Movie Reviews

Ok, this is truly weird. A sea captain, rescued after 100 years of being possessed by"the Old Ones", encounters magicians and monsters trying to get back to his own time, who he mostly seems to find junkyards and abandoned industrial sites around town. This is zero-budget, sub-"Creature From The Black Lagoon"rubber-mask monsters, to tell a story with as much ambition, weirdness and imagination as a Clive Barker film. Terribly miscast macho he-men who look like extras from a"Dirty Harry"police station scene—the actor playing the captain has almost 300 IMDB credits to his name including"Donnie Brasco"and"Fast and Furious"—run around spouting scenery-chewing Lovecraftian dialogue at each other, like"I have to go. Things are hunting me. Hideous things that dissolve and devour..."or"My pets. You see them? The creatures that fill what men call the pure air and the blue sky", as cheesy, obviously papier-mache bugs and creatures float and skitter around. Meanwhile, out of place humor pops up periodically, like bringing a magician the heart of a demon in a styrofoam takeout container, and when they tell him,"We have brought you a tribute", he says,"What, leftovers?", before opening up a demonic portal in his torso, a giant, hideous gaping maw full of very obviously fake rubber and foam fangs*; or, at another point, a waitress character for some reason played, completely straight and with no explanation or anything to suggest it's meant to be humorous, by a hipster-looking male actor with a goatee and mustache. This seems like a movie made by a very imaginative person who hadn't seen a movie since they were a young child and had only vague memories of what movies are supposed to be like, and a special effects budget limited to whatever they could spend in an hour at the craft store. I generally don't get into"so bad it's good", but this is so over-the-top, and they try so hard, despite having no budget and no talent, I can't help but be entertained by the effort. I might even give it an"honorable mention"... which, in this case, should not be confused with saying it's in any way good. Rather, it's so pyrotechnically, impressively bad, so ambitious without having anything even remotely resembling talent involved anywhere in the production, that I have definitely never seen quite anything like it. I can say that much for sure. (*C'mon. How cool is this, just for being so unrepentantly awful: https://www.voicesfromthebalcony.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/H.P.-Lovecrafts-The-Old-Ones-1.jpg)