Review: “Howard Lovecraft and the Kingdom of Madness”

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.