In 1998 Satanic priest and sculptor Bryan Moore released his self-produced short-film adaptation of Lovecraft’s story. I’m not sure what the budget was, but it’s not much outside of the filmstock, processing and some fees for the (mostly) professional crew. It’s pretty much a glorified home movie, but on the other hand, it’s a really damn good one.
Out of work writer (Bryan Moore) finds a room for rent in a run-down boarding house, with requisite ethnic land-lady (Vera Lockwood), who tells him of the mysterious Dr. Munoz (genre veteran Jack Donner). The strange fluid drips, the heart-attack and all other aspects of the story are, for the most part, faithfully realized in grainy black and white. Essentially a near literal translation from story to screen, Moore doesn’t stray much, if at all, from the path set out in Lovecrafts brief story. He takes the liberty of naming the previously anonymous narrator and lead character “Randolph Carter” and, for some reason, has given the land-lady a name change and swapped her ethnicity from Spanish to Italian.
While it is shot on film, it has gone through a lot of post to give it a scratched and grainy appearance. I’ve seen this done many times before with varying degrees of success, but I have to say this is probably the best I’ve seen it done. The props are sparse, but the machine that Munoz has built to keep his room cold is actually quite impressive looking. I’m assuming Moore used his sculpting talent to build it and it’s actually the most “authentic” looking to the time period of any adaptation.
Moore himself does an acceptable job in the acting department, resisting the usual pitfalls of amateur filmmakers. He doesn’t mug for the camera, or try to draw attention away from the other characters and hog the screen. He’s definitely a bit on the wooden side, but I’ll take that in place of the usual scenery chewing antics of most amateur thespians any day. When it comes time for Munoz to take over as dominant character, Moore wisely takes a back seat to Donner’s decades of experience in film and television. Speaking of Donner's Dr. Munoz, that is where this adaptation really shines. Donner is easily the most perfect casting in the role of Munoz out of any adaptation. He is totally convincing in his portrayal of a scientist that has ironically ceased living by trapping himself in his room in order to stay alive, and conveying anguish for his past life while radiating something dark and sinister. So convincing in fact, that after seeing Donner’s reading of the part, I will never be able to see anyone but him when I think of the character.
Without Donner’s sublime turn, the film would not be anywhere near as successful as it is. It would also be easy to nit-pick the movie for its faults. Clearly the building is too modern, the architecture looks to be built at the same time the story is set, not the 1800s-era New York brownstone mansion of the story. The doorknobs and locks are modem design. The interior is described as being luxury turned to seed, not one chair away from being empty abandoned. But to reiterate what I said before; when taking in Lovecraft adaptations, if you sweat the small stuff, you’ll only walk away unhappy.
According to a two year old blog posting, Moore has claimed to be working on securing backing for a new project titled THE FUNERAL DIRECTOR. Since there seems to be absolutely no other updated info about it anywhere, I think it’s safe to assume is not coming to cinemas near you any time soon. Moore was also responsible for designing the damn spiffy deco-Cthulhu relic in Andrew Leman’s excellent faux-silent film THE CALL OF CTHULHU (2005) and seems to be continuing his work as a sculptor.
CHILL (2007)
Sung to the tune of “Dixieland”:
Oh, I wish I was in the land of Tempe,
Bad effects are long forgotten,
look away, look away
Look away, this movie sucks!
Ok, so my singing voice is a little off and that last part doesn’t rhyme, but you’ll have to cut me some slack. I haven’t got my sea-legs back after being keelhauled by this turkey.
As I said before, expectations for an HP Lovecraft adaptations must be adjusted from the norm. Here dancer-turned-filmmaker (no, really) Serge Rodnunsky, a man responsible for helping to fill the shelves of your local Blocksucker with low-rent clunkers for the past 20 years, provides an updating of “Cool Air”. I was actually sort of looking forward to this (the new DVD cover is pretty damn spiffy), as I like the story and I think a modern day ghetto adaptation has tons of potential, maybe combined with elements from “The Terrible Old Man”. And seriously, after no less than 33 previous films, you’d think ol’ Serge would have this filmmaking thing down cold (alright, alright, stop groaning).
