- Directed by Elias, Tomas Almgren, Brian Barnes, Brian Bernhard, Grady Granros, Justin Powers, Jane Rose, Simon Ruben, Doug Sakmann, and Ashley Thorpe
- Starring
- Elias
- Harley Warren
- Matt Renicks
- Gillian MacGregor
- Nick Ewans
I like to make fun of Lovecraft as much as the next guy. Let’s be honest: his prose was overwrought, his grasp of characterization was feeble, and his ability to write dialogue was practically nonexistent. He often told us how horrifying some cosmic discovery was instead of directly terrifying us with it, and he telegraphed the endings of most of his stories from pages ahead. He was both a very good and a very bad writer at the same time.
Even so, comedy based on Lovecraft is deucedly hard. At its best, we get the treatment given in Stuart Gordon’s movies, in which black humor is used as a tension release at measured intervals through the movie. At its not-so-best, we get anthologies like LovecraCked! The Movie, which thinks it’s a lot funnier than it is (and really, is there anything so stifling to humor as a comedian who’s his own best audience?).
Some anthologies, those made cohesively by a single unit of filmmakers, are like Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates; you never know exactly what flavor each piece will be, but you can at least guess that certain fillings will be represented in certain proportions. LovecraCked!, though, came together via an open invitation to indie filmmakers to submit their shorts. It ends up more like a potluck dinner in which no assignments were made and thus the buffet table is filled only with crackers, margarine, and a single bottle of pickle relish. It’s supposed to be comedic, but nobody brought the funny.
“Prince Albert? I don’t get it.”
The “connective tissue” of the anthology is made of recurring scenes of an investigative reporter (Elias), shooting scenes for a documentary on H.P. Lovecraft and occasionally ranting at the cameraman. His little spiels go off on all sorts of tangents about whether Lovecraft ever existed at all, or whether he was abducted by aliens, and I’d like to tell you that more than a couple of seconds were clever, but too much of it simply operates under the mistaken believe that the absurd is inherently humorous, especially if drawn out to lengths that would make even the Saturday Night Live writers cringe. And no, the one-take interview with Troma’s Lloyd Kaufman isn’t any funnier than the rest; if anything, it simply establishes the anthology’s cred as “one of those movies whose unfunniness is supposed to be the joke.”
And then we get the shorts, most of which don’t try to be nearly as funny as the documentary schtick. Let’s run through them, shall we?
A surprisingly straight adaptation of “The Statement of Randolph Carter.” (Aside from the can-on-a-string telephones.) Not that “straight” equals “effective”; it’s one of Lovecraft’s most cunning short works, but here it falls flat because the older man playing Warren in a dressing gown delivers his lines as if he were reciting a bus schedule.
Forced perspective, good. Forced humor, bad.
“The History of the Lurkers” is a sideways adaptation of “The Music of Erich Zann.” Eric is a mohawked rebel who is introduced to us through a too-long montage as a party animal and musician and stuff. His downstairs neighbor is similarly introduced at far too great lengths. And the titular lurkers? They’re a bunch of porn-store pervs who show up at Eric’s apartment when he starts playing his electric guitar with demonic fervor. The end. No, really, that’s all there is.
“Remains” is an adaptation whose original I couldn’t identify. It’s a wordless live-shot stop-motion piece about an artist who paints a crusty face on his canvas, which then scowls at him and melts him. The end. (Go ahead, see if you can guess what my overarching complaints are going to be when we hit the end of the review.)
“Bugboy” is more of a pseudo-Kafka homage, rather than a Lovecraft adaptation, shot in black-and-white 16mm. Greg is upset because his galpal Jessie is getting married to someone else. So he goes into a cocoon in the corner of the room (intercut with Jessie and her fiance getting it on). After a couple of days, Jessie comes over to Greg’s to check on him, and he comes out of the cocoon and sprouts some mandibles and kills her. The end.
An unbalanced mind — and a haircut to match!
