Review – Cthulhu

This is as close as anyone has come so far to making a Lovecraftian horror movie of a sort that I would make if I made movies. The plot is a reinvention of “The Shadow over Innsmouth” in which a gay man returns to his old hometown for his mother’s funeral only to face his fundamentalist family. But the religion they adhere to is the cult of Dagon, mixing classic Yog Sothery with homosexual “coming out” issues in a way that actually works. And however unseemly the scene may be in which our hero is raped by Tori Spelling, the subtle use of the monsters more than makes up for it. Overall the production’s only disappointing part is that it somehow never quite manages to pull all its elements together. That notwithstanding, this is an excellent 21st-century rework of a 1931 horror story. Worth seeing