The story told awkwardly in linear and flashback, is of Dr. Munoz (Shaun Kurtz), a research scientist who is working on some nameless serum that is never really explained. When his funding is cut off he flips out and injects himself with a syringe of the stuff and promptly dies. For some reason, with their boss dead and the funding cut, Munoz’s two assistants still show up for work every day and apparently never bother to look in the back room where Munoz is apparently alive-ish, but stinks like a polecat stuck in a radiator grill. Munoz finally gets bored with sitting and stinking and attacks and injects his assistants with a broken bottle and the serum.
Flash forward 25 years and Munoz is running a ghetto liquor store-slash-deli that has lots of red meat in its butcher counter - the implication being that it's human, but this is never explored and actually none of the victims are really killed per se. An ex-ER worker tuned writer, Sam (Thomas Calabro, who appears to be from the "sleepwalking" school of acting), gets a job at said store and notices some odd stuff. Munoz is always in a huge walk-in cooler, decked out with antique sofa, coffee table and medical charts due to his rare skin condition.
Meanwhile Munoz and a clumsy assistant with a torn face are chasing the local riff-raff around stolen Los Angeles locations and dragging them back to the cooler in their bizarrely obviously intentionally-dirtied panel van. There they are hung up in a walk in freezer (that never freezes anyone or causes anyone to have visible breath) with big red bags of something that look awfully reminiscent of the cotton candy cocoons in KILLER KLOWNS FROM OUTER SPACE (1988). Sam develops a bit of a relationship with a girl (Ashley Laurence continuing her downward spiral) who has just separated from her husband and is being stalked by a creepy-ass cop (James Russo). The cop is preforming a half-assed investigation of the disappearances, apparently not for the department, but at the behest of a local pimp (who is about as straight outta Compton as Jaleel White), but really spends most of his time stalking and intimidating Lawrence.
If that synopsis sounds like a jumbled mess, the way the movie tells it is even worse. Lurching around from plot point to flashback to underdeveloped subplot to laughable scenes of “horror” makes for an unpleasant movie to try to follow. Scenes switch for no apparent reason, when someone is running away from Munoz and his club-footed assistant, suddenly they are killed as the none-too-subtle villains appear completely out of nowhere. Even Jason Voorhees would call foul on these two. The editing doesn’t help as some scenes cut too quickly and others go on foreeeeeever; such as a scene in which the assistant pulls a hooker off the lap of a guy behind the wheel of an SUV, and after she gets away, he stabs her with a meat-hook, hauls her to the van and returns to the shlub in the SUV where they stare at each other for seemingly endless time. Assisstant stares at driver. Driver stares at assistant. Driver continues to stare. Driver looks at steering wheel. Driver starts hyperventilating. The assistant stares. The driver stares. More hyperventilating. More stares. Aggggghhhh! What the hell? Brother, if some dude with a cut up face pulled a hooker out of my ride and whipped out a meathook, even my natural born curiosity wouldn't keep my ass within 50 freakin' miles of that spot to see what happens next! In that scenario, there are no happy endings.
As much as I dislike movies shot on digital video (particularly movies that need to convey atmosphere), I can deal with it. Particularly when you have adjusted your mindset into low-budget Lovecraft mode. What I can’t choke down is the fact that executive producer Shaun Kurtz has the ego to horribly miscast himself as Dr. Munoz. He looks like Jeff Daniels with a glandular condition and his whiny, nasal voice completely guts a character that is supposed to be a brilliant scientist-turned-walking dead who has resorted to kidnapping and killing people to sustain his life (here all he needs is human skin-grafts). In addition to that, having him get up in a Victorian-era suit and a cowl (?!) while running around da hood with his lumbering oaf assistant makes them look like a couple of lost frat boys looking for a Halloween party.
Surprisingly the best thing this film has going for it is an entire subplot that could have been made into a separate and pretty decent little movie. Lawrence does a fine job of portraying a vulnerable, damaged woman, who is an irresistible target for James Russo's aging, predatory, sleazebag cop. Russo’s performance is menacing and creepy as hell without going over the top and the subplot is actually reasonably well developed. Too bad the filmmakers didn't choose to make this the main story, sort of a BAD LIEUTENANT: PORT OF CALL INGLEWOOD, and instead chose to casually discard it like Munoz's left-over skin at the end of the film.
