Wednesday, July 1, 2009

No Craft Like Lovecraft Pt. 3 (Oprah's Book Club)

Necronomicon(1993)Directed By Christopher Gans, Shusuke Kaneko, and Brian Yuzna

I wasn't planning on watching this, I just googled Necronomicon, because a friend of mine says they have a copy, and google had the whole movie.
I liked Christopher Gans "Brotherhood Of The Wolf" and "Silent Hill", and knew of another of the anthologies three directors Brian Yuzna from his tongue in cheek "The Guyver" and "Warlock"(whose lead actors appears in this as well) movies, but Jeffery Combs was the real selling mark.
The point is, it was a dark and stormy night, and I was about to go to sleep til this appeared, and sometimes you gotta just go where the good lord Yog Sothoth takes you in life. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yog_Sothoth
Combs plays HP Lovecraft, hack horror writer, who asks some monks for permission to explore their library for story ideas, while he actually searches for the fabled book of the dead, the Necronomicon. He transcribes three stories, while the monks attempt to break into the inner chamber where HP sits with the book, after dropping the keys into the murky water just bellow the floor.The three stories play out at best like "Night Gallery" at worst like "Tales From The Crypt" so all around pretty good, if your into that kind of thing.The stories are all direct adaptations of Lovecraft stories, and only involve the Necronomicon in small ways (in the final story, it's just sitting in the background on a table).These are a pretty good cross section of the types of stories Lovecraft wrote.
The first is a gothic tale of two generations of men whose wives drown and how they use the book to resurrect them, and certain sea dwelling elder Gods they have to face as a result.
In it's New England locale, and story within story, its closest to HP's work.The next was about a woman in a boarding house, who meets a man who has to have the temperature set to freezing because of a rare skin condition, and his involvement in a string of disappearances.It's a mad scientist story, with an actually sorta creepy twist at the end.Re-Animator, on a more intimate scale.
The final story is the strongest, it starts with a police chase in mid pursuit, while a male and female cop argue argue about their having slept together and the baby in utero, which resulted, til their car flips over and the man is dragged away suddenly.
The woman follows a trail of blood into an abandoned building, and the subterranean caves beneath, guided by a homeless man who says the killer they are looking for is actually an alien. It ends in a giant womb, where human brains are transplanted, into bat-like creatures for sexual reproduction/cross pollination, who feed on bone marrow. Lovecraft called these cute little fellas "Mi-Go". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mi-goThe story ends with screaming turning into insane laughter, while being digested in the literal belly of the beast. While none of the stories were typically scary, this like so many scenes in the film, was genuinely horrific. The framing tale holds the stories together nicely, and comes to the only conclusion it could.Lovecraft summons a beasty, it eats some people.Lovecraft peaces out. The end. Tastes good on the way down.

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