For no particular reason, H.P. Lovecraft’s classic story, At the Mountains of Madness, kept crossing my desk this past week.
Admittedly, I’ve been on a Lovecraft kick for a while, but this legendary short story turned up again and again, thanks to several unexpected developments.
The biggest one came when Guillermo del Toro released an all too short clip of CGI test footage from his stalled $200 Million dollar adaptation of the story, featuring what I presume is a Shoggoth, A few days earlier, I also got a DVD copy of Matt Cooper’s brilliant sideways attempt to film the story in the mail (a gift from the talented Yorkshire based director, many thanks, my friend!) — and, somehow or other, I ended up watching an online movie billed as a “fan made” version of Lovecraft‘s tale.
A small group of hardcore movie fans who call themselves Mesters Films created this version. They’ve actually made quite a few “amateur” films, many of which they’ve sold on DVD, including versions of H.G. Wells War of the Worlds, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and, much to my surprise, even that reconstruction of Nigel Kneale’s long-lost science fiction TV movie, The Road, which I covered on the Blog side of my efforts.
However, I wasn’t aware of this when I first stumbled across this film.
It looked so impressive — in a low budget, DIY, greenscreen sort of way — and was so agreeably forthright in declaring itself a “fan made” effort that I decided what the heck and gave it a try.
Now for those of you unfamiliar with the original novelette, At the Mountains of Madness is one of Lovecraft’s longest tales — so long that Weird Tales refused to publish it. It is also the story he wrote to make it very clear that, despite all the talk about rituals and magic, his stories were, at their heart, science fiction and not the supernatural, and his horrific creatures were powerful alien entities not ghosts or demons or any other kind of supernatural being.
A group of scientists from Miskatonic University set out on a major scientific expedition to the South Pole. They hope to map out and explore as much of the region as possible, and they brought with them a huge crew of assistants, the materials to construct base camps, plenty of supplies and two aircraft.
However, one of the scientists find a number of shale samples with unique characteristics which suggest they may have come from a creature far older than even the earliest known single celled life. He takes one of the planes and heads further south, sending back regular reports on his findings, until, that is, he discovers a cave with the remains of some truly bizarre creatures entombed in its stone walls, and the radio goes dead.
But no one is ready for what they find when they try to discover what happened to him…
I’m used to watching this sort of DIY film, so it doesn’t faze me when I see that the film quality isn’t crystal clear, or that the CGI is very obvious. It seems almost defiant, though, when a DIY film starts off with a grainy, worn and obviously genuine piece of period footage from 1960s London (backed by a very mellow, Sixties-ish musical track), with one of the main characters greenscreened into shots of the London streets and an Underground station.
However, this leads us to a flashback to that expedition, aboard ship and nearing the coast of Antarctica. The story more or less follows the original story, using much of the original narration.
As I’ve said this is a fan made production, so the locations have all been greenscreened, and it is rather obvious, in one scene set inside a tent, that it is just a tent set up on stage as a set and there aren’t any actual high winds buffeting it.
However, the lost city and the Old Ones themselves have a definite flair to them even if we never lose sight of the fact that they are a computer generated background cut in behind our cast. The design work is truly impressive, and there’s a lot of clever digital lighting, as these scenes are all “lit” by the flashlights carried by the explorers. It’s far more effective than you would expect, particularly from a film made (as near as I can figure) around 2015 or possibly earlier. I’ve seen SyFy Network originals from that era which looked far worse.
The albino penguins found in the city…well that’s another story. They are actors in suits and look very, very silly in an endearing sort of way. I suspect that they decided, if we cannot do an impressive job of them, we might as well make a goofy cartoonish suit and just have fun with them.
The Shoggoths — the servants of the Old Ones who revolted against them untold aeons ago — are bizarre beyond belief. They took advantage of the darkness of the underground city to make sure we never really get a good look at the things, and they are more or less a shapeless blob surrounded by waving tentacles, but,darn it, those eyes! Those teeth! They get a mention in the dialogue (which I believe is directly lifted from the story), so we have to see them, and they have been done in a weirdly absurd sort of way, with big plastic eyeballs greenscreened onto a vague blob shape with tentacles and…
I’m being perfectly serious here and not making this up:
Wind up plastic “talking teeth” for the teeth.
Which keep appearing and disappearing in various parts of the beast.
Right.
That would definitely be madness inducing.
We only see it for a few instants but it is both head scratching and bizarrely awesome as choices go. You can’t ignore it, but at the same time it more or less makes sense as an artistic choice for something that is supposed to be beyond our understanding.
Well played, gentlemen!
The script is quite solid and covers the events in the story without straying too far from the original, while the acting at least passable. Certainly none of them are terrible in their roles.
But, surprisingly, the visuals are one of the strongest parts of the film, even if you never lose sight of the fact that it was shot on video for next to nothing. Instead, they’ve done a bit to add a bit of video faux film scratches and damage, lighting and environmental effects and other elements. Yeah, everyone is doing it these days, but here it is a fully integrated part of the film’s aesthetic, with a faint iris effect showing at the corners of the screen, a bit of faux grain, and a slightly faded looking palette, as if the colors had degraded a bit with age.
For all its weaknesses, and the cramped feel we get when people on a very small set run about in huge virtual spaces, At the Mountains of Madness is a remarkably good and earnest version of a story so huge and detailed no one could ever successfully film it.
Well, except perhaps Guillermo del Toro.
But only if you can accept it for what it is: a defiantly fan made production, which never pretends to be anything but what it is:
An act of love by a group of talented film fanatics…
rivets on the poster 
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