Last week I said that “Beat” Takashi’s ZATOICHI boasted the worst CGI ever. I owe all of you an apology. I lied. I lied like a dog. CHILL’s effects are pretty weak on the whole, but the CG work will leave you speechless. I put up with the CGI fog in the walk-in cooler (even though there wouldn’t be any because of the fans), but words fail me as I try to explain what looks like red and black sharpie marks on an acetate overlay to convey a shotgun blast that actually moves around on the target’s body! The fire effects have visible boarders and the face melting scene is like something out of a Terry Gilliam animation. Actually, Gilliam would probably be shocked and appalled by that statement and rightfully so. Man, even 15 years ago J.R. Bookwalter would have been ashamed to put his name on this mess.
ON THE HORIZON...
The once great Albert Pyun has been threatening to unleash his very own adaptation of “Cool Air.” Frequently held-up and stalled like so many of his recent productions, he claims that it has been mucked with by the backers who wanted to change the title and is such an “odd bird” that audiences won't understand it. Hmmmmm... I don't know how much odder you can make that story, but even if he did bust out all Jodorowski on us, I'm pretty sure we can take it. What we can't take is another shot on video snoozer with no production values, weak action, cheap CGI effects, horrible acting, canned dialog and a story that is practically non-existent.
C'mon Albert, we're pullin' for ya (well, sort of), don't screw this one up!
Thanks to the successful Empire productions (RE-ANIMATOR; FROM BEYOND) and a little thing called public domain, the stories of H.P. Lovecraft became hot film properties in the mid-to-late 1980s. Quick to jump on the trend was director Jean-Paul Ouellette (pronounced Well-lett), a Boston born filmmaker who had been toiling around in Hollywood's low budget world. Ouellette's biggest claim to fame is that he directed second unit on THE TERMINATOR (1984) starring some musclebound nerd and directed by some geek (both men went on to do nothing). When given the chance to leap into the director's chair, Ouellette settled on childhood reading fave H.P. Lovecraft to make a pair of low budget shockers.
THE UNNAMABLE (1988) - Wow, talk about lazy filmmakers - they couldn't even be bothered to come up with a title. Oh, that is the title! Published in 1925, Lovecraft's short story "The Unnamable" has Randolph Carter terrorizing friend Joel Morton with a graveyard spook legend about an unnamable monster that haunts a nearby house in the town of Arkham, Massachusetts. The duo are subsequently attacked by this beast but survive with enough wounds that tell their tale. It is a quick 7-page story that will leave you wondering, "How the hell did someone turn this into a movie?" Surprisingly, director-writer Ouellette does faithfully adapt this short story as everything that happens it happens in the movie. It is just that he needed to add another 80 minutes to bring it up to feature length.
THE UNNAMABLE focuses on Miskatonic University students Randolph Carter (Mark Kinsey Stephenson) and Howard Damon (Charles Klausmeyer, billed as Charles King). Carter indeed tells one Joel Morton the story of the haunted house with its unnamable monster and, when Morton ends up missing, the detective duo head to the house to check things out. What they don't know is that two jocks and their respective prey, er, the ladies they would like to get to know are already there to make sure the house is safe for some pledge initiations (smooth line). Once there, everyone encounters The Unnamable (Katrin Alexandre), a monster created in the 17th century by Joshua Winthorp as he was fooling around with the Necronomicon.
I can remember seeing this when it first hit video and being disappointed. Of course, I was a Freddy and Jason obsessed teen so maybe the lack of showing the monster until the last half did me in? The film is incredibly cheap (you can see the set walls shake when folks kick doors) and is basically a dead teen (they are supposed to be college freshman although everyone looks mid-20s) flick sprinkled with some Lovecraft lore. Yet THE UNNAMABLE does have a few things going for it though and there is something charming about it when I revisit it some 20 years later. Released on video in R-rated and unrated versions by Vidmark Entertainment, the film does at least have the gore factor going for it. The throat slashing and head bashing are quite graphic in the un-truncated form. A decapitated body leads to the best line of dialog as Howard sees the HEADLESS body and exclaims, "Oh my God! It's Joel!" Female lead Laura Albert also supplies the required nudity, which leads to another funny exchange:
Tanya: "Why do boys like Wendy so much? Is it her big boobs?"
