100 Minutes, Color, USA, 2007

Written By: Grant Cogswell, Dan Gildark, Jason Cottle & Douglas Light (based on the short story “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” by H.P. Lovecraft)

Directed By: Dan Gildark

Dramatis Personae:

Jason Cottle is Russ Marsh, college professor, come back to his home town of Rivermouth for his mother’s funeral.

Cara Buono is Dannie, Russ’s devoted sister.

Dennis Kleinsmith is Reverend Marsh, Russ and Dannie’s ultra-creepy father, leader of an equally creepy cult based in Rivermouth.

Scott Patrick Green is Mike, Rivermouth tow truck guy and Russ’s old flame.

Tori Spelling is Susan, local marine biologist with a hidden agenda.

Richard Garfield is Zadok, crazy old fisherman and town drunk who knows too much.

Amy Minderhout is Julie, Rivermouth liquor store cashier who also knows too much.

Nancy Stark is Aunt Josie, Russ’s institutionalized aunt, who may also know too much…or may just be crazy.

Commentary:

Ah, hubris. I knew next to nothing about this movie, only that it was roundly disliked in the B-movie community. When I read this thread on the B-Masters blog, where they called for volunteers to review Cthulhu, I leapt at the chance. I am, of course, an attention whore; anything to shameless promote my website to a larger audience. And it seemed like no one else had the time or inclination to tackle the movie, either busy with other projects or just plain unwilling to do it. Well, for me, that was just like being offered the chance to climb Mount Everest. Something the mighty B-Masters can’t or won’t do? Sign me up! Throw me under that bus, man! Besides, thought naïve I, I’m a fan of H.P. Lovecraft. Even bad Lovecraft is still Lovecraft, right?

Imagine my…well, not dismay, really…my surprise, to actually watch Cthulhu, and realize what it really was. There’s very little Lovecraft in this horror movie; only the film’s title and basic plot outline are recognizable as something from his writings. And while Cthulhu is certainly an effective little movie in its own right, it wasn’t quite what I was prepared to see. It’s a horror movie told from a very different angle, and therefore not for everybody. Certainly not for someone hoping to find some cosmic, eldritch horror.

Cthulhu starts out simple enough. We’re introduced to our protagonist, college professor Russell Marsh in Seattle, as he gets a fateful telephone call. His mother has passed away, and he must go home for the funeral. He is reluctant to go home, for rather understandable reasons: Russ is gay, and this has put him at odds with his fanatically religious father and with his old-fashioned hometown of Rivermouth. It’s been nearly a decade since he’s set foot in that sleepy seaside village, but he nevertheless goes to pay his respects. Along the way, he has a strange encounter on the road: two young men in a car say that they know him, make some vague semi-threatening comments, then speed away. Further up the road, Russ sees their car, crashed, one of the men dead, the other dying. He stops to help, only to get another warning from the dying man about going home.

Russ’s stopping to help makes him late; he misses his mother’s funeral and heads straight home for the reception afterwards. He is greeted warmly enough by his sister Dannie, but his creepy touchy-feely father greets him with a strange kind of longing. That strangeness only intensifies Russ’s desire to simply pay his respects and leave town, but this hope is dashed by a visit from the family lawyer. Russ has been named executor of his mother’s estate, which means he must stick around for at least week while various things, including the auctioning off of his grandmother’s old house, are settled.

With tension simmering between Russ and the Reverend Marsh, Russ elects to stay at a local motel rather than at the family house. This proves to be a smart move, because the longer he sticks around Rivermouth, the weirder things get. He stumbles across the old dockside building where his father’s black-robed congregation meets, its inside walls inscribed with dozens of names written in a strange spiraling text. That night he has a nightmare, where he once again sees the man who died in the car wreck. Only this time, the man angrily calls him a freak and offers him an oddly-inscribed piece of black stone. When Russ awakens from his dream, he has the stone in his hand. Russ pays a visit to his Aunt Josie, who says that his mother left something for him in her old house…in the event of her untimely death. While hanging out at the local bar, he reconnects with Mike, an old friend from his childhood, and with Susan, who works at the local aquarium and claims to know something about the carved stone…but Susan is seductive in a very weird and desperate sort of way, and is clearly not to be trusted.

Strangely enough, the closest thing to a reliable source Russ can find is Zadok, a crazy old fisherman who frequents the bar. When Russ and Mike discuss the strange stone, Zadok begins telling a story about human sacrifice and sea monsters. He leaves the bar before he finishes, only to accost Russ later, telling him to bring some alcohol down to the docks and he will tell him the rest of the story. While buying the booze, Russ is given yet another vague warning from Julie, the liquor store clerk, not to trust Zadok. Nevertheless, he heads down to the docks, where Zadok tells him the rest of the story. A story of how once of Russ’s ancestors came across a mysterious island in the Pacific, and he used what he found there to start an arcane cult in Rivermouth. The stone, Zadok says, was a sacrificial instrument used by the Marsh cult. Zadok claims to have witnessed gruesome rites of sacrifice to a race of dark sea gods, rituals to guarantee prosperity and long life…and he claims that the names of the victims are written on the walls of the cult’s temple.

