Yes, that's right. I had a perfectly wonderful post that I loved all ready to go about this very topic and then my clumsy sausage fingers grazed the wrong keys and it was gone... So I am working on an even better version of it. Hang tight.
Many of you know that Uncle P is a Lovecraft fan. So it should be no surprise that a few years back I was very excited to learn that Guillermo del Toro was planning to adapt Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness" for the screen, I nearly peed my pants with joy. As far as I am concerned, del Toro's2006 film Pan's Labyrinth is the first film masterpiece of the 21st Century. The Mexican-born director (and fellow monster-movie geek) has made some of the most visually arresting genre films ever made, including Blade II and the Hellboy movies.
If anyone could successfully bring Lovecraft's horrifying monsters to the screen, it would be del Toro. Others have tried. In 1970, Sandra Dee; Dean Stockwell; Ed Begley, Sr; Sam Jaffe and Talia Shire starred in the rather boring and not scary The Dunwich Horror. In the 80's, Stuart Band and Brian Yuzna made the first of many Lovecraft-inspired films, Re-Animator; an hilariously sick, gory and over-the-top film released in 1985 without a rating. It was followed by From Beyond and several other films, including Bride of Re-Animator and Beyond Re-Animator, all starring genre legend Jeffrey Combs. The underrated and very clever 1991 HBO movie Cast a Deadly Spellsaw Fred Ward as noir detective Phillip Lovecraft in an alternate-history version of the 1940's where magic is commonly used by almost everyone and a real-estate developer is using zombies to build a housing development which is really just a front for a cult bent on reviving The Old Ones. And John Carpenter's 1994 film In the Mouth of Madness combines elements of both Lovecraft and King in a tale of a publisher searching for his missing best-selling horror author in a bizarre New England town where nothing is what it seems to be. Lovecraft's work is even referenced in Sam Raimi's Evil Deadfilms. While some of these movies succeed more than others, none has managed to truly capture the abject horrors Lovecraft describes in his stories and novels. A del Toro version had the potential to do just that. Sadly, the studio backing the project got scared off by such a big-budget production which would limit audiences by requiring an "R" rating in the U.S. and the project was nixed.
Happily, it left the director free to make a movie he was only supposed to produce. The kaiju/giant robot mash-up, Pacific Rim. Inspired by the Toho Studios post-nuclear giant monster (kaiju means 'strange beast' in Japanese) movies of the 50's and 60's, Pacific Rim will undoubtedly be little more than what it advertises itself to be: A big, splashy, FX-laden 3D movie about giant robots battling giant monsters. And watching the latest trailer (below), who could want anything more. Destruction! Giant monsters! Giant robots! I am so there. Watch this one in Full Screen and the sound turned up!
Sweet Mia and I, after being friends for a while now, may have to make this our first movie date.
PS - I am a sucker for Fred Ward andI actually really like Cast a Deadly Spell. It's funny and very, very clever. Plus, David Warner!
And while wildly uneven, Carpenter's take on Lovecraft is at least fun to watch:
Oh, dear. Some one left their Baby Jane Hudson doll at the malt shop. At least I hope that's what happened. Or if not, then I hope the woman in this photo does not have Internet access, because if you Google the word "creepy," hers is one of the first images to come up. What may be even worse, she actually reminds your Uncle Prospero of a woman at his day job (I'll leave it to my co-workers who read this blog to figure who it is, though I am sure they instantly made the connection). Not that I'm being mean here. The woman is actually creepy - crass, tacky and lacking any real social skills (or vocal volume control), the co-worker in question has never once looked me in the eye, no matter how many times I have smiled at her or tried to be friendly.
Still, that photo is only one of three very creepy things I have to share with you, tonight.
The second (via) is a rather controversial video from a New Yorker who noticed that food had begun to disappear from his apartment. After confronting his girlfriend (who denied eating the food) about it, he decided to put a surveillance camera in his kitchen:
From the comments on BoingBoing, a lot of folks think this video is a fake, mostly because the woman leaves her water jug behind when she crawls back into her hidey-hole. I'm not so sure it is a fake. First, it is New York City. There are plenty of loonies in the Big Apple who are more than capable of doing such a thing. Second, she's almost caught when the guy gets up for a drink in the middle of the night. That could be enough to rattle her into leaving the jug behind. And third, even if you are desperate for attention on the Interwebs, why would you go to such lengths to fake such a thing? There are plenty of other ways to get noticed on line. I haven't gone so far as to research the NYPD logs for documentation of this incident, but I think it's the real deal.
Oh, dear. Some one left their Baby Jane Hudson doll at the malt shop. At least I hope that's what happened. Or if not, then I hope the woman in this photo does not have Internet access, because if you Google the word "creepy," hers is one of the first images to come up. What may be even worse, she actually reminds your Uncle Prospero of a woman at his day job (I'll leave it to my co-workers who read this blog to figure who it is, though I am sure they instantly made the connection). Not that I'm being mean here. The woman is actually creepy - crass, tacky and lacking any real social skills (or vocal volume control), the co-worker in question has never once looked me in the eye, no matter how many times I have smiled at her or tried to be friendly.
