DAGON

“Dagon” is mostly based on another of Lovecraft’s short stories, being about 65% “The Shadow Over Innsmouth.” The remainder is 5% “Dagon” and 30% miscellaneous ideas (mostly mutant fish person incest).

Review Snippet:
Personally, I’d have taken one look at the locals and decided they were either inbreds, fish mutants, or both (inbred fish mutants). In addition to being spooky in the conversation department, the people of Imboca have pale, clammy-looking skin, bizarre webbing between their fingers, and they never blink. Weirdo freakos, man. Them not blinking is a rather nice touch, even if it looks like the effect was accomplished by the actors wearing uncomfortable contact inserts. The villagers also tend to wander around with rusty knives and farming implements. The only place I have ever been that is scarier than Imboca is West Virginia.

Ah, West Virginia, where the people outnumber the teeth.

Lesson Learned:
Fish got nards.

Well, somebody has to post the lamest article of the roundtable–and ‘somebody’ is usually me, so I might as well embrace it. It’s a poor workman who blames his tools, but crimminy, I can only hope I end up with something a bit meatier next time than Full Moon’s epically mediocre Lurking Fear. It’s not doing Lovecraft any favors either, believe me.

DIE, MONSTER, DIE! (1965)

In which Howard Phillips Lovecraft receives full screen credit for the very first time…and really wishes he hadn’t.

Stephen Reinhart, an American, travels to Arkham, England, at the invitation of his girlfriend’s mother. He arrives to finds Susan’s family in the grip of a strange force, which has blighted the surrounding countryside and brought illness and death to the Witley household.

.

Could this force be:

(a) Radiation?
(b) Unspeakable evil from beyond?
(c) The family chickens coming home to roost?
(d) All of the above?

.

YOUR ATTENTION PLEASE:  Unfortunately, due to some organisational issues, the screeners for The Whisperer In The Darkness have not reached the relevant parties in time for this Roundtable. However, when they do arrive, the film will be reviewed, and you will be notified here as usual. So, as they say, please watch this space.

Here’s a blast from the past that still holds up.  RAWR!!!

Dragonslayer (1981)

Yeah, my roundtable contribution this time around is, shall we say, a marginal example.

Cabiria (1914), in which you never can tell which aspect of a movie is going to give rise to a major pop-culture phenomenon…

Evilution (2007), in which we see that when zombies are involved, good old-fashioned overkill might occasionally be better than the more nuanced approaches favored by modern militaries…

100 Monsters (1968), in which a singularly peculiar attempt at gentrification faces a singularly peculiar form of neighborhood activism…

The Shuttered Room (1967), in which David Greene and D. B. Ledrov appropriately treat their “collaboration” with August Derleth about the same way that Derleth treated his “collaborations” with H. P. Lovecraft…

and…

Transatlantic Tunnel (1935), in which some people apparently can’t tell when a job is more than difficult enough already.
 
 
 

THE HAUNTED PALACE (1963)

In which the first ever adaptation of an H.P. Lovecraft story goes out into the cinematic world disguised as something else: faux-Poe.

In the village of Arkham, Joseph Curwen, suspected of trying bring the Elder Gods back into this universe by mating them with human females, is dragged out of his house and burned to death by an enraged mob. He dies cursing the village and all those who have had a hand in his death.

One hundred and ten years later, Curwen’s great-great-grandson, Charles Dexter Ward, arrives with his wife, Ann, to look over the Arkham property he has just inherited. In rapid succession, he ignores (1) a frightened coachman, (2) hostile townspeople, and (3) a mutated girl.

I think it’s fair to say he deserves what he gets…

And now, a movie for those who think normal professional wrestling is just too realistic.

Ultimate Death Match (2009)

MEGA PIRANHA

Tiffany creates piranhas large enough to eat a battleship. The fish never stop growing and never stop eating, despite the fact that they don’t need to eat to grow and were meant to grow to eat.

If what I just wrote doesn’t make any sense to you, then I have successfully captured the spirit of this film.

Review Snippet:
Before long, the school of rapidly growing piranhas reaches a major harbor along the river. The carnage is horrific. Not because, as you might suspect, the fish eat everything and everybody in the water. The Mega Piranhas have a startling tendency to leap out of the water at buildings. Upon crashing into a building, a fish then explodes.

Exactly why the piranhas jump into the buildings is never explained. Maybe they are attacking their own reflection, which is odd behavior for animals that travel in schools, or perhaps they are just trying to steal Wi-Fi.

Lesson Learned:
A Hyundai can outrun a Blackhawk helicopter.

Unlike other cinematic H. P. Lovecraft adaptations, The Curse was not “based” on a Lovecraft story, but was instead “inspired”. In other words, the filmmakers took just enough elements out of a Lovecraft story (the story being The Color Out Of Space) so that they would not risk a possible lawsuit coming from the Lovecraft estate. With Wil Wheaton of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Directed and co-produced by Ivan Zuccon, best known to American horror audiences for helming The Shunned House (2003), also a Lovecraft adaptation. He’s also responsible for The Darkness Beyond (2000) and Unknown Beyond (2001), both directly Lovecraft-inspired, which makes four Lovecraft adaptations in a filmography of six movies. This, you might reasonably surmise, is a passion for him. And that’s a shame, because Zuccon’s filmmaking vocabulary is absolutely wrong for adapting Lovecraft.

Colour From the Dark (2008)

Cthulhu (2000)

No, not that movie… Tori Spelling does not appear in this one, for which we may thank the Elder Gods.

Rather, this is a low-budget Australian movie that starts out with the noble intention of adapting a Lovecraft story faithfully… and ends up switching stories in mid-film. To make things worse, they went from one of Lovecraft’s most direct and managable tales to one the budget simply couldn’t handle.

I guess when you’re dealing with the Old Ones, you get used to biting off more than you can chew.

Although I still aver that the slasher genre is played out, I’m willing and happy to acknowledge when a filmmaker takes those tired old tropes and gives us something half-decent with them. While too many indie microbudget genre directors are content to crank out love letters to the trash slasher flicks they loved in junior high, director Mike Nichols and writers Charles Black and Sam Freeman make Bread Crumbs (2009) more than a slavish imitation of thirty-year-old cheapies. It’s not a terribly good movie, but it’s good enough to be a net positive. This despite the fact that the movie is, essentially, the blending of two related slasher subgenres: “spam in a cabin” and “killer rednecks.”