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IFC reviews 'Call of Cthulhu' |
"...However undisciplined, our own indies come in all shapes and sizes, including "micro" — as in microcinema, currently the name of a distribution company selling underground cinema on DVD, but also the label given to the new digital DIY independent film, rarely available to a wide audience but thriving nonetheless, making films that cost less than a good car. The lovely, innocent pro-am aura surrounding these films can be bewitching (or, perhaps, it can be to me particularly), especially if it strives to evoke antique form and a sense of primal matinee naiveté. Andrew Leman's "The Call of Cthulhu" (2005) answers the siren: a "new silent" film, scrupulously faithful to H.P. Lovecraft's seminal Cthulhu tale (first published in 1928), that runs only 47 minutes but packs enough storytelling and energetic incident to fill out a miniseries. (The film, and its publicity ephemera, is also superbly designed to fit into its period.) Leman and his H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society cohorts cut every corner and freely employ obvious miniatures to tell the tale-within-a-tale-within-a-tale, from the Providence streets all the way to the mid-Pacific night (a blanket, scant nods toward a ship set, digitized perspective), the unmapped atoll covered with enigmatic ruins (cardboard, mostly), and the stop-motion appearance of the Old God himself. Call it pulp-geek nostalgia — which by itself seems hardly a dress-down to me — but the movie also actually manages to be creepy, in a cheap, unstable, kids-pretending-in-the-woods kind of way. It is innocent, and that alone makes it special."
By Michael Atkinson
IFC News
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