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| Sunday, November 7, 2004 09:50 PM |
| Parties |
 by Fëanor |
A lot of stuff went down this weekend. I'm going to cover yesterday today, and save today for tomorrow. If that makes any sense...
Yesterday, I went over to Sarcasmo's place to enjoy an H.P. Lovecraft movie festival, presented by Yagathai (who works at a cool local video store and thus was able to acquire copies of many Lovecraft film adaptations). Lovecraft is one of my favorite writers, and definitely my favorite horror writer, so this was a great time. I'd seen almost all of the movies before, but I still had tons of fun watching them again. They were actually universally much better than I remembered. I'd gotten the impression that all Lovecraft adaptations were bad, but this is not so.
The films:- First came Haunted Palace, a lovely little Roger Corman film featuring Vincent Price as the clueless Charles Dexter Ward, haunted by the spirit of his evil warlock ancestor, Joseph Curwen. This is, of course, based on Lovecraft's excellent story "The Strange Case of Charles Dexter Ward"--one of my all time favorites. It's a loose interpretation, but it brings in the Great Old Ones, even going so far as to name a few of them, and is generally a lot of fun, with some great hammy acting from Price. The movie came in the middle of Corman's string of Edgar Allan Poe adaptations for Universal International, and the studio tried to sell at as just another one of those, going so far as to bill it as Edgar Allan Poe's The Haunted Palace, and mentioning him and his poem "The Haunted Palace" as inspiration in the opening credits (though they spell his name wrong!). But they do give credit to Lovecraft, too, and really the movie has nothing to do with Poe's poem.
- Next in line was The Re-Animator, the classic, darkly comic adaptation of Lovecraft's story "Herbert West: Reanimator." The original story is, of course--like all of Lovecraft's work--not in the least comical. Neither is it as sick and perverted as Stuart Gordon's film. But that's okay. Gordon's film actually ends up being a lot more fun than the source material, thanks to these departures from it. Of course, the man most responsible for making this such a fun film is not Gordon, but B-movie actor extraordinaire Jeffrey Combs, who stars as the film's title character. Combs plays the modern day Dr. Frankenstein as a cold, heartless madman, earnest and arrogant, but with a twisted sense of humor and far too little thought about the consequences of his actions. Though he is not technically the main character of the film, and is certainly not the most normal or likable, he's definitely the guy you end up loving and rooting for.
- The next two films we watched are not adaptations of any specific Lovecraft story or novel, but they are heavily influenced by his work, and are definitely "mythos" works, as the saying goes. First was In the Mouth of Madness, which is probably the best Lovecraft-inspired movie out there, and also one of John Carpenter's best films. It stars Sam Neill as insurance investigator John Trent who's trying to track down a horror writer named Sutter Cane (played brilliantly by the mighty Jurgen Prochnow) who's mysteriously disappeared. Trent's job is to find the con, to see through the lie to the truth--he's a classic Lovecraftian narrator, unwilling to believe in the horror until the last moment. This is a trick Lovecraft uses to draw you in and to make you believe, and it works quite well here, especially since the story itself is all about the power of belief and the relativity of reality.
- The last movie I checked out before I left (though I'm told the viewing continued on late into the night) was the only one I hadn't seen before--an HBO TV movie called Cast a Deadly Spell. This is a particularly clever cinematic concoction, mixing together Lovecraft's mythos and the film noir genre into something quite potent and enjoyable. It takes place in a fictional, parallel universe version of America in the 1940s, where magic use is commonplace. Subtle references to noir classics like The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep abound, as do more direct references to Lovecraft monsters like Cthulhu and Yog-Sothoth. The great character actor David Warner, who had a small role in In the Mouth of Madness, pops up again here in a more central part as the rich wizard who hires Fred Ward's character (none other than private eye Harry Philip Lovecraft) to track down the Necronomicon for him (a book anyone with a passing knowledge of Lovecraft will recognize). A labyrinthine plot involving dames, gangsters and heaters follows. It's a ton of fun. I recommend trying to see this one if you can, but it's hard to find--Yagathai could only get it on VHS, which meant Peccable and I had to walk a few blocks to Peccable's apartment and grab his VCR, since Sarcasmo's wasn't working. But it was worth it. And anyway we had plenty of pizza and snacks to eat when we came back.
And that was it for the evening. Unfortunately, eating that pizza and those snacks so soon before going to bed meant I didn't get much sleep. But I did get a lot more of Knights of the Old Republic taken care of. Hee hee.
I'll talk more about my weekend (Sunday's party) tomorrow. Until then, my loyal readers, I bid you adieu...
UPDATE: Btw, my contribution to the party was three CDs that we played between movies. These were the three albums by The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets, the best Lovecraft-inspired, pop/metal band ever to exist! And actually, even judged outside of that rather small niche, they are pretty damn awesome. I especially enjoy their latest album, the soundtrack/concept album based on the film of the same title (which doesn't exist), which itself was based on the television show of the same title (which also doesn't exist)--Spaceship Zero. (Check out the poster--you may recognize one of the names on there.) Just wanted to make sure I put in a plug for them. |
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