I have encountered H. P. Lovecraft relatively recently, just a few years ago as I was digging slightly more seriously into horror literature and trying to find out is there something else besides Anne Rice and Stephen King. The answer was yes, but you need to search around in order to discover something that is not a typical pulp fiction - best sellers were not really so memorable and often simply depended on gore, sex and violence. Shirley Jackson was a revelation and than around the same time I finally decided to check this guy, who seems to have cult following - his 1927. short story "Color Out of Space" was sensational and my first introduction to his style. As brilliant as Lovecraft was, he turned out to be a bit too intense for me so I always read his work cautiously, little by little, short story here and there, never one after the another as with some other writers.
When I heard that there is a new movie version of this famous story, I was simultaneously thrilled and apprehensive - after all, Lovecraft creates the atmosphere of menace and doom with his words, so transferring this on a screen, into a completely different medium means that story will probably depend on visual effects and acting. I was correct: director Richard Stanley take on it is lovingly twisted re-telling that has almost nothing really in common with Lovecraft but a lot with 1950s monster B movies. And guess what, it worked perfectly. Because even during his lifetime, Lovecraft's writing was never considered a high literature and was always published in a trashy pulp magazines so it kind of makes sense that now comes to the silver screen as a trashy B movie with exaggerated acting and lots of blood all over the place.
The movie itself was great FUN. I genuinely don't remember when was the last time I had such fun in the cinema because normally I watch everything very for analytically and always found old ideas rehashed and presented as new, but here everything was moving in a such speed that there was no time for using the brain - I could just swirl trough some crazy LSD fantasy and enjoy the ride. The first half rolls nicely as a introduction to a doomed family who have just moved to a isolated new property and you don't have to be familiar with the story to understand something bad will happen to them. Director Richard Stanley takes a very basic frame - family living far away from everybody else, gets meteorite in their farm and strange things started happening - but naturally builds his own story around it. While I am not entirely sure how did they get Joely Richardson for this project, it seems like a perfectly natural choice for unrepentantly hammy Nicolas Cage who overacts, exaggerates and basically knowingly winks at the audience trough the whole movie - he knows that we know this is not a high art and here, you wanted camp, I'll give you camp. In a way its a equivalent to those old movies where stars like Joan Crawford in the twilight of their careers valiantly tried to hold on to the very last minute on a screen, covered with blood and screaming while waving the axe/scissors/hammer. Once things started rolling, I spent the rest of the movie with hands covering my face and not only I was squirming uncomfortably but looking away and behaving like a squeamish teenage girl - I honestly don't remember when was the last time I wriggled and wriggled so much in the cinema - as we went out, both me and my friend were laughing like madmen and had immediately to go for a drink out in a open air to get back to reality. I could actually watch it again. It was a breath of fresh air amongst movies full of cliches, it might be derivative from 1950s but today it felt completely new. I actually like this director big time and looking forward to his second Lovecraft project.
No comments:
Post a Comment