The word “Cthulhu” is hard to pronounce, but it will ring a bell with fans of H.P. Lovecraft, the weird and memorable purveyor of horror fiction. The word refers to not just a legendary creature but a whole mythology of evil.
In this Northwest-made take on the Lovecraft world, an interesting and ominous idea is at work. It’s just very hard to get to it through the mystifying storytelling and inert characters.
Much of the film’s exteriors were shot in Astoria, meant to be an island off the Oregon coast. This is the childhood home of Russ (Jason Cottle), a gay professor who now lives in Seattle.
He returns to the island for his mother’s funeral, and is reminded of all the things he hates about the place. But the weirdness is about to crest: Russ finds a mysterious black artifact with strange writing on it, a few people prone to portentous ravings about doom, and a sea-cult that might be connected with the disappearances of local children.
The actors are mostly unknowns, except Cara Buono, a onetime “Sopranos” cast member, and Tori Spelling, who plays a married islander suspiciously eager to get pregnant by Russ. Yes, that’s the Tori Spelling of “Beverly Hills 90210” fame, whose presence in this otherwise somber movie adds a much-needed B-movie accent.
And this is a major problem of “Cthulhu”: It has little or no grasp of how a genre picture lives. Director Daniel Gildark and screenwriter Grant Cogswell may have had more on their minds than a mere horror movie, but without the skeleton of a horror movie operating, they don’t have a chance of getting their other goals met.
The film is so well photographed by Sean Kirby (who also did the dreamy visuals for the shot-in-Seattle “Police Beat”) that at times it actually summons up some grandness, or spookiness. The final sequences are especially fine, although you have to tread a lot of water to get there.
Despite its hip soundtrack and the novelty of having a gay hero, the film is curiously square; the actors perform in a straightforwardly dramatic way, without much humor or nuance. This adds to the dulling effect of the story’s metronomic motion, and even the suggestion of a very fishy cult uprising can’t enliven it.
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