Howard: "Uh, yeah, I guess so."
Tanya: "Damn."
Perhaps the single best thing about this film (and the subsequent sequel) is lead the performance of Mark Kinsey Stephenson as Randolph Carter. A recurring character that appeared in 7 Lovecraft stories, Carter is pretty much a surrogate for the author himself. Stephenson, who somewhat resembles Lovecraft, plays Carter as kind of a nerdier version of Jeffrey Combs' Herbert West. He has the same strain of dogged intensity, but without the arrogance or desire to kill. His steadfast geekiness also reminds me a bit of Don Knotts in THE GHOST AND MR. CHICKEN (1966). So Jeffrey Combs mixed with Don Knotts - wrap your head around that. The slightly odd performance just really seems to fit in Lovecraft's world. And the film seemed to do well enough that Ouellette was able to get a sequel financed a few years later. So we then turn our attention to...
H.P. LOVECRAFT'S THE UNNAMABLE II: THE STATEMENT OF RANDOLPH CARTER (1993) (aka THE UNNAMABLE RETURNS) - Try saying that five times fast. Yes, that is how the full title for this sequel reads on screen. And, believe it or not, I actually enjoyed this more than the first one. Director Ouellette brings back his two leads and rightly begins his sequel mere hours after the first one ended (a trick I tend to love).
Following the slaughter at the house, Randolph Carter (Mark Kinsey Stephenson) and Howard (Charles Klausmeyer) notify the police of their horrible night. Surprisingly, the cops aren't shocked by this carnage ("Remember what happened in Dunwich," says the corner) and try to keep a lid on the happenings. But while Howard (whose is inexplicably renamed from Howard Damon to Eliot Damon Howard!?!) is in the hospital recovering from his wounds he has a visitation from Winthorp's ghost that warns that the unnanamble beast is still still alive and in the tunnels under the house. So Carter, Howard and mythology expert Professor Warren (John Rhys-Davies) head back to the graveyard to try and kill the beast once and for all. Of course, they screw up and release the monster's human half Alyda Winthorp (Maria Ford) and this leads to the monster half (former Penthouse Pet Julie Strain, completely hidden under the monster costume) hunting Carter, Howard and Alyda all over the campus of Miskatonic University.
This might be the only Lovecraft movie sequel to actually adapt a Lovecraft story ("The Statement of Randolph Carter," which actually preceded "The Unnamable") and is a superior follow-up. As with the original, Ouellette does completely adapt the short story on which it is based. "The Statement of Randolph Carter" first appeared in 1920 and has Carter recounting the tale of how he and a companion took the Necronomicon (never mentioned by name) to a graveyard to open a portal to the underworld. The duo keep in touch via a crude telephone device as Carter heads into an underground tomb. Like I said, Ouellette puts everything from that story in here. And, like the previous film, he has to fill out the rest of the running time. Which is how we end up with scenes like Carter and Warren separating the demon from the girl using some insulin and candy (both of which Warren had readily available...really! Fat bastard!).
Ouellette has a noticeably larger budget this time around and definitely makes use of it. There are lots of locations and the monster suit by R. Christopher Biggs gets an revamping. As with the first film, it is suitably gory with the original severed head from the original even making a cameo appearance (I'm easy to please apparently). Stephenson is again the unusual lead. He is great and even more nerdly focused on the task at hand to the point that he is oblivious to the advances of his 17th century charge. Klausmeyer, who has decided to accept his real name, is also good and reminds me of William Ragsdale from the FRIGHT NIGHT films. In fact, this reminds me a bit of the college-set FRIGHT NIGHT PART II (1988). In the "Completely Underutilized" department we have David Warner, who has one scene as the college chancellor, and Rhys-Davies, who manages to make the most absurd lines sound plausible. The real star, however, is B-movie actress Maria Ford. This might be her strongest acting role as the displaced 17th century girl (and I'm not saying that because she spends 50% of her screen time nude). Sure, I bet Ouellette told her to "act like a cat" but you can't deny she is good, especially since she has to pretend to be in love with Carter.
