Cool, I just heard that Solomon Kane is finally out on DVD in the USA. I’ve no idea what delayed this fine 2009 movie, or stopped it getting to the cinemas in the USA. I can only imagine that there was perhaps some spurious legal challenge by a copyright troll, going on behind the scenes?

Thanks to Lovecraft is Missing for the new review of the DVD. I saw the movie way back in 2010 in the UK, and enjoyed it. I thought it was a fine and respectful evocation of R.E. Howard’s Puritan hero, beautifully designed and lit, and well acted with good period accents. The flaws were not very many, but were annoying: two jarring jumps in the plot during the first third, as if the makers hadn’t filmed quite enough material to bridge the gap; many lost opportunities to visually foreshadow the distinctive look of the main bad-guy (for instance via having his minions wear his face as crude tattoos or scrawl it on walls etc); and the ending is a little too “Mines of Moria cave-troll battle” (in a cheesy kind of way, in that it resembles LoTR far too strongly).

The plan was apparently that Solomon Kane would have been the first of a trilogy. Africa was mooted as being the next stop. But Puritan New England, and a slight blending with the historical back-story of Lovecraft’s Mythos, would have seemed a much better choice. Anyway, due to the bizarre and unexplained four-year hiatus in actually getting this movie to a U.S. audience, it doesn’t seem we’ll get to see the next two movies.