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mhamill
Reviews
Cthulhu (2007)
Smell like a rotten fish
Word among my wife's circle of friends was that the 2007 movie Cthulhu was wretchedly bad. If you are bad movie fanatics like we are, this was reason to place the movie on our Netflix queue. No question about it, Cthulhu is a stinker of a movie. However, it languishes somewhere between mediocre and abysmal. I have seen much worse than this, but certainly not recently.
Perhaps I would rate this clunker lower if it were not that some of the actors actually seem to be trying. Jason Cottle plays Russ, a reputedly brilliant university professor in the Pacific Northwest who is reluctantly drawn home because of the untimely passing of his mother. That and there is the small matter that Armageddon is at hand. While we see him driving home to the funeral, we hear on the radio all these terrible things about the end of the world, like rising sea levels and global anarchy. Not much of it is actually borne out on film though because that would, like, cost money, although the budget was big enough to include one overturned car.
Russ turns out to be gay, which is fine by him, but not so fine with his weird dysfunctional family. Russ's domineering father is particularly unhappy with his sexual orientation but as we learn later it is not because he is particularly homophobic. Nor does he seem particularly broken up by the passing of his spouse. Russ's sister Dannie (Cara Buono) tries to play family peacemaker, but everyone at the old homestead seems very concerned about Russ passing on his DNA to another generation. That's pretty hard when the idea of making love to a woman gives you the hives.
Russ does find himself rather curious when one evening he sees a row of hooded priests, looking like they came out of The Da Vinci Code, climbing out of boats and into an old warehouse along the wharf. Curiosity leads him inside where he finds outlined on chalk on the floor the names of many of the townspeople. What could it possibly mean other than they were being cheap? Should we care? For someone who seems to want to rush back to academia he seems to ask many questions and spends inordinate amounts of time in and under creepy warehouses. Part of his motivation for hanging around is to catch up with an old family friend, whom he conveniently seduces. Through his friend, he learns about a mysterious book that could explain all the weird things going on in town. A clerk at a convenience store warns him to stay away from the old warehouse by the wharf. However, if he is crazy enough to investigate the place would be please look for her younger brother who disappeared some years earlier? It turns out what Russ really has to worry about is Tori Spelling. Tori plays Susan, the friend who allegedly harbors the old book that explains the weird things Russ is witnessing. Tori's presence in a movie is almost an imprimatur of its badness. She is sort of like Adrienne Barbeau's was in movies a few decades back, and she comes with Barbeau's ample cleavage. Susan has a husband who is conveniently paraplegic and sterile. In fact, his visit is a setup because Susan is on a mission to become impregnated. Of course not just anyone will do, as we learn later. It's got to be Russ.
So Susan plays the role of hussy. This one seduction scene is very strange and is perhaps the comic highlight of this lowlife movie, rendering what is probably the silliest scene filmed in the last decade. Fortunately for bad movie buffs, there is plenty more here to wallow over. The movie is tangentially related to H.P. Lovecraft's horror stories wherein Cthulhu apparently is a pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque scaly body with rudimentary wings. No such critter is manifested here of course, as there was no budget for that, but there is a sort of Swamp Thing scene at the very end of the movie. Russ's father and his kind live near an island off Antarctica and spend most of their long lives in the ocean. They apparently manifest as humans from time to time, and use human females to procreate. Yeah, this is pretty convoluted but it explains why Susan is putting the moves on a gay guy.
The movie suffers from the classic symptoms of a bad movie: no budget to speak of, mostly unknown actors, an incoherent script, dialog that doesn't make much sense and a director (Dan Gildark) what doesn't give much of a damn. What's puzzling is that in spite of these problems some of the actors are trying to do something with the material. It is all for naught but perhaps it somewhat immunized them from having careers completely destroyed. Every actor is entitled to at least one clunker. Unfortunately, this one sinks like dead weight.
Cthulhu then comes across as something like a Coen Brothers movie if the brothers were drunk while making the film. It is undeniably an odd little movie. Do not spend too much time trying to connect the plot points because you really cannot. Marvel instead that even though this is a really bad movie, it could still be plenty worse.
If you like an occasional bad movie though, this is definitely one to add to your list.
Stay Alive (2006)
Stay Away!!
The best part of going to a teen movie with your daughter is you get to spend a little quality time with her. This is increasingly challenging the older my daughter gets (she is sixteen). The trailer for the movie Stay Alive looked interesting. Alas, the trailer was the best part of the movie. Truth in marketing should require the movie to be renamed "Stay Awake".
Yech! To quote another movie ("Ghostbusters"), "I've been slimed." It is not accurate to say the movie has absolutely no redeeming values. It is just that you have to look pretty darn hard to find anything about it to recommend. Even my daughter laughed when the movie was over and agreed, "It was a terrible movie." Considering we paid full price to see the movie, I feel doubly ripped off. It wouldn't have been worth the matinée price either, but at least the damage to my wallet would have been less.
The premise is that a "Beta" online video game a group of very young adults are playing together called "Stay Alive" becomes more than escapist entertainment. If your character dies in the game, you die too, in exactly the same way your character died in the game. This becomes increasingly absurd as more than one of the disposable teenagers/young adult actors gets run over by (and I swear I am not making this up) a horse drawn carriage.
The plot is allegedly based on the real life story of a 17th century "Blood Countess", although it was updated to take place in a modern pre-Katrina New Orleans. Fortunately, this half-dead Blood Countess picks some of our society's most dispensable citizens. Each of the teens/young adults in this movie are mere stereotypes, and annoying stereotypes at that. Truly, we are better off as a society with them dispatched to some other world, so the Blood Countess is really doing society a favor. A cop or two also meets his untimely reward along the way but hey, these are New Orleans cops.
Perhaps one-dimensional teenagers are now par for the course. I would like to think that when I was their age I had more personality and a larger vocabulary. For a movie that was supposed to be scary, it was anything but. Can you say "foreshadowing"? I knew you could. If you cannot foretell when one of these cardboard characters is going to bite the big one, then you have oatmeal for brains.
While the movie was not filmed on a shoestring, it was obviously a low budget movie. Clearly not much money was spent on the virtually unknown "actors" that were hired. More money was spent on special effects and dressing up the faux creepy New Orleans mansion where some of the ending climactic scenes occur. This was a movie though that could not even afford a car wreck. In one scene, a guy sees a ghost on a backwater bayou road. He swerves but his car is left without a scratch. He gets out of his car to try to find the girl he thought he hit, to be shortly run over by, you guessed it, a horse drawn carriage. Here's an idea. Get in your car. Let's see a horse drawn carriage get over that. (Or for that matter, in the cemetery scene, simply hide out between the many mausoleums. Ain't no carriage that will get between them either.) The "actors" play vapid teenagers/young adults reasonably well, so in that sense they acted. The biggest problem with the movie is that it lacks any suspense whatsoever. You know what will happen since it is first shown in the video game. To keep yourself awake, you can simply hope that every one of these thinly drawn characters is wiped out. Alas, two of the more vapid teens manage to make it out of the movie alive. You though might want to check your pulse before leaving the theater, to ensure you didn't die of boredom.
The movie's saving grace is its short playing time: 85 minutes. This is not even a movie worth renting for a buck at a discount dollar DVD rental. If you happen to own a copy, its most important use will be as a coaster.
1.8 on my 5.0 scale. Unfortunately, I have seen worse than this, but have rarely paid so much for virtually no value.
I would review this movie more but alas, I have already wasted far more time warning you about it than it merits. Give it wide berth.