This one hit VHS in 1993 via Prism Entertainment and I'm sure it was a success. By far the best thing to come out of it is this video promo featuring Stephenson doing the hard sell of the film for distributors. Now which one of you will confess as to having written him a fan letter?
To paraphrase Tony Anthony in BLINDMAN; being an H.P. Lovecraft fan ain’t easy. Being a Lovecraft fan and a movie fan? Well that’s a bitch!
Lovecraft adaptations have been around for a while, but tend to be pretty sparse. His work is essentially unfilmable, but if you are going to make the attempt the brevity of his stories are well suited to a short film medium. I think it’s safe to say that Hollywood doesn’t “get” Lovecraft. I bet the studio executives must have been driven as mad as Abdul Alhazred when he finished the last page of the Necronomicon, sitting in their meetings listening to someone pitch ideas that have vague words like “unseen” and “unknown” in it. Because of that it seems that Lovecraft has pretty much stayed in low-budget indy and student films. Not to sound cynical, but the thing of it is you don’t need much cash to have a movie about an unseen horror. The sticking point here is that you have to be able to tell a story and it has to wallow in atmosphere thicker than primordial ooze and it requires something in the way of decent acting. Aye there’s the rub.
Because of those limitations watching H.P. Lovecraft adaptations requires a different mindset. Like any book that is brought to screen, if you come into them expecting exact translations, you are just setting yourself up for disappointment. Even some of the most ballyhooed genre films, such as BLADE RUNNER (1982) and RE-ANIMATOR (1985), as much as I love them both, they really have very little to do with their source material. I’m not saying that running off into left field is always a good thing, so much as it isn’t always a bad thing and keeping an open mind is essential.
Everybody has their favorite Lovecraft stories and one of mine is “Cool Air”. I think it’s a story that, however brief, is not only creepy and atmospheric as it stands, but provides a great premise for a movie or short film. It’s a great idea, but it also doesn’t feature the “unfilmable” elements of many of his other stories. This one is about people, one of whom has a horrible secret. You can read the story in its entirety here.
ROD SERLING'S NIGHT GALLERY: COOL AIR (1971)
The earliest adaptation I can find of “Cool Air” is the 18th episode of NIGHT GALLERY which aired on December 8th 1971. In this version Serling decides he wants to put a romantic spin on the tale and changes the lead character (the narrator in the original story) to an attractive female (Barbara Rush) who tells the story in flashback from Dr. Munoz's grave. Here she is not a writer looking for a room, but merely trying to track down Munoz, to give him the news that her father, his friend of many years with whom he has been exchanging letters for some time, has died. Expecting an older man around her father’s age she is surprised to find Munoz (Henry Darrow) to be fit and swarthy, complete with whiskers and smoking jacket (ahhh the ‘70s!). This leads to many dinner conversations, candle-light conversations and moon-eyed flirty conversations in which you'd almost expect a tuxedo-clad violinist to pop into the scenes serenading our lovebirds. While watching this you’ll think “this must be going somewhere” and it is. After filling up it’s time with TV-style romance that would be considered timid in a G-rated movie, the last minutes feature the breakdown of the air-conditioning, the revelation of Dr. Munoz’s pruney corpse and the letter explaining it all.
Sometimes I wonder what the hell Rod was thinking when he wrote some of the stuff for NIGHT GALLERY. I had a discussion with my brother about this and I staunchly defended the integrity of the show based on 25 year old recollections. So I set out to sit down and start plowing through them and damned if he wasn’t right! While THE TWILIGHT ZONE still holds up as one of the best anthology television shows ever made, NIGHT GALLERY does not. It’s interesting to note that the NIGHT GALLERY adaptation of Pickman’s Model also is given new female lead and a strong romantic bent. I’m guessing Serling was using NIGHT GALLERY as some sort of televised catharsis, but either way, I ain’t havin' none of it.
