O’REILLY,
Sean Patrick, “Howard Lovecraft and the Kingdom of Madness”, 2018,
Arcana Studios Inc./Howard Lovecraft’s Movie Inc./Pinnacle Films Pty. Ltd.
I’ve
been otherwise occupied of late so this kind of slipped beneath my radar. I saw
it at the local Big W DVD department and thought “whoa! Where did that
spring from?” Additionally, it had been reduced in price, so I thought “win:
win!” I should really have taken that as a warning.
I
tried to watch this movie a couple of times and had to turn it off on each
occasion. I was aware – vaguely – that this thing was around (I don’t spend my
time entirely under a rock) but tuning in to this made no sense. So, I did
some research and discovered that this is the third – the third – film
in a series, which explained why there was an enormous assumption of knowledge
that opens this instalment. Without this backstory I thought there was no point
forging ahead, so I went back to Big W – they had no idea that it was a series
and so hadn’t stocked the earlier chapters – and I was left to catch up as much
as I could on YouTube. This helped, but not completely.
The
first thing to say about this film is that the animation is dire. Having seen “Hellboy”
(2019) lately, I thought I was au fait with bad computer graphics, but
this is atrocious. Everything is a bunch of polygons welded together; a close
up of a character’s head often reveals more scalp than hair and Henry Armitage’s
teeth seem permanently to be rattling around inside the hollow of his head. On
top of it, there’s a Disney/Pixar cheese-y ‘happy families’ vibe running
through the narrative which feels quite at odds with the material. Howard’s
mother here comes across like Mrs. Incredible from the Pixar franchise and is
about as far removed from how HPL’s mother would have behaved as it is possible
to be. Of course, this is not supposed to be H.P. Lovecraft – literally -
but it riffs off all the real individuals of his family to the extent that
Howard’s “cousin” Randolph is an animated carbon copy of HPL. I mean, it plays
it too close for comfort – either it is, or it isn’t, HPL; just pick one. And
who’s idea was it that HPL should look like a raccoon?
The
big issue with this piece is that I don’t know who this is for. It feels like a
kid’s show – there are life lessons abounding at every turn and our young hero
learning how to navigate the strange waters of a grown-up world. But then,
there’s Cthulhu (“Spot”) and the Mythos lurking on the fringes, with mad
relatives and Deep Ones and Cultists galore. And none of this stuff is pushed
at levels that would satisfy a true Mythos fan. It feels halfhearted; like it
doesn’t know what to do with itself or who it’s targeting. And the glacial
slowness of all movement on the screen doesn’t help.
As
Mythos fans, we take on board the ‘Cthulhu plushie’ aspect of the fandom. Every
Lovecraft follower has a stuffed Cthulhu lurking somewhere in their collection
(I have three); it comes with the territory, along with Cthulhu mugs, T-shirts
and ski-masks. The horror element of the Mythos needs a pressure valve
somewhere and these kinds of things allow us fans to decompress. Even Chaosium
does it, to the extent of including Mythos cartoons in the previous editions of
its “Call of Cthulhu” rulebook. This sort of thing is best when it’s
brief, allowing the reader to be momentarily amused and then to get back into
it. But these things can outstay their welcome. Certainly, three movies, each
over an hour long, is flogging a dead Byakhee. And the fact that this vehicle
is spring boarding off a series of comics makes it all seem that someone has
far too much time on their hands.
I
tried to imagine what this might be like to watch as a child. Lots of kid’s
shows have extra layers of meaning and suggestion built into them, because the
creators know that the target audience is not the one buying the tickets and
the popcorn, and that those individuals need to be kept amused also. With this,
it’s a case of all the layered and textured nuance being impenetrable to anyone
who hasn’t read a Lovecraft tale. To kids, the Deep Ones and Elder Things here are
just funny-looking critters; even Cthulhu is just a big odd-looking monster.
While grown-ups will nod and say “Antarctica, therefore Elder Things, and
possibly a Shoggoth lurking among the blind albino penguins”, children
don’t know this stuff. And sometimes it starts to annoy them that there’s stuff
going on that they’re not privy to. And for the Lovecraft fans, what’s the
point? Does it do anything new? Does it add to the canon or reinterpret the old
mainstays? Fine, it’s good to see that the genre formats are being ticked off, but if there’s nothing at stake, isn’t this just a case of the creators
showing off how much they’ve read?
