Fun With Tentacles, Part II

“All my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large.”

-H.P. Lovecraft

The genre of horror has never been so succinctly summarized. In American horror, Lovecraft is rivaled only by Poe, and horror storytellers have spent much of the 70 years trying to live up to the legend.

For Stephen King, The Mist’s nods to Lovecraft are pretty subtle compared to a straight-up homage like Crouch End, but they’re still present. Lovecraft popularized the idea of monsters entering the world through a dimensional rift, and the large bug/mollusk monsters of The Mist, with their clusters of tentacles, are particularly reminiscent of Lovecraft’s monsters. Whereas the creatures of 19th century gothic horror were often just one step removed from folklore or the natural world, Lovecraft’s stories in the early 20th century featured grotesque, alien things that defied conventional understanding of physical utility and sometimes didn’t even conform to this dimension’s rules of geometry and physics.

Guillermo del Toro, who has had his fair share of Lovecraftian tributes, did a good job of realizing those influences in Hellboy. Both the Cthulhu-like tentacle creature and the hulking Sammael monsters, with their insect-canine-mollusk features, are clear homages. He is releasing the Hellboy sequel this summer and has some people pretty excited about The Hobbit because of the same judicious use of effects that worked so well in Hellboy.

Before The Hobbit is finished, he plans to go a step beyond homage with Lovecraft and make At the Mountains of Madness, based on one of Lovecraft’s stranger stories. He has his work cut out for him; the material is challenging and should make for a difficult film. The book was incredibly novel at the time of its release, but has influenced so many films since (John Carpenter’s The Thing, among others) that it will take additional effort to translate its ingenuity to modern audiences. His comments thus far seem encouraging; at the very least he’s resisting the urge to tamper with the ending, one of many mistakes in The Mist.

Little Orphan Lost

With its almost complete lack of sex appeal, gratuitous violence and cheap scare tactics, The Orphanage is a refreshing look at the horror genre. It calmly sneaks up on its audience in the same way that the supernatural plot slowly unfolds around the main characters. It begins innocently enough, with easily rationalized oddities, which gradually develop to find the participants entirely enveloped, suddenly drawn into this slowly evolving eerie world.

The Orphanage plays out with a ghostly patience, never rushing the paranormal predicament that plagues the main character, Laura (Belen Rueda). This patience can be attributed, in part, to the fact that it took nearly 10 years for the script (written by Sergio G. Sanchez) to come to fruition. The ceaseless persistence of the film’s pacing allows first-time director Juan Antonio Bayona to tell the spine-chilling story through a step-by-step method that somehow never lags with tedium. It’s almost a how-to memorandum regarding the horror genre; every plot point, however mundane, is critical in bringing the film to its oddly tender conclusion.

At its heart, The Orphanage is a dark re-telling of Peter Pan. It tells the story of former orphan, Laura, who returns with her husband Carlos to the antique orphanage where she lived as a child in order to raise their terminally ill adopted son. Their son, Simón, knows neither that he is HIV-positive nor that he is adopted. However, he bears a strong sense of preternatural understanding that he will remain a child, a lost boy, forever. Similarly, Laura also feels a rootless resistance toward her adult life. She is the Wendy – the unlucky one who had to grow up – to her friends, who forever remain children in her mind.

Best Case, Worst Case: Monsters, Epidemics, Adam Sandler

Hellboy II: The Golden Army (trailer)

Best case: Potentially incredible costumes, makeup, and effects in the same vein as Pan’s Labyrinth, and more scenes with the uniformly excellent Jeffrey Tambor. The trailer is loaded with monsters, and with some of the origins and introductions of the first film out of the way, this film should have a lot more room to breathe.

Worst case: Pan’s Labyrinth’s effective mixture of the real and surreal broke director Guillermo del Toro out of his genre confines, but it also set a high standard for his future films. Hellboy II appears to share a similar theme, with the real battling the mythical, but the more conventional action-based story may mean that Hellboy II garners unfavorable comparison to Pan’s Labyrinth. Even the preview features a creature with eyes in all the wrong places – look familiar? More generally, del Toro’s participation in bigger and bigger projects (including a commitment of as much as four years to The Hobbit) could prevent him from doing smaller, more novel fare.

Blindness (trailer)

Best case: The director of one of the best films of the past few years interprets a baffling, numbing, revelatory book. You do the math.

Worst case: An interesting or sort of good movie that can’t quite translate the distinctly subversive phrasing and punctuation at the heart of José Saramago’s book. The story has no character names and weaves its dialogue directly into its action and description – it doesn’t even use quotes. It’s difficult to read and thus presumably not at all easy to transpose into another medium. It also features several sequences that are so deeply disturbing that one wonders how they could possibly appear on a theater screen.

You Don’t Mess With the Zohan (trailer)

Best case: The new film from Adam Sandler, the king of the man-children. From the (relative) highs of films like Happy Gilmore, he has descended into the mindless depths in search of previously unknown lowest common denominators, and the marginal premise of this film (Israeli soldier becomes New York hairdresser) is not promising. But here, Sandler shares writing credits with Robert Smigel (Saturday Night Live and TV Funhouse) and Judd Apatow (the comedy guru with his fingers in basically every film coming out this year). Sandler was excellent in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love, so it’s not as if he isn’t capable of good things if he’s working with the right people.

Worst case: Put the Apatow-bong down for a moment and think this over. Adam Sandler. Adam Sandler talking in a completely rubbish accent. Adam Sandler physical comedy. Adam Sandler. Ugh…