In 1981 Lucio Fulci finished off his quadrilogy of E.A. Poe and H.P. Lovecraft inspired films with THE HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY. Out of the four films that included THE BEYOND (1981) and CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD (1980), Fulci wisely avoiding any direct adaptation of Poe or Lovecraft with the exception of THE BLACK CAT (1981) which is loosely based on the Poe story. If you do a direct adaptation, you open yourself up to a hail of negative criticism because it wasn’t done exactly the way each individual reader imagined it would when reading the story. Instead, if you do not point fingers at your literary sources, you gain praise for being influenced by great authors. Whether this was a conscious decision on Fulci’s part is debatable, but it made for some classic exploitation filmmaking. Seeming to start life as a modern reworking of Mary Shelly's “Frankenstein,” a plan perhaps scuttled by flaky backers, the finished film, THE HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY, is a gothic, very loose adaptation of “Cool Air”.
After a Boston scientist working on some secret project kills his family and commits suicide, another scientist, Dr. Boyle (Paolo Malco), is brought in to try to piece together the clues. For some reason Dr. Boyle and his family (Catriona MacColl and Giovanni Frezza as “Bob”) move into the house where the murder-suicide occurred. Known to the locals as The Freudstein house, the house is in a state of neglect to the point where some teen-ages are shown using it for a place to plow the beanfield before being slaughtered by an unseen assailant in the beginning of the film. Mrs. Boyle, who apparently has a mental condition, soon finds some weird shit going down; a sealed tomb in the middle of an entry hall, strange crying sounds, a cellar door that won’t open and her son Bob claiming to be getting warnings from a little girl that no one else can see. As it turns out the basement contains the subject of the previous doctor’s work, the long-dead corpse of Dr. Freudstein, a scientist who figured out how to keep himself alive in a state of undeath by killing everyone who sets foot in the house.
Obviously the screenwriters (including the genre icon Dardano Sacchetti) took the premise of “Cool Air” and ran with it. The film throws weirdness and unanswered questions at you from every conceivable angle (why is coffee more important than all that blood all over the kitchen floor?) and drenches you in gothic atmosphere. In fact the atmosphere is so thick and story so strange that it’s easy to be completely oblivious to the movie’s budgetary shortcomings. Almost the entire movie takes place in the house with occasional, and perfectly placed, cutaways to very small scenes in one or two locations. This adds to the claustrophobic atmosphere and at the same time broadens the scope of the film just enough to keep the viewer from getting bored seeing the same interiors over and over.
In addition to the camera prowling behind cobwebs thicker than Cousin It's hair, you have a great cast of regulars including the striking Ania Pieroni (TENEBRAE, 1982), the prolific Dagmar Lassander (A HATCHET FOR THE HONEYMOON, 1970), the frequently killed Daniela Doria (CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD), Gianpaolo Saccarola (THE BEYOND, 1981), and even Lucio Fulci himself, Dr. Boyle’s boss, who sets the plot in motion. For better or for worse, no discussion of a Fulci film is complete without mentioning the pretty extreme, even by modern standards, make-up effects. Here the brilliant Giannetto De Rossi provides the stunning carnage that turns disposing of a pesky bat into a grisly bloodbath of epic proportions. Surprisingly even the clarity of DVD doesn’t diminish the gory shocks as in many other films of the era, most notably THE BEYOND. It’s like listening to The Dead Boys or Black Flag on a digitally remastered CD instead of vinyl, somehow all that low fidelity noise made it so much more subversive. Of course I say that, but I don’t see myself going back to my old import VHS tapes any time soon!
NECRONOMICON: THE COLD (1993)
Bryan Yuzna made his name by producing Stuart Gordon’s seminal onslaught of black humor and bloody carnage RE-ANIMATOR (1985), something that both of them have been trying to cash-in on ever since (RE-ANIMATOR the musical? Ummmm… yeah).
