Double Feature: The Whisperer in Darkness and Tucker and Dale vs. Evil

So as I explained in my last post I'd be missing Saturday's film posting as I was at the Telluride Horror Show and was honestly too lazy to find wi-fi anywhere to post. But now I'm back at home and I actually ended up seeing two films, one of which I'm using as my film for today. Which works out well as with driving six hours today and needing to write a midterm tonight there was not much time to find a film to watch. My life is hard, ain't it? But enough intro, onto reviews oh reader...

10/15: For this nights film I, for the third time, watched a film based on a Lovecraft story, "The Whisperer in Darkness." Is it obvious I'm a bit of a fan of his writings? This film was created by the same group that made "The Call of Cthulhu" silent film that I reviewed a few days ago and they give this Lovecraft story much the same treatment. Presented as a 1930s black and white film, and for the most part pretty convincingly, it tells the tale of an alien race of crab-like beings that appear in Vermont and attract a Miskatonic University professor who is a skeptic to investigate. What he learns when he arrives is horrifying and could potentially end Earth as we know it-- but I won't ruin it for you, it's over-the-top and very typically Lovecraft. Probably the biggest strength of this film as was the same with "The Call of Cthulhu" is the very obvious love the creators have for Lovecraft's stories. Every effort is put forth to make it as close to the original story as possible and in doing so it feels like the greatest care went into its creation. Once again, though, the films downfall lies in it's obvious lack of budget. It does well with what it has, but somethings, the acting namely, suffer from budgetary constraints. It is nice to see people dedicate so much to bringing Lovecraft's words to life, especially a story as different as this one, but one can only hope someone backs their vision more to lead it even greater success.

8/10

10/16: For what I'm calling today's film I saw Eli Craig's "Tucker and Dale vs. Evil." Wow... this may be one of the funniest films I've ever seen. Seriously. But before I sing it's praises... basically, this movie "Shaun of the Dead"'s "Texas Chainsaw Massacre." Two innocent, kindly hillbillies have bought a vacation house fixer-upper in the backwoods of West Virginia. A group of college students is vacationing in the same woods as well and after innocent deaths of their friends begin to think the two hillbillies are doing all the killing. This is all surrounded in a heart-warming love story that emerges with one of the hillbillies. A hilarious comedy of errors I was laughing pretty much solidly for an hour and a half. All the deaths are typically gruesome for the slasher genre and done amazingly well, and all happen completely innocently. Craig also does a really ingenious flipping around of the slasher as well. The "killers" are completely innocent and become sucked into a situation they did nothing to create, and the "victims" end up becoming the evil ones themselves. I can't recommend this enough, it's not only funny but brilliant about what it has to say about the horror genre-- and it just make you go "awwwwww" too. Really the only flaw I can find is it bogs a tad in the second third of the movie, but this is nowhere near enough to write off such a good film. I'm still stuck on deciding, but I might even pick this one over Shaun of the Dead. And that's a big statement.

9.5/10