His patience wearing thin, Russ goes back to the liquor store, offering Julie a ride home and interrogating her about what she knows about the cult. She claims she doesn’t know much, but her freak-out when Russ almost hits some mysterious THING while driving on the night road says otherwise. Before leaving, Julie gives him a picture of her little brother, saying that he was taken by the cult. She believes him to be still alive somewhere, and she implores Russ to help find him. As Russ get himself deeper and deeper into the mystery surrounding Rivermouth, he gets more than he bargained for from Susan, and from the network of caves and catacombs that run below the town…caves that are not uninhabited…

The most effective horror stories are the ones that tap into very primal fears, and perhaps the most primal fear is that of the “Other”. The unknown, the alien, the unfamiliar. H.P. Lovecraft had a unique handle on this concept, and the monsters he created are some of the most “Other-ly” in horror fiction. His Old Ones are things of cosmic dread, beings so alien in nature that our feeble human minds can barely comprehend them, and would pop like water balloons if we even tried. Slightly less cosmic in scale are his Deep Ones from “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” but they are still disturbingly of the Other variety. As the products of unholy unions between humans and sea monsters, the Deep Ones also tap into another primal fear: sexual perversion (Oh, how Lovecraft despised both sex and fish; ‘twas mad genius to combine them). Sex is pretty scary on its own – an urge so basic that we simply cannot rationalize it – and when you start tweaking that urge in unconventional directions, you have the makings of some potentially scary stuff.

Cthulhu comes from one such unconventional direction. It is basically a gay horror movie, a horror film told from the perspective of homosexual characters and addressing the specific fears of the homosexual community. That’s a rare thing, because if any genre of film is dominated by the heterosexual point of view, it’s horror film (action movies are more exercises in repression, but that’s a whole ‘nother essay). Nearly every horror film dealing with themes of Other-ness and sexual insecurity address a very straight male fear: the fear of PENETRATION. Both actual and metaphorical: the fear of being violated on some core level, of having something alien enter you and rob you of your manhood. Not only to fear the Other, but to be TURNED INTO the Other.

If this is a very heterosexual fear, then what is the homosexual equivalent? When society has decided that YOU are the Other, that YOURS is the sexual perversion, then what is your most basic insecurity, your most primal fear? I guess what you fear is society. The judgment of political and religious authorities, and the persecution that comes with that judgment. The fear not of simply BEING DIFFERENT, but of being condemned on account of that difference, being either destroyed or being forced to become something you don’t want to be in order to survive. And Cthulhu relies heavily on this fear; the movie plays like the typical struggle of gay man to be accepted by his conservative home community…only with sea monsters added. The creepiness and horror to be found in this movie are of a very human kind. Rivermouth is a small American town made nightmarish by a few little tweaks in set design and color scheme. Every homey piece of Americana looks alien and vaguely hostile. Every friendly comment, every sunny glance from a happy townsperson is tinged with an unspoken menace. Every question seems loaded, every answer a subtle accusation. Which is how it all must seem to a man like Russ. His father’s religious fanaticism and passive-aggressive condemnation of his lifestyle are familiar; it has nothing to with him being the leader of an arcane cult. The “decent” members of the Rivermouth community resemble nothing so much as empty-eyed zombies, who wear creepy smiles and just want Russ to stop all this gay nonsense and have a couple of kids (exactly who or WHAT they want him to have kids with is barely important).

Cthulhu’s take on sexuality and its notion of what “perversion” really means is what gives it its unique spin. It’s worth noting that in Lovecraft’s original story, he unambiguously condemns the people of Innsmouth. The cult of fish-lovers is a perversion of the natural order, and its progeny are abominations. In this movie, the cult is the Establishment. Their congress with unclean things from the depths is simply the way things are done, and have always been done in Rivermouth. Russ is the anomaly here – why doesn’t he want to spawn hideous amphibious progeny like his father and his father before him have done? – and no one in the Rivermouth community can seem to understand why he’s so horrified. It’s a clever twist on Lovercraft’s original concept, and one in-tune with that very different take on violation that Cthulhu offers. For Russ, the ultimate violation is the loss of his sexual identity. As a gay man from Rivermouth, he is unique, and he has had to struggle to find and define himself, to break free of an oppressive home life and a planned-out future, and to become his own man. This is what he values, and violation is to have that taken from him. To lose his sexual identity, to just become another one of these dead-eyed “breeders,” is the ultimate horror. It’s telling that the worst physical indignity Russ suffers is to be drugged and raped by Susan (she really, REALLY wants him to have kids). It’s a heterosexual initiation, a complete reversal from the typical horror movie scenario, and it manages somehow to be convincingly traumatic. That’s quite an achievement; there are those of us who wouldn’t find getting seduced by Tori Spelling to be all that horrific.

