Oculus Reviews: Lovecraft and claymation? Hell yeah! Sort of.

Hey, y'all, this is Oculus Reviews.

The truth is... I have a real love-hate relationship with H. P. Lovecraft. I love him for the reason everyone else does: his incredible, vast imagination in creating alien terrors beyond human comprehension. He even wrote an actually good story every once in a while. The reasons I hate him are the flagrant racism that makes even his better-written stories horribly uncomfortable sometimes (it's a bit hard to take The Shadow Over Innsmouth seriously when its main theme is basically "ooo miscegenation is spooky"... and we all know what the guy named his cat); and the fact that he's lauded as a much better writer than he actually was. I do admire his creativity, but his actual writing skill was rather far behind it: I can't help but be allergic to his overindulgent purple prose and badly-written women (if he ever actually bothered to write a woman at all), even when he does manage to scare the bejezus out of me.

I should duck all those rotten tomatoes flying at me, shouldn't I?

Lovecraft adaptations, on the other hand, are... diverse, to put it gently. From the H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society's excellent Call of Cthulhu silent movie and the devastating Dagon to the recent Colour Out of Space that I'm still planning on watching, there have been a handful of actually watchable Lovecraft movies—and a lot of horrible crap, let's not kid ourselves. I suppose that's the case with every household name in horror (let's play a game: name the best and worst Stephen King movie that comes to your mind, and keep the "worst" down to one), but so far I can call myself lucky in that I've only seen the better Lovecrafts. And a fairly unique one that I'm not sure where to put on the scale.

imdb.com

H. P. Lovecraft's Dunwich Horror and Other Stories is a 2007 Japanese claymation movie that adapts three of HPL's short stories, some better-known and some less so: The Picture in the House, The Dunwich Horror and The Festival. I'm not actually a fan of any of these stories (racism, purple prose, see above; my personal favorites are Pickman's Model and Cool Air), but I'm always up for some novelty value, and the combination of claymation with cosmic horror is definitely a new one. Alas, the movie really underperforms in some ways, despite all the potential in the concept.

The first segment, The Picture in the House, is probably the best-adapted of the three stories, with slowly mounting dread escalating into a crescendo as the blood begins to drip... Movement is scarce: most of the story is told through small gestures, still images and dialogue, adding to the oppressive atmosphere. The art style of the movie is incredibly stark and grotesque, with even normal faces appearing gaunt, distorted... haunted. Whether this is a clever stylistic choice or just ugly is up to the viewer. (I'm leaning towards the former.) But to my great annoyance, the movie leaves out my favorite Lovecraft quote ever, from the beginning of the story proper:

Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places. For them are the catacombs of Ptolemais, and the carven mausoleums of the nightmare countries. They climb to the moonlit towers of ruined Rhine castles, and falter down black cobwebbed steps beneath the scattered stones of forgotten cities in Asia. The haunted wood and the desolate mountain are their shrines, and they linger around the sinister monoliths on uninhabited islands. But the true epicure of the terrible, to whom a new thrill of unutterable ghastliness is the chief end and justification of existence, esteem most of all the ancient, lonely farmhouses of backwoods New England; for there the dark elements of strength, solitude, grotesqueness, and ignorance combine to form the perfection of the hideous.

Why wouldn't you put this into your Lovecraft movie?! It's an iconic quote!

The second story, The Dunwich Horror, is where things start to fall apart a little. Told through narration, the story begins with Wilbur Whateley's dying moments, then rewinds to the beginning of the actual short story before plunging into the action-packed finale. The bizarre animation style really lends itself here to the horrors of the tale, but claymation and "action-packed" rarely go together well, and with the way the segment sprints through the plot of a pretty lengthy short story in barely ten minutes, there's little for the viewer to actually engage with.

The third story, The Festival, is easily the weakest of the trio. Even if I'm not a big fan of Lovecraft's Dramatique™ purple prose, without it this story—the eyewitness account of a bizarre eldritch celebration—really falls apart. With almost nonexistent narration, this segment mostly comes across as an exercise in set design: the horrific visuals really are great and would make for a stellar short film with a little more meat to it, but if you don't know the original short story, you probably won't even know what the hell you're looking at and why. There's very little character, plot, anything to hold the viewer's attention beyond "ooh, pretty!" (well... in a certain definition of  'pretty')—I was mostly nodding off through this segment, to tell you the truth.

He clearly doesn't approve.

Too bad about this movie, folks. I really do feel like there could have been more done here: maybe with a better selection of stories to work with, a longer running time, or just more effort to translate the stories to animation, this could have been an absolutely terrifying Lovecraft movie. As it is, it's mostly memorable for the sheer novelty of it; as far as Lovecraft adaptations go, there are definitely better-executed ones out there.

Writing: Not much to speak of, sadly. 2/5

Visuals: Probably the strongest aspect of the entire short film, but still not enough to carry it through all 46 minutes. 4/5

Do I recommend it?: For Lovecraft connoisseurs only—newcomers would probably just find it confusing and boring. 2/5

Oculus Reviews: The Terminator (no, not that one)

Good morning, y’all, this is Oculus Reviews. How do you like your coffee? I like it black and bitter like my soul. But what do you do if it’s fresh and too hot to drink? People have different solutions to that: some put it aside until it’s cool enough, or put cold milk in it… or drink it anyway. But me, I’ve invented a different path. Put water in it! Not only will your diluted coffee taste like the devil’s taint, and not only will you piss yourself off first thing in the morning with having to drink it, but you’ll get to enjoy that sweet, sweet caffeine straight out of the pot. It's a win-win scenario, isn't it?

