Film review – The Old Ones

My notes on The Old Ones

Chad Ferrin’s The Ghouls is one of the most effective contemporary uses of H.P. Lovecraft’s style of cosmic horror – though it doesn’t namedrop any of HPL’s mythic entities and takes a view of urban nightmare which might be antithetical to HPL’s instinctive disgust for the city and its marginal inhabitants.  Ferrin developed this theme in Parasites, a Most Dangerous Game spin.  Between these intense, disturbing, confrontational pictures, he’s been much more playful with the likes of Easter Bunny, Kill! Kill! and Exorcism at 60,000 Feet.  This follow-up to his The Deep Ones exists somewhere between these two strains of Ferrin’s work – and does go the Full HPL with tickmarks for Captain Marsh, Cthulhu, R’lyeh, the ‘strange aeons’ rhyme, some Ghasts and the like.  It has an interesting aesthetic, using mostly practical monster effects which evoke Weird Tales illustrations with some effective, minimal optical flourishes.

Dan Gordon (Scott Vogel) and his son Gideon (Benjamin Philip) are out fishing when they haul Captain Russel Marsh (Robert Miano, a Ferrin regular) out of the river.  Marsh, lost for 93 years, claims he’s been simultaneously sacrificed and kept alive (as seen in a neat animated credits scene) by the Old Ones, denizens of a sunken city.  And a big-headed fish-monster strides out of the river, kills Dan and has to be decapitated and used for magic purposes by Marsh, who drags Gideon through a series of encounters with Lovecraft characters of varying degrees of post- or sub-humanity – Nyarlathotep (Rice E. Anderson), Randolph Carter (Timothy Muskatell), Crawford Tillinghast (Elli Rahn).  The climax visits the territory of ‘From Beyond’, with streamer-puppet-like extradimensional manifestations, and throws in some time-twisting paradoxes.

While Joe Lynch’s Suitable Flesh homages Stuart Gordon’s distinctive take on Lovecraft and Lovecraft Country engages with the underpinnings of the author’s terrors, Ferrin’s mythos films map out their own space – with a sense that he’s not finished yet.  There’s sly humour here – as there is, often unnoticed, in Lovecraft – and a kind of let’s-put-the-show-on-in-the-barn inventive low-budget enthusiasm in the wild-looking toothy/tentacular manifestations which is always strangely engaging.