Rating: ½ 

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  USA. 2009. Director/Animation Sequence – Henry Saine, Screenplay – Devin McGinn, Producers – Oliver Garrett, Devin McGinn & Ashleigh Nichols, Photography – Cameron Cannon, Music – Michael Tavera, Visual Effects Supervisor – Jacob Abrams, Creature Effects – Kim Graczyk & Kris Kobzina, Art Direction – Nikki Rudloff & Henry Saine. Production Company – Outlaw Films. Cast: Kyle Davis (Jeff Phillips), Devin McGinn (Charlie Russell), Barak Hardley (Paul Reamer), Gregg Lawrence (Captain Olaf), Ethan Wilde (Starspawn), Harry Karp (Jimbo), Edmund Lupinski (Professor Lake), Martin Starr (Clarence), Richard Reihle (Mr Snodgrass), Robert Eaton (Gary), Charles Haigh (Council Leader), Ellen Pederson (Nanna Reamer)  

The Last Lovecraft: Relic of Cthulu chooses as its focus the works of horror writer H.P. Lovecraft. Howard Phillips Lovecraft had a brief writing career (from 1916 until his death in 1937) but in that time managed to create a body of work that has inspired a cult. Lovecraft’s prose brims with a unique sense of cosmic horror – of Earth existing as a tiny island surrounded by unbelievably powerful ancient gods waiting to return, lost cities, arcane rites, scientists whose quest for knowledge has taken them too far and individuals driven insane by sights and horrors so unimaginable they can only be depicted as ‘indescribable’. Although there does seem to be something forced in attempting to make a fanboy comedy about H.P. Lovecraft – it is not as though Lovecraft has a fanatical following or entire conventions centred around his works as is the case with Star Trek and Star Wars, at most you might get the odd panel at a convention discussing Lovecraft’s work. (Although there do seem to be a surprising number of amateur filmmakers dedicated to making Lovecraft-based films – see The H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival – North (1999) for one such example).

There are two different ways to read The Last Lovecraft – either as a fanboy comedy or as an H.P. Lovecraft film. As a fanboy comedy, The Last Lovecraft has its undeniable amusements – gags about trying to pry the sucker tips of fish people off the passenger window of a car to make a getaway; or the scenes training in the backyard with Barak Hardley playing the role of Cthulu with a cardboard mask and multiple green inflatable sports shakers for tentacles. There are some mildly amusing one-liners tossed off – Barak Hardley recoils from the offer to join the expedition “I’m not ready to roll the D9” or his pissed-off friend Martin Starr threatening “I’ll never be your dungeonmaster again.” The two lead characters played by Kyle David and writer/producer Devin McGinn are okay, although the scene-stealer of the film proves to be Barak Hardley who gives a fine performance as the overgrown adolescent setting out into the world.

The Kevin Smith/fanboy comedy does seem an odd fit when transplanted into the world of H.P. Lovecraft, which almost always centres around people discovering artefacts and ancient monsters from beyond time or unleashing mutations and potentially nightmarish terrors. The typical H.P. Lovecraft story ends with the narrator driven insane by the things they have encountered. All of that said, The Last Lovecraft does a fair job of approximating the basics of Lovecraft. Almost all of the mainstream Lovecraft adaptations borrow bits of Lovecraft, make occasional references to his mythos and offer even less occasional glimpses of the intensely paranoid mood that the Lovecraft cult loves. In fact, the amateur Lovecraft films do a far better job of capturing the essence of Lovecraft than most of the professional Lovecraft adaptations do. The Last Lovecraft is short on intensely paranoid mood – a large part due to its taking a comedy focus – although does offer up a cheaply animated potted encapsulation of the backstory of Cthulu and the Elder Gods that holds far more of the Cthulu mythos than all of the aforementioned professional productions put together. (See below for a full list of H.P. Lovecraft adaptations). That said, you cannot help but feel that H.P. Lovecraft, a noted conservative whose fiction you could search in vain looking for a sense of humour, would probably be turning in his grave at the thought of a fanboy comedy based on his writings.

On the other side of the coin, The Last Lovecraft leaves much to be desired as an H.P. Lovecraft film. The Lovecraftian creations that we get are no more than B-budget monster masks and occasional gore effects. The Starspawn seems singularly lacking in cosmic horror and nothing more than a villain in a red-faced monster mask – shades of Red Skull in Captain America (1990) – making threats and despatching his minions. The animated sequence where Cthulu starts to return to life in the undersea city of R’yleh is particularly cheap.

Other films based on the works of H.P. Lovecraft include:- The Haunted Palace (1963), Die, Monster, Die/Monster of Terror (1965), The Shuttered Room (1966) and The Dunwich Horror (1969). The big success in the modern era was Stuart Gordon’s splattery black comedy version of Re-Animator (1985), which popularised Lovecraft on film. This led to a host of B-budget Lovecraft adaptations, including Stuart Gordon’s subsequent From Beyond (1986), The Curse (1987), The Unnameable (1988), The Resurrected (1992), Necronomicon (1993), The Unnamable II: The Statement of Randolph Carter (1993), Lurking Fear (1994), Gordon’s Dagon (2001), and other works such as The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (2003), Beyond the Wall of Sleep (2006), Cool Air (2006), Chill (2007), Cthulu (2007), The Tomb (2007), Colour from the Dark (2008), The Dunwich Horror (2009), Pickman’s Muse (2010) and The Whisperer in Darkness (2011). Also of interest is Cast a Deadly Spell (tv movie, 1991), a tv movie set in an alternate world where magic works and where the central character is a detective named H.P. Lovecraft; Juan Piquer Simon’s cheap and loosely inspired Cthulu Mansion (1992); and John Carpenter’s Lovecraft homage In the Mouth of Madness (1995). Lovecraft’s key work of demonic lore The Necronomicon also makes appearances in films such as Equinox (1970), The Evil Dead II (1987) and Army of Darkness (1992), and was also borrowed as an alternate retitling for Jesus Franco’s surreal and otherwise unrelated Succubus/Necronomicon (1969) about a BDSM dancer.