Last year, between the two of us, we watched an average of 317 movies.
This year our goal is to top that by watching at least one a day.
And as an extra special torture, we've decided to write about all of them.

12 May 2008

The Call of Cthulhu, dir. Andrew Leman (2005)

NIKKI says:
Lovecraft Week is going well. This one was especially successful. I don't think I've seen anything like it. It's an experimental-type film, based on a Lovecraft story, that pretends to be a silent film from 1925. It comes complete with stark b/w lighting, stage make-up, and old-timey stop-motion effects. I worried I might not get into it, but it was absolutely gripping.

The movie is about an old professor who leaves his box of Cthulhu stuff to his nephew. The nephew becomes obsessed as the professor was, and heads out to find the truth behind the cult. The call of the beast sends him mad...

Somebody wrote on the Database:
"The story embodies HPL's nihilistic world view, his cosmic perspective, and his sense that mankind is doomed by its own insignificance."

Great way of putting it. I'm fairly new the Lovecraft oeuvre, but that's a worldview I can get behind. These old stories are just amazing -- the author writing a hundred years ago with this sad future for the world that's coming true. The beat might not be a big octopus with tentacles and scary eyes, but it's something... I love the subtext, the metaphors. All in all, loving Lovecraft Week.

4/5

STEVE says:
The Call of Cthulhu may be the best, most faithful Lovecraft adaptation ever. Director Andrew Leman and screenwriter Sean Branney have crafted the film in a way so faithful to Lovecraft's story that it maintains the flashback within a flashback within a flashback structure - and pulls it off.

Clocking in at 45 minutes, it manages to tell the complete story without reworking it (Re-animator), using it as a springboard (From Beyond and The Unnamable), or embellishing an already workable story to create some awful hybrid (The Lurking Fear).

I guess I shouldn't expect anything less from the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society.

They're working on a second film, The Whisperer in Darkness. Though it won't be silent, I expect it to be every bit as faithful to both Lovecraft and the film making techniques from the time-period. The Call of Cthulhu is really an amazing accomplishment.

4/5