The HP Lovecraft films of Stuart Gordon

Spoilers:

The charmingly overwritten yet impressively atmospheric works of OG (original gamer) HP Lovecraft may never be faithfully realised on screen, but fortunately they've been cheerfully and freely adapted by the late Stuart Gordon as a loose series of endearingly characterful gore flicks. While this is closer in spirit to the ear-shattering-fart-noise /tv/ pasta than the spirit in which the original stories were lovingly crafted, they're entertaining enough to be notable.

Re-Animator

If you've never found a dead cat in your fridge, you weren't a student.

Herbert West (Jeffrey Combs, these flicks) is an astutely observed case study for why smart people are the dumbest people in the world. Re-Animator concerns his misadventures in the art of bringing dead people and comical cat puppets back to life with an hilariously glowing green serum, but this is window dressing to the metanarrative which is that the whole movie is a setup to a visual pun about giving head.

Image censored for nudity.

Far from evoking the existential terror of man's insignificance in the face of an endless universe of hentai monsters, Re-Animator mines the slapstick potential of an antagonist whose head commands his body, which can't see and bumbles around comically, toward a singular purpose: to boldly go where no decapitated physician (presumably) has gone before; to tongue-spelunk Barbara Crampton's canyon. If it were me I think a higher priority might be to find some way to reattach my misplaced cranium, but I am not a medical genius.

They call him Ted the Caver (they don't).

The use of one of those dummy things with the organs you can take out and rearrange as a replacement head for the body is nicely creepy/funny. Leave a comment if u know the name for one of those.

Tragically for our orally inclined villain, he's cock-, or, rather, tongue-blocked by Herbert at the last second and a battle ensues, leading to a Pet Semataryesque denouement.

Say Herb, what do you think we should name him?

From Beyond

Not content to stop at one extremely loose HPL adaptation starring Jeffrey Combs as a scientist with poor judgement with a villain with a semidetached head facilitated by strategically framing him near the bottom of the screen molesting Barbara Crampton, Gordon followed up Re-Animator with From Beyond, swapping out the blues and greens for a distinctive bright pink theme.

Colour coding your movies is such a simple step to take to make them stand out yet you never really see it.

This time the premise is that Crawford Tillinghast (Combs) and his pervy mentor Dr Pretorius (Ted Sorel) have put together a machine that when activated allows them to see creatures that are all around us in some parallel dimension, which unfortunately allows them to see us too, and eat us.

They look sort of like eels, in keeping with Lovecraft's signature seafood phobia.

Following the first disastrous use of this machine, in which Pretorius is apparently killed, Tillinghast is committed to the funny farm where he is studied by Dr Katherine McMichaels (Crampton), who determines the exposure to the device has enlarged his pineal gland. What ensues is a movie more indebted to the fantasy metaphysics of Freudian mythology than that of the Lovecraft cycle, with psychedelic-era theories of third eyes and experiences far beyond the doors of everyday perception gleefully chopped, screwed and Frankensteined together in Gordon's characteristic style.

????

Pretorius returns empowered with the knowledge of extradimensional shapeshifting and an agenda to fingerblast Crampton's crevice almost suspiciously reminiscent of Re-Animator's antagonist's oral designs.

♫I'm gonna finger bang bang you into my life/Girl, you like to finger bang and it's alright♫ - Dr Pretorius

The singular imperative throughout the Gordon mythos seems to be to access Crampton's snatch by any means available in this world or the next, a goal she becomes increasingly willing to facilitate upon discovering that activating the machine activates her below the spleen. In true librarian-letting-her-hair-down style, she loses the glasses and dons a BDSM outfit Pretorius kept around the house for purposes of his home movies (really). From Beyond is stopped from going full porno only by the intervention of based black ethnonationalist Ken Foree, who heroically slut-shames her for trying to seduce him.

"The white devil must not be allowed to dilute our proud melanated Wakandan strain" - Ken Foree

After a while Pretorius figures out how to activate the machine by himself, causing enough distress to our heroes that they wind up back at the koo-koo zoo, where the hapless Tillinghast's third eye activates, causing him to eat some brains in a bizarre yet pointless detour into Return of the Living Dead territory.

Ah, my favourite brain soup...cream of nowhere.

The movie goes further off the rails when Katherine escapes from the hospital and returns to blow up the machine with the old pipe-bomb-out-of-nowhere routine. Presumably she got it from Acme Co., same as Wile E. Coyote.

