Review of In Search of Lovecraft (2008) by Kerie C — 12 Nov 2010

In search of Lovecraft? Don't look here. You'll find only a yawning gulf of unnameable horrors stretching out before you for a no-budget, no-talent hour and a half that will leave you wanting to plunge shoggoths into your eyes.

"In Search of Lovecraft" has a suitably Lovecraftian premise: a very green TV news reporter is researching HP Lovecraft for a Halloween story. She stumbles into an occult expert who tells her that the whole thing is real and leads her straight to the cult of Nyarlathotep... but anyone who knows that the cult exists becomes its target. The expert, the reporter, her cameraman and a witch team up to save their own lives and to find the black stone trapezohedron that the cultists will use to open the gate and let Nyarlathotep in on November 6. Which doesn't make much sense, since they've already made a big deal about Nyarlathotep being the only outer god who dwells among humans. Wouldn't seem like he'd have much use for a gate if he's already here, and if this was the flick's worst problem, we could let it pass.

The thing is, this one goes wrong in more ways than there are tentacles on Cthulhu's face. The acting is uniformly wooden, horrible enough to drive anyone who sees it insane. The writing is terrible, too. Characters do things that simply don't make any sense, and the whole thing revolves around the notion that San Francisco's Coit Tower is secretly a landing pad for the malevolent Lovecraftian gods. Throw in some terrible CG (wait until you see the dimensional hound!) and puppetry (a tentacle clearly attached to nothing at one point), a mish-mash of New Age, Solomonic and Thelemic ritual magic performed by a willowy blond with no acting ability and a nasal voice -- hearing her chanting is *such* a treat -- and you've got something much, much worse than anything found in the Necronomicon.

I'm a major fan of Lovecraft and will see any movie even remotely based on his work, and I tend to be more lenient in my estimation of Lovecraftiana than other sorts of horror films because I love the idea of someone trying to film one of HPL's notoriously difficult-to-film stories. "In Search of Lovecraft" does little more than borrow names from Lovecraft's works, though. It isn't really based on anything he wrote and the baddies here could have been anything at all; there's nothing particularly Lovecraftian about them, or the story, or anything other than throwing a bunch of hard-to-pronounce words at the viewer.

If the makers of this atrocious insult to the memory of the great horror author ever did find Lovecraft, he'd probably slap them for making this thing.