p e n g u i n d e v i l

We all know this, yet another installment of the Lovecraft Film Festival! This year I am actually going to go to two evenings, so just wait until tomorrow when there will be a special music report!

Tonight though, I went to see a couple of movies. Due to arriving a bit late and the in-between movie event, I didn’t have anytime to browse the bazaar vendors. But the movies? First up was Hellboy, my first time on the big screen. I think I have warmed on it a bit since the last/first time that I watched it back in 2006, though my previous comments do remain the same. It is basically a fun action-filled comic book hero movie. The story of a young scientist who heads (with the army) to a small island to try and prevent the Nazi’s (and Rasputin) from opening a portal to the other side and letting terrible destructive beings through. While they generally succeed in their mission, one odd thing does get though, a little baby devil-boy with a giant forearm. He grows up, teamed with some other odd ducks, fighting whatever odd beings appear in the world. Of course, the evil folks who led to him being here in the first place come back to finish the job! It has great sets (though a bit much on the CGI), some good villains, and the Hellboy character is not too bad, though Karl Ruprecht Kroenen is easily the most interesting and compelling character in the film. I am lukewarm to the other paranormals and the romance stuff seems rather out of place, but it’s fun and quite entertaining to watch. I also really like the Ogdru Jahad! If anything is going to come and rain down apocalyptic destruction on the world, they would certainly be my first choice! After the film there was a Q&A with Mike Mignola, which was pretty fun…

And then we stepped into the evenings surprise…. The Dunwich Horror! Now, when I saw that they were playing The Dunwich horror with Dean Stockwell, I assumed that it was Roger Corman’s great 1970 film with Dean Stockwell, as I only knew of that. It wasn’t until minutes before it started when it was mentioned that Jeffrey Combs was in it that I started to realize that something else was going on. Boy was it ever. Something else like the difference between walking on the beach and walking into quicksand! Awful? Stink? This dud was terrible! Bad (no… terrible) script, bad cinematography, bad “sets”, bad casting, bad digital video… And they tried too hard to be corny. The worst was the lame half-assed “Lovecraft” angle! Sure, it sort of had some Dunwich Horror going on, but then they just throw in every Lovecraft reference they could think of, making a naive hodge-podge spoken by people who came across as amateur actors, though they were supposed to be brilliant and respected scientists. Griff Furst was the worst, but the whole thing was bad. I mean, Dean Stockwell was fine and Jeffrey Combs did his usual entertaining “look what a weirdo I can be” shtick, but the cast and acting was just bad. And though the worst was the “the house is the book!” scene, to top it all off they seemed to come too close to the un-lovecraftian good vs evil thing, with our “heroes” even using a pentagram for protection!