Regardless
of insider knowledge, the plot is hugely unwieldy and badly expressed. There’s
another world – which might be an alternative dimension or another planet, it’s
not that clear – where someone – either Azathoth or Nyarlathotep, it’s also not
clear – is agitating, therefore weakening the “Walls Between Worlds” and
threatening to destroy our world by waking up Cthulhu, “The Destroyer of Worlds”.
This weakening causes ruptures which allow Nightgaunts through to attack the
Lovecraft family home (attracted by Howard’s unrestrained use of the dark arts)
thus sending him, at the insistence of his newly-arrived “cousin”, to
Miskatonic University to engage the help of Armitage and his motley crew of
Mythos-bashing international stereotypes. Their investigating takes them to the
Antarctic base of Geoffrey West (father of Herbert), and then to a strangely
un-submerged and bucolic R’lyeh, where a fateful confrontation between our heroes
and Cthulhu, with his micro-army of darkness, takes place. Along the way we
discover that Randolph is actually Howard himself, from the future of a
now-destroyed world, doing a shonky deal with Nyarlathotep to possess the
younger Howard in order to live longer with the benefit of a lifetime’s knowledge while in
possession of the Silver Key. Phew! As stories go, it’s involved, and
consequently dependent upon clear communication; however, this is not a strong
point in this production, and I imagine that most kids watching it – and a lot
of adults – would come away from it more than a little befuddled.
Never
mind though, there’s an almost endless array of fight scenes between our heroes
and the strange rubbery monsters who attend the ‘Boss’ baddies. Yay! Every
human being in this show is capable of throwing devastating spells of the “pew-pew-pew”
variety, or else carries a magical weapon of some kind, either a glowing
hammer, a shamshir, or a coin with an Elder Sign on it. Herbert West is also
able to throw glass phials of necrotizing fasciitis bacteria, which is
kind of cute. Unfortunately, the clunky animation renders most of these set-tos
vague and ill-defined – you can see the pratfalls being set up, but they never
really pay off. Simply put, they’re poorly choreographed, too long and muddily (slowly)
executed.
And
as for those rubbery minions, since when do Nightgaunts have faces? And why are
the Shoggoths flying, purple and of a fixed form? The Elder Things are quite
cool-looking and, as stated above, are okay in the context of the Antarctic second
act; but why are they all over the place at the end of the film, especially
forming the bulk of Cthulhu’s dark army? Aren’t they an independent race? For
the Mythos fans, these types of errors are distracting – the creators reveal
themselves to have skimmed a bit of the source material but missed the
essentials.
The
Deep Ones are handled quite strangely too. Howard’s peers (as introduced in
earlier instalments) are a vaguely octopoid bunch of children whom he refers to
as the “squid kids”, with tentacled hair, mottled skin and bug-eyes. However,
they are accompanied by a clan of medieval-looking critters that seem to be around
just to give the baddies something to target, while they execute random
pratfalls. Other Deep Ones in the off-world city of Y’ha-nthlei are more like
what the average fan would expect, along with their leader Dagon, so how are
they related, if at all? The kid characters seem to be there in order to appeal
to young viewers but given everything else that’s happening, again, who is this
thing aiming for?
The
final confrontation is resolved by Spot’s (Cthulhu’s) unshakeable love for
Howard and “Randolph’s” sudden change of heart, deciding that stealing Howard’s
lifespan would deprive young Howard of his mother’s love and would therefore be
a Bad Thing. In all of his published works, HPL used the word “love” only twice
– how does it come to play such a dominant role in a work of Lovecraftian
pastiche?
Budgetary
restrictions (and it’s obvious that this production was dominated by these)
should push the creators of such fare to greater heights in execution – I’ve
said it before, and I’ll probably keep on saying it. The H.P. Lovecraft
Historical Society have shown how it can be done in two high-quality features
and there are other cinematic versions – even spoofy YouTube clips – that make
well-executed pieces on a shoestring. Computer animation isn’t cheap (and this
explains the excess of Elder Things here, no doubt) but trying to do too much
with too little will always highlight the deficiencies rather than obscuring
them. At base, the scripting needs to be bullet-proof; here, it lets down the
narrative rather than driving it. And the cast needs to be tightly handled:
there are big names here – Mark Hamill, Christopher Plummer, Jeffrey Coombs, Finn
Wolfhard – but they’re phoning in dead words for re-animated corpses. And did
the director really have to take the role of Spot/Cthulhu for himself? Really?
Maybe
the earlier instalments of this show are better, I don’t know. What I do
know is that this is an hour-and-ten-minutes of my life I’m not getting back.
One
Tentacled Horror.
