“It is new indeed, for I made it last night in a dream of strange cities. And dreams are older than brooding Tyre, or the contemplative Sphinx, or garden-girded Babylon.”

Sitting Duck’s rating: 9 out of 10 repulsive idols

Sitting Duck’s review: Adapting H.P. Lovecraft to film has gotten the best of Tinseltown on more than one occasion. Mostly it’s because his horrors are meant to be beyond human comprehension and therefore not easy to portray visually. Just consider his most popular story “The Colour Out of Space,” which features an entity that is a color previously unknown to human experience. How is a visual effects elf to cope? It’s no coincidence that “The Colour Out of Space” is the source material for some of the worst Lovecraft adaptations on film.

Even objectively good ones like The Haunted Palace and The Resurrected feature setting alterations and added characters that can be grating to fanboy sensibilities. And let’s not get started on Stuart Gordon, who took “From Beyond” (a short story that is essentially a monologue, which might have been better suited as a Night Gallery segment) and turned it into… whatever that was.

Naturally, it was up to those spunky misfits at the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society (responsible for the Shoggoth on the Roof documentary) to do one properly, with a minimum of wedged-in original characters and retaining the 1920s setting. What’s more, it was decided that it would be shot in the same fashion as a movie made in 1926 (the year it was written). Which means it’s in black and white and has no audible dialogue. So how’d that turn out?

Francis Thurston (Matt Foyer) has been named executor of the estate of his recently deceased uncle Professor George Angell (Ralph Lucas). Most of the material he goes through is scholarly research. However, a locked box proves to contain something more unexpected.

The first thing uncovered are transcripts of a series of interviews Angell conducted with local artist Henry Wilcox (Chad Fifer) in March of 1925. It all started when Wilcox presented Angell with a bas relief featuring a strange tentacle-faced being. Despite its recent composition, it had a vibe of being far older. Wilcox explained that he had sculpted it while half-asleep during a dream in which he wandered through a city with alien geometries that would give Euclid a swirlie and stuff him in a locker. Angell requested that Wilcox keep a journal of his dreams and report them to him. Wilcox complied as his dreams became even more bizarre. Later in the month, Wilcox collapsed into a fever-induced coma, in which he would stay for over a week. Once he regained consciousness, he had no recollection of any dreams he might have had and couldn’t remember any of the prior ones.

Along with the transcriptions is a poster-sized calendar of March 1925, which serves as a cross-index for a collection of newspaper clippings recounting abnormal happenings around the world during that month. Thurston finds this all confounding. In particular, why would a professor of Semitic Languages at Brown University be concerned with something as fanciful as dream journals and other such occult nonsense? He gets his answer in the next batch of papers which recount Angell’s attendance at an archaeological symposium in St. Louis in 1908.

This gathering of scholars was visited by New Orleans police detective John Legrasse (David Mersault), who wished to consult them about the provenance of a tentacled-faced idol that had been confiscated during the raid of a cult orgy. None of the learned men present recognized it except for Professor Webb (Barry Lynch), who saw a near identical sculpture over thirty years ago in Greenland. The idol had been the center of worship for an outcast tribe, who would utter a phrase not even vaguely connected to the local languages. Rather disconcertingly, Legrasse recognized it right away, as it was used by the cultists he had encountered.

As for how Legrasse acquired the idol, it was thanks to an investigation of the disappearances of several swamp folk and reports of sinister drumming from deep within the bayou. In their exploration, Legrasse and his men stumbled into a vile cult ceremony where the missing persons had been sacrificed. Despite their superior numbers, the cultists were too out of it to mount an effective resistance and the police captured most of them, taking only minor injuries in the process. One of the more lucid cultists proclaimed that they worship the Great Old Ones, alien entities beyond human comprehension that had descended from the stars untold aeons ago. Chief among them is Cthulhu, who lays dreaming in his sunken city of R’lyeh, which will rise again once The Stars Are Right. How two nearly identical cults had formed seemingly independent of one another is something the people at the symposium found troubling.

Now understanding why his uncle had been so interested in Wilcox, Thurston decides to conduct his own investigation to fill in the blanks. However, every one of his leads comes to a dead end. So he gives it up and returns to his geological research. But a chance encounter with a newspaper article that had been used to wrap one of his samples sheds light on an incident which ties in all the bizarre happenings of March 1925. Though it may ultimately prove to be more knowledge than he can handle.

From a fanboy standpoint, the adaptation is remarkably faithful, with only two significant changes. The first is how the old-timey racism that crops up here and there in the chronicle has been excised. Since none of it was all that pertinent to the narrative, it was an easy call. The other is how the crew of the Emma came in possession of the Alert, encountering it uncrewed during a storm rather than being attacked by its pirate crew. My guess for that one is that the production crew wanted to reduce the number of action sequences to the absolute minimum necessary, and that was the most expendable of the lot.

Though the production was intent on mimicking silent movies of the 1920s (down to the picturing having minor scratches and artifacts), one aspect they did not emulate was the acting. This was for the best. One of the reasons I consider Noseferret to be an overrated classic is that I believe the acting style of the day undermined the film. The exaggerated facial expressions and other such techniques remind why most of the best remembered silent movies are comedies. Here the performances are more understated, and don’t wreck the mood as a result. In particular, I liked the guy they had for Wilcox, who really conveys the manner of a neurotic artist.

Music is especially important, as it’s the only audio component. Fortunately, each composition matched well with their accompanying scenes. My personal favorite was the percussion-heavy piece during the cult orgy, which proved to be quite resonant.

As for production values, well let’s just say it’s a good thing the movie was shot in black-and-white. The making of feature on the DVD showed what everything looked like in color, and I believe the phrase “Muppet Show set” was bandied about. A fair assessment, as the garish colors were not very helpful in making them look convincing. Yet shoot it in black-and-white and they prove to be quite evocative, particularly the swamp set. The least effective sequences visually involved the ocean scenes. The simulation of the ocean surface as well as the model ships were not at all convincing. Yet even this can be allowed to slide, as movies of the 1920s would have featured similar deficiencies.

Also, their stop motion Cthulhu was much better looking than the Cthulhu in Rough Magik.

Intermission!

• Fun with flashbacks
• Why no “Building Code Under Fire” or “New Petition Against Tax Law”?
• Esquimaux
• Regional dialects
• Indiana Jones-style travel montage
• Go for distance!
• Temple slime just won’t come out
• Cthulhu does his own Noseferret shadow
• “What has risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise. We hear its call and await our inevitable doom.”
• And the cycle of Shmuck Bait continues