“Witch’s Spring” is again a pretty un-Lovecraftian story. A guy in London meets a girl on the internet, who does spooky things from the moment he meets her in the flesh, like giving him heather (which, the narration informs us, one should never accept from a witch) and having him pour her some salt while she cooks (which, SHE informs us, one should never give to a witch). We therefore feel little sympathy for the clueless lunkhead when she gives him something drugged to drink, then pops his heart out of his chest. The end.
“Alecto” may be the second “Erich Zann”-inspired short in the collection. It’s hard to say, really; I couldn’t tell what the hell was going on. A bald guy gets out of the shower and dresses, then plays the violin while he remembers how his father beat up his mother. And there are intercut scenes of him watching his memories on TV, and scenes of him curled up on the floor while marionettes dance around him. And there’s a violin student whom he rapes when she plays the music that he remembers from his childhood. The end. Honestly, when the presence of a violin is the single tenuous connection to the Lovecraft canon, you have to wonder what the short was doing here at all.
“Chaos of Flesh” is at least a complete vignette (even without any dialogue), though the Lovecraft inspiration is again lost to me. A guy out in the woods birdwatching or something sees another man carrying an axe in one hand and a girl over his shoulder. The guy with the axe lays the girl’s head on a stump and readies the axe, but the birdwatcher interrupts him and in the ensuing struggle kills the axe man with a pocketknife. But the girl turns out to be something zombieish, with her lips stitched shut and everything, and kills her “rescuer” with the axe. The end.
PLEASE do not give Charles Band any ideas.
“Re-Penetrator” is the giant sucking wound in an anthology which wasn’t impressing me to begin with. Let’s do a Re-Animator riff (actually more of a Bride of riff), but with sex! Like, just-this-side-of-hardcore sex! The insane medical student injects a beautiful female corpse with his glowing reagent, right in the vagina. Because what more movies need is shots of green fluid dripping from shaved labia. She comes back to life, and immediately starts banging him every which way, for minutes on end. Then, just past the point when any viewer would have leaned on the fast-forward button (unless you’re the kind of person who likes to see bloodstreaked zombies in just barely-legal sex scenes), she bites his jugular open and claws out his guts. Then, with him lying there in pieces, she picks up another syringe of the reagent, ready to have another go. The end, mercifully. I don’t know whose idea it was to include an explicit and disgusting (and pointless, but we’ve come to expect that) short in the midst of these other non-sexual films; I just hope that individual has since become the victim of random, senseless violence.
And finally, there’s an animated music video called “And This Was On a Good Day.” There are a couple of monsters in it, so I guess it’s Lovecraftian if you squint and cock your head to one side.
Now, if you were playing my little contest, let’s see if you already know what my major complaint against almost all of the shorts will be. Ready? If you said “STORY,” congratulations! You’re a winner! You would think, in a culture so saturated with narrative in almost every entertainment genre, that those people who fancy themselves filmmakers (and thus storytellers) would have at least some crude grasp of story. You know, that whole beginning/middle/end thing. But no, almost everyone responsible here can’t tell the difference between “story” and “stuff that happens until I turn off the camera.” And when you’re dealing with nonexistent budgets and largely consumer-grade technology to craft your short, you NEED an honest-to-goodness story to make your short worth watching.
This kind of side-effects warning should go at the BEGINNING of the movie.
And when the documentary reporter admits at the one-hour-eleven-minute mark that there’s probably no one left watching the DVD, you can’t help but believe that the anthology’s compilers knew quite well how uncompelling this string of shorts had turned out to be and tried to compensate with self-deprecating humor. Sorry, guys; for most of these shorts, the only compelling reason to watch would be a close family relation to the filmmaker. (And that certainly doesn’t apply to “Re-Penetrator,” for which no compelling reason to watch is even conceivable.) For all his shortcomings, Lovecraft at least knew what a story was supposed to look like.
Some Notable Totables:
- body count: 9
- breasts: 2 (not counting the porno mags, and boy, how I love having to note that)
- pasty male butts: 2
- penises: 1
- explosions: 0
- ominous thunderstorms: 2
- actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0
