the first of the group to meet his maker in an extended scene while his friends are under fire and trying to save his life. It doesn’t get much more predictable than this.

Other clichés include the group leader and authority figure whose responsibility it is to keep his soldiers safe, losing nearly all of them and then suddenly going a bit ‘Captain Ahab’ about things and getting obsessed by his mission at the cost of his humanity and sanity. Well acted but... nah, seen it all before. And the one about the lone soldier who grows to a state of enlightenment and understanding about things, to a certain extent, because of what he’s been subjected to in his own personal battle and his ability to see the good in his fellow man? There’s that one in there too. But, of course, clichés like these work and I suspect people who haven’t seen a lot of war movies, or that kind of thing, might be sucked into the narrative a whole lot better than I was... so I cant really condemn it for this. It might be old school but it does its job and, it has to be said, it does its job quite effectively.

Everything else about this movie is great. The special effects are cool, the tension and suspense in the combat scenes is almost unbearably intense in certain places and, while not as harrowing as some of the great war films, it can still be a gruelling watch in some moments and the combination of constantly moving, hand held camera combined with some extremely competent editing really pays off for it. Once you can get over the ridiculously low values of the characters, it’s a joy to see a well oiled machine of a movie like this one at the local cinema. It also has an interesting correlation in a “dog fighting sequence”, something I really don’t approve of or condone (we all love dogs, right?) but switched out to be a dog fighting an infant alien, and using that to show us both the changes and commonality in the attitudes of the cultural backdrop of the world depicted in the movie. Nasty to watch but, nevertheless, good stuff to get certain points across in short hand.

And the surprising thing for a movie which is using a lot of “camera reaction” style photography is the fact that it has a very striking and entertaining score by composer Neil Davidge which, alas, is only available as a stupid download. When will record companies get it in their heads that we want these things on CDs please? A download is next to useless to me, frankly. They might as well just put it on vinyl... which is equally useless to me. Such a shame because I actually wanted to buy this score since it is so strong in the context of the movie and sounds like it would be a really great thing to listen to away from the venue it was created for. Such a shame.

All in all, the film is quite gritty and if you are able to sympathise with the main characters, then you should have a really good time at the cinema with it. Even though I can’t relate to characters who seem happy to behave like football hooligans rather than somebody I would personally like to hang out with, it can’t be denied that this is well put together, well acted and is quite compelling... even though it’s also quite predictable and there are not too many surprises in store, to be sure. Its a shame that a movie like this has been released into cinemas at this time of year when it’s going toe to toe with stuff like the new Avengers movie (my review of that one here) which will inevitably suck all the audience away from films like this... it perhaps deserves a better fate than I suspect it might have in store for it. Saying that, though, it’s a good bet it will do reasonably well on DVD and Blu Ray rentals through word of mouth with a young audience, I reckon... so good luck to it and if gritty, gruelling action movies are your thing... you might want to give Monsters: Dark Continent a look.