Weekly Cinemeh

Hello and welcome back to Weekly Cinemeh. This week we delved back into the the madness strewn adventures of Lovecraft with some Cthulian themed movies. Eshi and I love this type of movie. Lovecraft's way of doing horror affects the soul in a way that is very satisfying. Unfortunately, this week was a little weak...You'll see. To the list!

1: The Color Out of Space
COoS is about a young man traveling to Germany to find his father who has gone missing. While in Germany he meets a man who knew his father from the war who tells the son about their first meeting and why the land is bad around this area. I have mixed feelings about the movie. There is some overuse of CGI where practical effects could have been used instead. There is also a bit too much green screen, but neither really detracted from the movie by itself. I get when a movie is made and you don't have all the resources to do it right so I have been trying to not hold it against them. My favorite part of the movie was how it was in black and white and one of the subjects of the movie is a creature that emits an unnatural color, and to show this they always show the alien in color. Its an interesting way of handling that. The part of this movie that kind of ruined it for me is how boring it was. I like the base idea, and even where it went with it, but the movie just didn't capture my attention. Its not terrible, but its not great. Watch it, but don't expect to many surprises.

Eshi: Too much of this movie is reliant on the audience giving a fuck about things it gives us no reason to give a fuck about. For a movie about a guy looking for his dad, very little of it is concerned with either the guy or his dad. Basically, a bunch of weird shit happened to some people years ago and then some other people (like the aforementioned dad) stumble upon it and eventually the main character hears about it. As Brian says, it isn't terrible, we just aren't really given any opportunity to be interested, and considering the manic fascination that drives so much of Lovecraft's work, the lack is a painful one. I would go so far as to say don't bother with this one. Read the story though, just because this isn't a great adaptation doesn't mean the original doesn't deserve some attention.

2: Dagon
Dagon is based off of the Lovecraft story, The Shadow Over Innsmouth despite being named after another story. Dagon is a lot like Re-Animator in presentation. Its a little cheesy and over the top in ways that make the movie pulpy fun. The people who made this movie obviously had a lot of fun with it. The story is about Paul Marsh who, while on vacation off the coast of Spain with some friends and his S.O., is forced to go ashore when the boat he is on gets wrecked on a rock. While ashore he discovers the secret of Imboca and must escape a hoard of Fish-people. There is some memorable lines and some well done practical effects, though the acting is nothing to write home about. One complaint I have about this movie is when they show Dagon. Its a little cheesy and it gives a form to a type of monster that is better left nebulous. Don't expect high art, and you will enjoy this movie. Watch it with some friends and drinks and you will have a good time.

Eshi: Fucking fish-cults man, they ruin everything.

3: Shadows on the Wall
I hate bad movies. Not because they are bad, but because they make me wonder if there is something wrong with me. This is a bad movie. The main story is interesting and I think could have been quite good, but the execution was bad. You can miss this one. Eshi wanted to go into detail on this one so I will pass it off to him.

Eshi: Okay, I'm going to start by saying I don't have anything against student films. I feel like that's important to note because a lot of the problems with SotW are cliche student film issues. The problem is that it careens face first into those issues like a baby strapped to an impact test rocket. The premise is that an incompetent and awkward engineering student manages to convince his cousin and his math tutor to help him build a machine to "transmit data using background radiation without using a signal" using the schematic equivalent of a brain damaged child's finger-painting. There are stories of "insert technical jargon here" in the scripts of many sci-fi endeavors, and this is no different, save that the jargon is less technical and more a hodgepodge of buzzwords from a fifth-grade science class. Not only do they get pretty much nothing right, there's a kind of fevered pride to the stupidity that would be fucking hilarious if they didn't take it so seriously. There is no internal consistency to their concept at all and when the opportunity to bring the story back in line presents itself, it instead turns almost bravely towards incomprehensibility. Probably the worst part is how good it could have been, either as a campy comedy or as cosmic horror, with really any effort. Someone edited this thing. Someone, presumably someone who really didn't like Ben Carland, saw this and was like, "Yeah, sure, why not". The characters are all so bleakly cliche` as to be unbelievable as people, the writing is so bad that the movie would have been more compelling as a series of stills, and the science is so fucking bad they might as well have just defaulted to "engineering is magic" and not bothered. SotW is Plan 9 bad with none of Plan 9's charm.