In a weird twist, writers Kazunori Ito and Brent V. Friedman (who is also credited with writing Dan O’Bannon’s superlative 1992 Lovecraft film THE RESURRECTED) decide to remake Rod Serling’s take on the story with a female protagonist who is romantically involved with Dr. Munoz (David Warner). It’s basically a NIGHT GALLERY remake with RE-ANIMATOR sensibility. Again told in flashback by the female lead, the story tells of a teenage girl, Emily, who has run away from her drunken mother and sexually abusive step-father, answering the ad for a room to rent in an old Victorian. Once there the landlady (who turns out to be Munoz’s assistant) tells Emily of the elusive Munoz and his strange condition.
All of the elements of the story are included, such as the fluid dripping from the ceiling, but most have been slightly altered. Instead of a heart-attack, Emily finds herself unconscious in front of Munoz’s door when her step-father manages to track her down and puts out her lights. Unbeknownst to Emily, Munoz disposes of the bum with a scalpel and a staircase. The relationship develops from there and becomes “complicated” in the middle of the greenhouse where Munoz shows Emily his serum that when injected into the stem re-animates a dried rose. What he doesn’t tell her, at least right away, is that the serums efficacy is dependent on fresh spinal fluid. Of course all good things must come to an end with Munoz melting down in spectacularly gruesome fashion. The final twist regarding Emily’s pregnancy is a wonderfully nasty little bit of business that feels like it has its roots in EC Comics.
Shusuke Kaneko does a nice job of balancing the characters and chilling atmosphere with the over-the-top gore effects. Following this he went on to reinvent the GAMERA films with state of the art technology, but after trying to suffer through DEATH NOTE (2006), I feel like we lost another one to the Corporate Film-making Machine.
I guess it should be noted that the other two stories and the wrap-around segment are not actually based on any Lovecraft stories at all. The final one, WHISPERS, about two police officers following a serial killer and discovering subterranean aliens, is actually a reasonable facsimile of Clive Barker's short story “The Midnight Meat Train”.
Welcome to Video Junkie's second theme week.And by week we mean seven days and some change.We seem to slowly be working our way down the cinematic alphabet as we go from B for Blind to C for Cthulhu.Yep, our second week focuses on the cinematic adaptations of the literary works of one H.P. Lovecraft.One of the most descriptive, influential and respected writers in the horror genre, Lovecraft created a contained and detailed world that offered filmmakers plenty of fertile ground to work with.Like all heavily adapted authors, the quality varies.We won’t be talking about the stuff examined to death (the original THE DUNWICH HORROR, RE-ANIMATOR, FROM BEYOND), but instead will focus on the lesser known adaptations that run the gamut from good to bad to amphibian.
What better way to start off than to combine two of my favorite passions - horror and unmade films. Sure, there have been plenty of aborted Lovecraft projects over the years, but none so chronicled as Stuart Gordon's unsuccessful attempts to get an adaptation of Lovecraft's novella THE SHADOW OVER INNSMOUTH off the ground. The first major exposure for the ill-fated project came in Fangoria #91 where they boldly deemed it “the greatest horror movie never made!”Hyperbole aside, writer Chas Balun does give a detailed chronology of the film’s history in his “The Unmaking of THE SHADOW OVER INNSMOUTH” article.
Talk of an adaptation of SHADOW initially began after Gordon and Yuzna’s success with Lovecraft's RE-ANIMATOR (1985).Gordon has often cited the adaptation as his dream project as he told Fangoria, “It’s always been my favorite Lovecraft story.” With a script in place by frequent collaborator Dennis Paoli, Gordon initially lined this up as his second horror feature. But further commitments to Charles Band’s Empire Pictures (another Lovecraft adaptation in FROM BEYOND, DOLLS and ROBOT JOX) put the project on the back burner.Eventually Gordon and company were able to set up a production deal at another one of the 1980s most prolific B-movie producers.From the article:
“We set it up with Vestron,” Gordon recounts. “I had originally told them it would cost around $5 million. Vestron came back and said if we could do it for $4 million, we had a deal.”
Gordon quickly got to work on the project as he scouted locations and worked with renowned comic book artist Bernie Wrightson to create some storyboards. Wrightson delivered roughly 70 drawings and paintings to help flesh out the fishy folk inhabiting the town of Innsmouth. Below are just a sampling of the work he turned in as shown in Fangoria and the Lovecraft cinema book "The Lurker in the Lobby."
