The Call of Cthulhu by The Professor

Writer: H. P. Lovecraft
Director: Andrew Leman
Starring: Ramon Allen, Jr., Ralph Lucas, Chad Fifer, Matt Foyer
Length: 47 Minutes

Perhaps undervalued in his time, Lovecraft has grown in modern times to become something of an archon - one of the Great Old Ones of horror fiction. His Cthulhu mythos has spread its tentacles into everything from Mignola's Hellboy to Gaiman's American Gods to Doctor Who to innumerable role-playing games, not to mention all the movies that have been made to greater or lesser effect that are meant to be direct interpretations of H.P.'s own stories.
 
Released in 2005, The Call of Cthulhu, was stylized to look like a 20's-era silent film. And it does. The filming technique, sets and exaggerated acting all lend to the feel of a film made in the years when the story was drawn from the dreamlands by Lovecraft.
 
Over all the concept is a brilliant one, a lot of things that might come off as hokey in a typical modern film, work because of the film design. Cthulhu himself, appears only in the briefest flashes of lightning and camerawork preventing the lord of R'lyeh from becoming a monstrous muppet in the mind of the audience. The cheapish sets work great in conveying the "non-Euclidean" geometries of the city drawn up from the deep. And when one of the explorers somehow wanders to the top of the ancient portal and stumbles off, his accidental sacrifice opening the way for Cthulhu to emerge, it seems right.
 
The only thing that bothered me was the words of narration that appeared in between scenes, necessary to understand the dialogue of the characters and preserve the old-timey feel, but troublesome in that there was perhaps too much dialogue to keep it from becoming tedious. The constant reading breaks took away from the pace of the story, though I can't think of a way to better it.
 
Overall, a good flick. A must if you're into the mythos. While not what a modern audience would call scary, it's certainly entertaining and takes one back to a time which was not after all so long ago, a time which may come again,...when the stars are right.  
 

3 out of 5!