You can’t kill classic creatures! They just keep coming back, sometimes with comic results…especially when they work their way into indie horror. So here’s looking at Attack of the Killer Shrews! and The Last Lovecraft: Relic of Cthulhu.
ATTACK OF THE KILLER SHREWS! (2016)
As a fan of director Ken Cosentino’s more serious horror (Wolf House, Dead Inside), I was looking forward to seeing his campy b-movie spoof/remake of the classic 1959 creature feature The Killer Shrews. That film has already been given a trashy sequel in the 2012 film Return of the Killer Shrews, which used CGI shrews, whereas Attack makes good on its promise on the DVD cover art; it goes old school with puppets and dogs in costume…just like the original!
I’m totally good with the bad low budget movie look and feel, the over-the-top performances, cheesy humor, and the silly shtick, which is what I would expect.
The issue I have is that Lloyd Kaufman got his hands on the film. He does a spoken intro, but even without that, I would have guessed he crapped all over it—literally—because it’s filled with the stench of his unfunny, always out of place fart humor.
It sux what indie directors have to do in order to get someone to back their films these days, but Cosentino did it: Troma fart-o-rama. Ugh.
It’s something I can just never overlook and I’m totally taken out of the joys of bad b-movies (like Shrews humping guys in their undies and beefy boys with guns) when there are Kaufman shit stains on it. I’m just so glad Kaufman, who is distributing Cosentino’s film Dead Inside, didn’t mess with that one.
THE LAST LOVECRAFT: RELIC OF CTHULHU (2009)
I would say that you don’t have to be a Lovecraft fan to have fun with this one…but I don’t know if Lovecraft fans will have fun with it because I’m totally not a Lovecraft fan. But I did have fun with it. Could that be…because I’m not a Lovecraft fan? You’ll have to ask a Lovecraft fan who watches this.
Although it begins with a sinister and gory death of two guys out boating, this is just a silly little low budget buddy/road trip/creature feature/sci-fi comedy/geekdom movie.
Two cute, bored guys working in an office are suddenly on the run from fricking fish people when a college professor says one of them is the chosen one.
He gives them a relic they must protect to keep a cult from opening an underwater gate that will release the Cthulhu (for the Lovecraft ignorant, it’s all explained in a fun animated sequence).
Clueless as to what to do when the fishmen come for them, the guys run to the house of a major geek they went to high school with.
Actually they go to his foul-mouthed grandmother’s house, because he lives with her. She’s a blast. I wish they had brought her with them on their road trip.
The road trip takes them through the desert in search of a man who can supposedly help them fight the sea creatures.
This old geezer, who they find in an RV, is the second funniest part of the film. If only foul-mouthed granny had come along for the ride, these two could have hooked up.
Anyway, believe it or not, Cthulhu and plenty of other freaky sea creatures make appearances right in the middle of the desert for the final battle, and it’s pretty epic for a modest indie flick.
This lighthearted film brings me back to the days of movies I’d watch dozens of times on cable in the early 80s.