All that being said, while Cthulhu is an effective little film, it skimps unforgivably on the Lovecraft. When I go to watch a movie entitled Cthulhu, I go in with certain expectations, expectations which sadly were not met. There’s precious little eldritch horror to be found here. Precious little fishy horror to be found either. Now I will grant that this is a low-budget movie, and the old saw of horror film is that “no director has the budget to show you what you’re imagining behind that door.” I will further grant that H.P. Lovecraft was quite oblique in describing his eldritch horrors, knowing that some things are best left to the imagination. But in this movie…man. Is it too much to ask to maybe show a tentacle or two? The closest we get are the fleeting glimpses of the (admittedly creepy) frog-children that Russ encounters in the catacombs below the town, and of course the strange horned thing that shambles just out of view in a few pivotal scenes.

In the hands of the right director, this kind of thing can work, and work beautifully. Regrettably, Dan Gildark is not that director. Cthulhu is his first film, and it shows. There are moments of brilliance, but also moments of clumsiness. There is no real sense of “flow” to the film. Scenes are frequently broken up by flashbacks to Russ’s childhood in Rivermouth: random, underdeveloped things that don’t seem relevant to what’s happening in the present day. Plot points are dropped in the middle of the movie and left undeveloped: Aunt Josie and Zadok vanish from the film completely once they’ve dropped their loads of exposition. The regular disappearances around Rivermouth of children meant to be sacrificial victims are left unexplored. It’s not even clear what the monsters lurking around beneath the town even ARE. Acting, too, is wildly uneven. Jason Cottle is ear-gratingly shrill, particularly toward the end of the film, and Scott Patrick Green is just plain BAD, mumbling his lines and looking uncomfortable in his own skin. Tori Spelling is actually one of the better actors in the film; she does creepy well enough. It’s easy to simply get LOST watching the movie; there were times when I had NO IDEA what was going on, what was real and what was one of Russ’s vivid nightmares. Where Cthulhu DOES work, it works very well. But where it doesn’t, it threatens to bring the whole thing crashing down.

And thus, am I punished for my hubris. Thus, do I have the dubious honor of being the first to be crushed under the Juggernaut. I must come to the conclusion that when the B-Masters avoid a film, they have good reason to. So I venture back out into the world, a little wiser and a little humbler. And a little more hungry for a decent Lovecraft film.

Things To Look For:

- Cthulhu seems to be set in the not-to-distant future, if one is to judge from the television and radio reports that fade in and out of the background of the film. References are made to melting ice caps and rising ocean levels, the extinction of wild polar bears, and some kind of war happening on the “former U.S. border.” Ultimately nothing much is made of these things, which is kind of unfortunate. Setting Lovecraft’s tales of oceanic horror against the backdrop of global warming would certainly be a great way to modernize his tales, but the movie doesn’t go there. The movie does seem to be evoking something else with these reports, though. Environmental crisis, civil war raging in America, reactionary politics taking the forefront…this pretty much is a left-wing nightmare scenario. Certainly not a world where a homosexual would feel welcome. But certainly one where an apocalyptic sea cult could be a sensible way out.

- The relationship between Russ and Mike is a refreshing one, a kind of same-sex romance you don’t see in mainstream film. In that, there’s nothing all that unique about it. They’re childhood sweethearts who went their separate ways, then are thrown together again and rekindle the old spark. It’s just such a classic storytelling trope; in this case it just happens to involve two men. It also helps that Jason Cottle and Scott Patrick Green are rather normal-looking men. They’re not the strapping young hardbodies you’d find in a David DeCocteau film. Jason Cottle has facial blemishes and a pot belly, and Scott Patrick Green is a scruffy, homely man. There’s a real sense that this is not exploitation; it’s just two ordinary guys falling back in love.

- While I’m throwing myself under the bus, let me admit something else: I like Tori Spelling. In every interview I’ve seen, she comes across as a genuinely nice and decent person, surprisingly funny and down-to-earth – or at least, as down-to-earth as one can be, being Aaron Spelling’s daughter. I think she’s a better actress than most people give her credit for – I even liked her sitcom – and she does a good job in this movie. Granted, her role isn’t all that complex, but at least she doesn’t mumble.

- There’s only one thing about this movie that really irks me. The name “Cthulhu” is only spoken out loud two or three times in the movie, and it’s pronounced a completely different way each time. I know it’s a hard word, being made-up and all, but if you’re making a movie about Cthulhu, can you at least figure out the right way to pronounce the name? And yes, before you Lovecraft fans jump down my throat, there IS a right way to pronounce it! Or at least, a generally accepted way to pronounce it. You’d think, of all people, the guy WHO LEADS THE CULT devoted to Cthulhu would know how to pronounce it correctly! Bah! Well, at least there’s isn’t all that much Cthulhu in Cthulhu; saves us all a lot of grief.

Written words (c) 2009-2010 Tim o'Brien. Not to be used without permission. Other content, including images, is intended as a Fair Use pursuant to 17 U.S.C. sec. 107.

Date Posted: April 6^th, 2009

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