Howard Lovecraft and the Kingdom of Madness

source: Howard Lovecraft and the Kingdom of Madness

A fittingly bad conclusion for an awful series of movies that totally ruined what could've been a really good idea. I give it a point more than the other two, because as ridiculous as it is, baby Cthulhu is adorable.

Seriously, don't bother. The storyline is more strange than interesting and the execution is pathetic. The animation is terrible. The artwork looks like it's from a 1990s video game- in a bad way. I can't remember the last time I was this annoyed with a movie.

Seen all of the series and they haven't improved. Animation quality of central characters is like watching plastic dolls walk like robots i.e. not natural in any aspect. Background animation, always a sign of quality, is flat 2-D painted stillness. Storyline either through poor editing or just poor storytelling was an emotionless jumble, and stereotypically generic.

Yesterday I watched this odd little film. I'm still not sure how to react to it. On it's most basic level it's an animated horror film (or at least horror influenced). i'd say that it's aimed at tweens, as it's too scary for little ones but pretty boring for adults. First, the style. It seems to have grown out of Edward Scissorhands, visually. All the characters are pale, with dark eye sockets, dark hair, etc. They all have perpetually pained expressions. Sure, why not? It does fit the mood of the original (divorced) source material, if not the tween audience. It's that divorced-from-the-source-material element that's the oddest thing about this film (and apparently its two in universe films that I haven't watched). For example (mild spoiler) young Howard Lovecraft, presented as something of a horror-involved Indiana Jones, has Cthulhu as a pet. He calls him Spot. Things like that are why I saw it's a horror-influenced tween film. Anybody who understands what Lovecraft was writing about is terrified at the mere thought of Cthulhu. In the books, the people who actually see him go crazy. Here, he's a boy's best friend. I can't say that it's flat out bad, but I can say that the dialog and character actions are near the lower end of the quality scale. Characters say what they need to say in order for the writer to advance the very simplistic plot. They typically don't seem to be having a conversation, i.e., responding to one another, as much as they're spouting independent exposition. I've got no desire to seek out the other two films. One was enough.

There's so much potential for the root concept here. The end result unfortunately is poorly rendered computer animation (think Pixar pre-95) and a lack of character

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Howard Lovecraft and the Kingdom of Madness