When I told my Aussie friend about my shrewd coffee strategy, her response was “call that coffee a Depresso”—and wasn’t that the best thing I’d heard all day. I can practically hear the commercial. “Tired? Sad? Feeling like the whole world is against you? Why not make it worse? Depresso.”

Anyway, here I am, done with my daily Depresso and ready to talk about the movie I love the most in the whole wide world.


It’s no secret of mine that the first Terminator is my favorite movie ever—no secret because I will blather on and on and on about it to anyone foolish enough to bring it up. I just love it to bits, y’all. I’ve seen it at least six times all the way through, not counting the times I only rewatched parts, and man, it still makes me sob like my dog’s been shot every single time. As far as I'm concerned, the Terminator franchise is the best thing since celluloid film was invented; and by franchise, I of course mean Terminator, Judgment Day and Dark Fate. I don’t recall any other movies because those don’t exist. Right?

Now as for the novelization… that’s a bit more complicated. There are two versions for the original movie; one of them, the more widely accessible one, was written by Shaun Hutson. You know… THIS GUY.

goodreads.com

And let's just say that I ain't touchin' that one with a ten-foot spork. (Although the Slugs cover does rock.)

The other novelization was written by Randall Frakes and Bill Wisher, both people who have worked on the movie script itself—so you know the story was in better hands here. Unfortunately, the book has fallen out of print pretty much immediately, and nowadays it’s a rare collector’s item; good luck finding it under 40 bucks, really. I’d love to say that I was one of the lucky ones to snag it cheap, but the truth is that I dropped a pretty penny for this baby. Was it worth it? Hoo boy.

I assume most of us would be familiar with the basic plot of The Terminator, either from the first movie or the second one, but I'll give it a quick rundown nonetheless. From the year 2029, after a bitter war fought between humans and machines, two men are sent back into 1984 to find a nineteen year-old waitress named Sarah Connor—who's much more important to the world than she thinks. One of the men is her protector... and the other is a machine designed to kill her no matter the cost. It's a matter of who gets to her first that will decide the fate of mankind.

Boys, girls and pals, this book broke me. Here I thought the movie was heartbreaking. If it wasn't for the heinous prices and difficulty finding this novelization, I'd honestly urge every single Terminator fan to find a copy. It's beautifully written. Frakes and Wisher flesh out a lot that the movie doesn't show, from Sarah's everyday life and friendships to the Terminator's victims, or Kyle Reese's trauma and life as a soldier of the future; it's alternately funny, deeply romantic and absolutely devastating. Under the authors' pen even the most minor characters gain lives, become human and real rather than just set pieces. One of my favorite scenes from this story, for instance, is the one with the biker guy the Terminator shoves aside to get the phonebook in an early part of the story. After realizing that the huge, dead-eyed man is looking for women named Sarah Connor he briefly contemplates calling them to tell them about the weird person searching for them, only to forget it; and later he's filled with horror and remorse when he sees that two of those women were murdered and realizes that he might have been able to warn them in time. Even the nameless bit characters from the movie get names and realistic inner lives in this, and it's a real delight to see—for a 240 page-long book, it really packs some heart and humanity.

The action scenes, of course, are just as good, filled with as much relentless intensity as they are in the movie, so reading them will get your heart pounding as much as watching them would. I'm usually not a marathon reader—I prefer to immerse myself in a book, take it slow, as it were—but I stayed up until 4 in the morning to finish this one because I couldn't. Put it. Down. And this after already knowing the story by heart; the richness of this novelization, of the prose and the characters and all the emotion and adrenaline, really surprised me. And if you happen to like Kyle Reese, prepare to be absolutely demolished by pretty much everything he thinks and does in this novel. He picks a strawberry and feeds a stray dog, y'all.

Or there's this particular passage which I have to show you guys, because you're all welcome to cry with me.

The Terminator, page 173.

WHY MUST YOU HURT ME SO.

The good things about this book are many, and the bad are few; I could mention the occasional typo or the maybe one scene where I thought one of the protagonists was thinking a little OOC (at least as far as my own interpretation of the movie goes), but really, these bad parts are like needles in a haystack. If you're as immersed in this story as I was, you'll probably barely notice them.

In conclusion? The Terminator book is really freakin' good—because it was clearly made by people who knew what they were doing and gave a damn. It's a skillfully written, relentlessly dark, but also deeply touching novel that does the movie justice and fleshes it out in a way I haven't seen many movie novelizations do. If I could somehow make it so that every Terminator fan could get a copy of it, I would. And to answer the earlier question to myself... yes, it was worth it. Boy, was it ever.

Writing: While hardly literary fiction, this is really the best kind of vintage genre writing: rich, atmospheric, heart-poundingly intense when it has to be, soft and poetic where it hits you the hardest. 5/5

Availability: Why isn't this back in print?! 1/5

Entertainment factor: Couldn't. Put it. Down. 5/5

Do I recommend it? What else have I been doing until now? 5/5