Also joining the production was FX legend Dick Smith (THE EXORCIST), who provided several head sculptures of the amphibious creatures to populate the piece. Below are two examples of his work for the project. Kind of creepy how his fish-women looks like every other actress in Hollywood nowadays, eh?
Despite a healthy amount of pre-production, Gordon and his team slowly began to realize they couldn’t do this film properly for the ascribed $4 million dollar budget Vestron was offering and the project eventually was put on hold. As Gordon told the magazine:
“The further we got into it, we realized it couldn’t be made for that. For less than $7 million, you would lose what made SHADOW so special in the first place.”
“It was a mutual realization,” Gordon sighs. “We all knew we just couldn’t do it right for $4 million.”
Eighteen months later, Fangoria revisited the subject in their “Special H.P. Lovecraft issue” (Fangoria #106).In “The Lurking Film Projects” article by Anthony C. Ferrante, the status of the INNSMOUTH adaptation is given an update.Vestron and their Vestron Pictures line had now bitten the dust and significant legal wrangling got the project back into Gordon and Yuzna’s hands where it found a new home at Charles Band’s bustling new Full Moon Entertainment outfit.Gordon and Paoli had just done an update of THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM (1991) for Band, so a it seemed a natural progression.Band was very high on the project as he mentioned it in VideoZones and delivered an updated version of Wrightson’s naked fish woman artwork (see Cinefantastique cover).Yet budget issues arose again and a promised late summer 1991 filming in Malta never materialized.
As Band told Cinefantastique:
“We were unable to get [SHADOW OVER INNSMOUTH] made because the budget on it was too high.It didn’t fit into your horror movie niche, it was a bigger project and it was so strange.What people kept saying to us was that if it was about vampires or werewovles, you would have no problem here, but since this is about people turning into fish, this is a little bit too weird for us to be able to put this kind of money into the project.Well, to me, that’s what makes this interesting.You haven’t seen this before.”
Band and Gordon instead collaborated on the lower-budget CASTLE FREAK (1995), an adaptation of “The Outsider” short story by Lovecraft.They eventually parted ways as Band needed to make less odd films about killer bongs and deadly gingerbread men while Gordon focused on truckers in outer space and magical ice cream colored suits.And you thought fish people were weird?
All was not lost though as Gordon would eventually get his INNSMOUTH adaptation made…sorta. In the new millennium, producer Yuzna secured financing for co-productions for Spain’s Filmax and they started a production company called Fantastic Factory. The third film made under this banner was DAGON (2001), which saw Gordon directing and Paoli scripting. In a clever twist (possibly to circumvent legal ramifications), the film is indeed an adaptation of the 5-page Lovecraft short story “Dagon” but also adapts “The Shadow over Innsmouth.” Lensed in Spain, the film effectively brings to life the town inhabited by fish folk and – despite a wooden lead performance by Ezra Godden – proves to be atmospheric and one of Gordon’s best films. Ironically, the film was made for an estimated budget of $4.8 million.
As you may have noticed, time in the world of the Video Junkie is much like Ray Milland spending a weekend in the country. Our "Week of Blind Vengeance" has turned into "A Couple of Weeks of Blind Vengeance". Granted it's not quite as catchy, but hey, you get twice the Blind Vengeance for the same low price of... well, nothing.
You don't see any Pay Pal links or advertisements do ya? That's because when you are sightless and pissed off, you only take payments in blood!
Next week we will be starting a new theme week that promises to be a breath of cool air. In the meantime, send our link to your rotten, drunken friends and enjoy our continuation of the exploits of ocular and judgement impaired killers!
While it is shot on film, it has gone through a lot of post to give it a scratched and grainy appearance. I’ve seen this done many times before with varying degrees of success, but I have to say this is probably the best I’ve seen it done. The props are sparse, but the machine that Munoz has built to keep his room cold is actually quite impressive looking. I’m assuming Moore used his sculpting talent to build it and it’s actually the most “authentic” looking to the time period of any adaptation.
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