If every time this happened in a movie the character just whipped it out from behind her back with a comical sound effect, I think the audacity would override the plot hole.

Who cares though?, as the conclusion is appropriately entertaining for the setup, with Combs once again giving his life (maybe) so Crampton can perhaps survive sort of although perhaps, Pet Sematarily, dead would have suited her better. From Beyond is probably the highlight of the cycle for its distinctive look, creature design, and madcap escalation, and maybe the first few minutes of screentime are even loosely based on the story.

Castle Freak

10 years after Re-Animator Combs and Crampton now play an unhappily married couple, with Combs assuming the role of frustrated exile from the Crampton clam. They're sleeping in separate rooms after he killed their son and blinded their daughter in a car accident some time prior, but the family stays together for the daughter's sake or maybe because Combs just inherited a castle in Italy.

Even though they're playing different characters each time, this feels like exactly where all of them would end up.

They move in only to find the castle is already occupied by a Castle Freak (1995)!!! Raised in a basement dungeon, chained, beaten, castrated and subsisting on a trickle of water from a leak, C. Freak is as sympathetic a movie monster as ever chewed off his own thumb to escape his manacles, and as tenuously connected to Lovecraft as anything in the Gordon ouevre.

He's just like me.

He even dresses as a spooky ghost upon seeing his appearance in a mirror and, later, in a poignantish moment for a movie called Castle Freak, dumps the disguise when he realises the daughter can't see him. If only he had the power of speech they might have gotten along famously and populated the castle with little Gollums of their own.

We're spanning time.

Released direct-to-video and barely resembling its nominal source material (The Outsider), this one is somewhat of a footnote but is worth catching for the creature makeup and performance. Jonathan Fuller gives C. Freak a fantastically creepy gait, and Combs and Crampton are as good as ever. There's even a wholesome scene of prayer with the mother and daughter.

Christian blogge approved.

Dagon

At last, a chance to use this image not for no reason.

Dagon loses fat points for starring neither Combs nor Crampton, but redeems a few for actually being somewhat Lovecraftian, albeit goofily. A mishmash of the stories Dagon and The Shadow over Innsmouth, it stars an unlikable couple who bitch and fight all the time even though they're rich and on a boat in Spain. The main guy demonstrates by way of contrast how important Combs' vulnerability was in selling his seething nerdish manlet as a credible protagonist, someone we could root for despite his actions or personality. Combs Lite has the glasses but comes off as simply arrogant, while his Spanish gf is of the genre of femoid who feels entitled to throw his laptop into the sea because she didn't get his undivided attention for five seconds.

Depicting relationships realistically is always a mistake.

Fortunately the boat is wrecked by a storm and they have to seek help in the creepy local fishing village of Imboca (In mouth - do u get it?). The locals begin to reveal ever more ichthyological features and Not Barbara Crampton is captured, leaving Not Jeffrey Combs to try to escape the fish-people in a series of narrow escapes including an effectively suspenseful scene in which he must swap out a bolt from one doorway to another to prevent the Imbocans from invading his hotel room like a dismembered professor invading Barbara Crampton's puss.

There's some excellent creature makeup in this one, such as this hotelier's gills which only become visible as he turns away from the camera.

Soon Not Combs meets an elderly inebriate who gives him the backstory: once Imboca was full of normal humans, but when the seas ceased to yield a sufficient catch they turned to this guy, who invoked the great old one Dagon to bring fish and gold back on the menu.

This dude look like he about to start speaking Klingon.

Naturally the cult of Dagon starts murdering everyone and turning everyone else into Birdseye fish fingers. There follow far too many scenes of Not Combs fighting rejected Spongebob characters in the rain and making out with DevianTART tier monstergirls.

Kurt Eichenwald has pumped enough bilge to this movie to keep the British navy afloat for a year.

Finally he faces down the townsfish as they gather to sacrifice Not Crampton to our titular cephalopod, but while occupied torching the Imbocans he proves too late to prevent Dagon from flooding Not Crampton's poop deck with his briny black spooge.

@ least it's good for ur skin

She insults /oursquid/ a little bit by begging Not Combs to kill her, but he hesitates and is once again too slow to stop Dagon from dragging her down to Davy Jones' locker for a postcoital spoon. He looks like this:

He wants a hug :(