Review : Lovecraft Country

I love HP Lovecraft , with him the horror genre would not be what it is today. We can not say the same for writer Matt Ruff. "Lovecraft Country" was his stab at horror. Normally he is a left of center urband fantasy author who is mediocre at best "Lovecraft Country " found him trying to work through his conflict in loving  HP Lovecraft. Quality wise it was like "50 Shades of Gray" was to ' Twilight", the idea was there the excution was off.  "50 Shades of Gray" is sadly a better book than "Lovecraft Country".  I went into the show with low expectations . Jordan Peele's name had been attached to it and fortunatly he was only the producer. It is more watchable than any of the garbage Peele has put out. I expected more from director Yann Demange as he also directed 'Dead Set". Instead when the horror elements came in at the end it felt like a bad rip off of Sam Rami.

Good news first ...the best part of the show was Jurnee Smollett. She is way hotter than she was in "Birds of Prey". She was the only actor in this show not made out of card board or playing off a tired stereotype. The point they were trying to make on the show was better made on the most recent season of "Umbrella Accademy". I think even when trying to capture the feel of the time period it was ruined by stupid mistakes like breaking the mood with hip hop. Jazz would have made more sense. Writer Misha Green read the Ruff book in order to adapt it , but it feels like she never got around to reading any actual Lovecraft or maybe she would have known the basics like  ...there are no vampires in his stories! Not showing the monster and letting imagination to the work is scarier. After all if the CGI budget was just big enough to make the monsters look like something from the 2004 Van Helsing film, then what you did now show us wwould have been better than what you showed us. I did like the monster that attacked them with all the eyes, but only when they did not show it full on.

This episode was a let down and the bar could not have been raised any lower. The moral to all horror should be ...abandon all hope, life is futile, you will die. Lovecraft carried this message with a dose of you will be driven mad by the unseen evil. Instead we get a veiled history lesson that we have already have had Hollywood sense us hundreds of times, thankfully not in horror until now. Horror is loosely termed as nothing was actually scary in this episode. I might give it one more episode to see if it either gets better or Smollet gets naked. I have low expectations for either happening.

Film Review : "the Color Out of Space"

Mandy was fun, I feel it got a great deal of cult cred perhaps too quickly. I would also say it was more like a "Mas Max" revenge flick with a weird cult in it . There were too many things that were explained in a sloppy fashion. Here this is gotten away with because that is part of HP Lovecrafts style to not give it all away . Lovecraft worked off the notion that what you do not see, the unknown is what is scariest so the film did keep that tone. Though I would not say this movie was all that scary.   Nicholas Cage might have been better in "Mandy' it seems like he was transitioning into playing the kinds of roles that John Lithgow once played. The co-star was really the scientist kid, who was pretty boring and I did not give a shit about what happened to him. The mother in this movie was also unlikeable. I which they did more with Tommy Chong, his character was one of the best , along with the Witch daughter. The Necronomicon was placed in her scenes which was an amusing wink.

The scene with the color were pretty to look at. I read a review that said this is a movie about how the color pink ruins your life. Not untrue and fair synopsis. It mutates what it touches in a manner that would have made Stuart Gordon proud. I like when the color rippled through their bodies. I think some of the monster effects were better done than others and some could have been better served more suggested which would have stayed closer to HP Lovecraft's vision.  I remember being on a horror panel once where someone brought up the reason Cthulhu has such a hard time transitioning to the screen because once you show a tentacle monster it is no longer scary. Stuart Gordon managed to blend this in a way that mixed camp with the grotesque and this movie while paying homage to his style could have taken better notes on this part.


Does it seem like I am talking about many other things that are not this movie ? Well that because it is made up of parts that are not all that original. Perhaps by today's standards, but when most horror these days is remakes then the bar is pretty low. This is not a bad movie. I made it through and was marginally entertained most of the time. I think it plays it too safe and experiments in the wrongs ways . This is so mediocre that if it makes it onto my end of the year list then it had to have been a pretty sad  year for horror movies if we do not ten more better than this one.