Hi everyone!
Well, today’s another special review for the podcast, as it is my 41st birthday. I figure there’s no greater time to watch a film I want to watch rather than trying to keep up with all the great films in the theaters and showing up on streaming services. And so, today I have chosen a film that has sat in my watchlist for months looking for an opportunity to see another film in the hit or miss world of Lovecraftian adaptations. For a few other films with a Lovecraftian feel, definitely check out this past Sunday’s classic review for “The Endless” (Episode #441), “A Dark Song” (Episode #033), “The Ritual” (Episode #045), “The Ornithologist” (Episode #182), “The City of the Dead” (Episode #250), “Apostle” (Episode #287), and “Annihilation” (Episode #400). As you can tell, I have a thing for these films.
Here we go!
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Today’s movie is “Cthulhu” (2007), the Lovecraftian horror film directed by Dan Gildark and written for the screen in collaboration with Grant Cogswell, Douglas Light, and Jason Cottle, based on the works of the Cthulhu Mythos and “Dagon” by H.P. Lovecraft. The film follows Russell Marsh (Jason Cottle), a Seattle history professor who returns to his Oregon coast home to attend to his late mother’s estate. While catching up with childhood and family friends, he also discovers a dark history within his own family, and its relationship to the crumbling world around him.
No spoilers.
I am a huge fan of popular, pulp and genre fiction, having ingested a healthy diet of mystery in the form of Agatha Christie and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, of crime thrillers in the form of Dashell Hammett, of science fiction like Edgar Rice Burroughs, of fantasy like Robert E. Howard, and of horror, like H.P. Lovecraft. I saw their work first on screens, between Masterpiece Theater and syndicated noir and popular films growing up, and later discovered their source material and rapidly gobbling that up. It wasn’t until a transitional summer I worked before my first consulting job out of college that I finally broke down and picked up an H.P. Lovecraft reader. I sampled his early fiction and segments from his later larger works, surprised at how forward-thinking he was, and how well he could weave a tale that dragged the reader slowly, but persistently into madness. I’ve made it a goal to read his entire body of work chronologically, and I’m about two-thirds of the way, having just recently finished reading “The Whisperer in Darkness”.
Reading his work as shown me just what a subtle influence he has had on horror in general, but also on ideas of monster design, and founding a whole genre of cosmic horror, a term that can only be called Lovecraftian. And it came out of a historical time period where our reliance on myths and legends was waning, and our understanding of science was accelerating, transforming previous notions of ancient polytheistic pantheons of ancient civilizations into more plausible alien horrors, either horrifically fascinated with our planet, or carelessly destructive about the wake of their passing. This intersection of space and science and technology and myth and pure, madness-induced horror is, in many ways, a metaphor for our own individual confusion. This kind of theme can be carried forward in time and recreated under different conditions, and I listed quite a few Lovecraftian films that find that same mix earlier.
The question remains, though, is whether you can create a modern retelling of a classic Lovecraft story. Nearly every modern-day adaptation of Lovecraft’s work seems unable to capture the same kind of historically contextual dread from the time period in which they were originally set. Our incredible modern advancements in technology override the limitations of technology as a recurring theme in Lovecraft’s work. Our access to information and knowledge severely restricts the ideas of hidden knowledge as another recurring theme. I think the film medium itself also presents some challenges, as Lovecraft’s written work takes you on a journey of madness or adventure (or both) over hours, slowly eroding your faith in technology and your security in knowledge, manipulating your imagination, and leaving enough vagueness to allow the reader to fill in the gaps. A film has to show everything, which brings us to today’s film.
To be honest, I really liked the opening sequence of “Cthulhu”, as Russell Marsh receives the news of his mother’s passing, and he begins his journey back home, accompanied by various news reports suggesting the world is a lot further along towards climate collapse and sea level rise, an excellent way to link back to the proto-Cthulhu short story “Dagon”. It’s a good start to a story that will descend into madness, as Russell takes some nostalgic walks around his hometown and runs into relatives and friends, including a male friend named Mike (Scott Patrick Green), with whom he shared some sexually experimental experiences when growing up. Gildark and Cogswell have spoken about their choice for a gay lead character, and using the film as a vehicle to explore the alienation of a gay man returning to a conservative hometown. It’s a bold move, especially since sexuality of any sort rarely factors in to any of Lovecraft’s work, having been characterized more than once as asexual. It certainly plays with the idea of “the alien” in different ways, representing the alienation of LGBTQ people in society, and the alien quality of the horror of the Old Ones like Cthulhu. But I also think the themes clash more often than not, as we have to waste time building a relationship between Russell and Mike instead of focusing on Russell’s descent into madness.
The film’s main weakness is its cast, a mixed group of working actors like Jason Cottle and Cara Buono turning in inconsistent performances, along with forced caricatures like Dennis Kleinsmith’s Steve Jobs inspired look as cult leader Reverend Marsh (Russell’s disapproving dad) and Tori Spelling’s over the top hypersexualized role of Susan, who is uncharacteristically eager to get Russell in bed, his sexuality and consent be damned. Characters often talk over one another, often with major sound issues making things unintelligible, or need to advance their characters faster than reasonable to meet the reduced storytelling time. It ends up being kind of a mess, but not in a non-Euclidean Lovecraftian kind of way.
However, the film also has some extremely well done scenes. For every roughly cut scene, there’s an equally inspired camera angle or set decoration that makes up for it. For every minute I struggled with the underground chase scene getting too experimental, there is an excellent montage or dream sequence that cuts right to the chase. I certainly have my criticisms of the film, especially the very abrupt ending, but I also had parts of it I really enjoyed and thought were well above average. A script doctor and a slightly better cast could remake this film into something really amazing, and that seemingly unattainable holy grail of bringing a Lovecraft story effectively into the modern age might be within our grasp.
“Cthulhu” (2007) is an attempt of bringing the Cthulhu mythos into the modern age, that struggles with an overly complex story and a mediocre cast, but also shines in unexpected ways. While I don’t think it quite succeeds in modernizing Lovecraft, I think it has come closer than many other attempts I have seen. Fans of the Cthulhu mythos should definitely check out the film, along with fans of cult-based horror thrillers. Everyone else, just know the quality will be inconsistent, and the story perhaps hard to follow for those outside Lovecraft fandom.
Rotten Tomatoes: 62%
Metacritic: 41
One Movie Punch: 6.4/10
“Cthulhu” (2007) is rated Rand is currently playing on Amazon Prime.
