The Glade 4.0

Why is it that every movie people try and make based on the writing of HP Lovecraft is almost uniformly complete garbage?

I currently own:
The Call of Cthulhu, which is done as a silent movie and is not bad. But not good either.
Re-Animator, which really does suck badly.
and From Beyond, which is also surprisingly bad.

This evening I tried watching The Dunwich Horror, and I had to turn it off 10 minutes into the movie, because I thought it was going to give me a severe case of brain damage if I continued to watch this crap.

But here we are in a time when we have some of the best actors living, the best special effects we have ever had... and the closest we can get to a slightly Cthulhu-esque monster is in the movie Hellboy... But Steven King could take a dump on a piece of paper and call it a screenplay and we will have 10 directors fighting to make it. And it would be a HUGE movie with a large fan base...

i just don't get it.

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Darksiege
Traveller, Calé, Whisperer
Lead me not into temptation; for I know a shortcut

Don't bother watching Dagon, either. It's not exactly based on any of his stories, but it is based on his works...and it is pretty horrible.

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Los Angeles Kings 2014 Stanley Cup Champions

"I love this **** team right here."
-Jonathan Quick

Just watched From Beyond again pretty recently, I had forgotten how insane that movie is.

Good writing does not always make good movies. A lot of Lovecraft's best writing is inner dialogue, what is going on inside the character's head. That doesn't translate well to the screen unless you have a superb scriptwriter/director/and everyone else team who understand the material and can put their vision up on the screen.

There is also the problem that it is horror. Problems in horror movies are solved way to often by the 'substitute something bloody and shocking we can shoot in an hour for the thing in the book that will take us a month to do right' workaround. Unfortunately, that is usually the part the fans of the source material really want to see in the movie.

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The U. S. Constitution doesn't guarantee happiness, only the pursuit of it. You have to catch up with it yourself. B. Franklin

"A mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone." -- Tyrion Lannister, A Game of Thrones

While I mostly agree that it's probably part of the problem, it isn't like they can't do it well anyway. If you've played Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth, they did just fine. Of course, it's a video game, but the style could easily be adapted to a movie. The point is, it can be done.

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Los Angeles Kings 2014 Stanley Cup Champions

"I love this **** team right here."
-Jonathan Quick

Eh, give up movies and go straight to theatre.

http://www.cthulhulives.org/shoggoth/

I own the soundtrack, which I got as a gag gift one year, and it's actually quite clever.

The video game seemd to be done by someone who loved the source material. The movies so far, not so much.

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The U. S. Constitution doesn't guarantee happiness, only the pursuit of it. You have to catch up with it yourself. B. Franklin

"A mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone." -- Tyrion Lannister, A Game of Thrones

Maybe the movie is more on target than you thought?

Isn't Del Toro scheduled to do the Mountains of Madness in the next few years?

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"Life isn't divided into genres. It's a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you're lucky."
— Alan Moore

He is. It's been his dream project for a while now, but I'm not sure where it fits in his schedule. He seems to be the busiest man in Hollywood right now, with The Hobbit and its successor film, Saturn and the End of Days, Dr. Strange, At the Mountains of Madness, Frankenstein, Drood, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Hellboy III, and his new Disney production company, Disney Double Dare You on his plate. And those are just the films he's directing; he's also either producing or writing Pinocchio, the American remake of The Orphanage, Neil Gaiman's Death: The High Cost of Living, Stephen King's Bag of Bones, Hater, and more. As well as writing the second and third novels in his Strain trilogy, which are being turned into a TV series by Marti Noxon (a producer on Buffy), and I'd assume he'll have a hand in that too.

To be fair, not everything he craps out is well-received. I personally don't know anybody who liked Maximum Overdrive, for example. It's got 4.6 out of 10 stars on IMDB, Critic/Community ratings of 18% and 46% on RottenTomatoes, and is rated #1 among the worst Stephen King films ever by MSN (The Best and Worst of Stephen King's Movies).

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Go back to zero, take a pill, and get well ~ Lemmy Kilmister

It could just be that I was a stupid kid when it came out but I liked that movie. Then again, it could have just been the soundtrack.

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Raell Kromwell

I liked Maximum Overdrive. It's **** hilarious.

_________________
Los Angeles Kings 2014 Stanley Cup Champions

"I love this **** team right here."
-Jonathan Quick