Trailer for Spanish Lovecraftian movie La Herencia Valdemar (2010), apparently currently looking for a US distributor and translator…

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1-vBOgY2Bk&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&version=3]

From a Spanish interview with the director, one of Spain’s major talents…

Q: “The Valdemar Inheritance” is based on the Lovecraft universe. Is not this an unknown writer [the journo means ‘in Spain’, presumably]?

“It may be unknown to the [Spanish] public, but for those addicted to the genre it should be a compulsory piece of homage to the creator who showed us how the best horror can be done; complex but full of imagination. It was a joy to portray this vision, although it was not developed from any particular book by Lovecraft.”

Kaare Andrews (noted comics artist on Spider-Man and The X-Men and The Incredible Hulk) has a new Lovecraftian horror film out soon, going straight to DVD.

The premise of Altitude is quite interesting. It’s a green-screened indie film from Canada, set in a light plane — a constrained setting which one can only hope the director’s undoubted visual flair for composition has made the best of. The trailer looks good, in that respect, and the CGI looks competent. So one can only hope the story (by Paul A. Birkett, of Escape Velocity, Mindstorm, and Crash Landing) is strong, the plot has some intelligent twists, and the acting/dialogue isn’t dire. Birkett’s films get between one and two stars on IMDB, though, so I’m not hopeful.

/Spoilers ahead/

The film is set in a small light plane, flown by a rookie teen pilot taking four cute friends for a spin. They go up and of course they hit a storm. They start to run out fuel. Then they panic. Then it gets really bad…

Sounds similar to the Twilight Zone “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”. Storm, Plane, Madness, Lovecraftian Sky Beast.

Altitude has been shown at the San Diego ComicCon without reviews, and it’s possibly a bad sign that it’s going straight to DVD (26th October 2010) — although maybe that’s just because they don’t want to waste money on the marketing needed to herd the mouth-breathing popcorn-heads into the cinemas. Straight-to-DVD doesn’t necessarily mean it’s dire — remember what Spielberg did with just a big truck and a TV-movie budget in Duel, for instance.

The official trailer (spoilers alert: it seems to lay out most of the film)…

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLWbM3r2W2I&fs=1&start=8;&hl=en_US]

A new Deadline interview today, with Toro on At The Mountains of Madness…

“The screenplay that is on the internet is an old screenplay, and the one I gave to Jim [Cameron] and Universal is different.”

“We are not green lit, we are still budgeting and designing, and we are partners on this. I believe in my heart we are going to be making this movie in June of next year. We are budgeting the creatures and met with Spectral Motion and ILM, where Dennis Muren told me the sweetest words ever when he said, no one has ever seen monsters like this. […] The way the creatures are rendered and done is going to bring forth an aspect of Lovecraft that has not been done on live action films.”

Dejan Ognjanovic at Temple of the Ghoul has his hands on the script for del Toro’s forthcoming movie adaptation of At the Mountains of Madness, written by Guillermo Del Toro and Matthew Robbins. The first-act script-structure was ‘revealed’ by Latino Review in 2007 (although that could have been a hoax — certainly no-one reputable seems to have followed up on it). I’d imagine there are also several radically different versions of the script now floating around, as often happens for major Hollywood movies — some of these possibly being old and/or prototype scripts that were rejected and that won’t be filmed? Anyway, this is the gist of what Dejan writes:—

“It’s not as bleak as Lovecraft’s novel […]. story takes place in 1939, at the very beginning of World War 2 […]. Those who expect a certain meaning and symbolism […] cosmic horror – loads of atmosphere, suspense, build-up… Well, not much of that, sadly […] This script takes Lovecraft’s concept of Shoggoths – large blobs of intelligent protoplasm which can assume any shape (including human) – and runs with it to lengths that Lovecraft never bothered with [and] the bigger picture they belong to is paid just a brief lip service, in a couple of lines of dialogue you might just miss while checking your text messages. […] The Old Ones have very little to do [and at] the very end there is (yet another) appearance of Cthulhu itself! […] very little subtlety preserved […] More action, action and action than in the entire Lovecraft’s opus. [… There’s relatively little stress on atmosphere. […] Very little space for poetry and weird, alien beauty of the landscape […] Don’t expect a long and complex retelling of the history of the Old Ones […] The section from the novel when the expedition goes deep, deep, insanely deep into the bowels of the Mountains of Madness is entirely gone. […] The submerged city in the deep caverns, too. None of that here. And very little exploring of the city above, as well. It seems like they discover the bas-reliefs with the Old Ones’ history in the first building they come across, and that’s it.”

How very disappointing. I really hope that what sounds like a dumbed-down rehash of “Alien vs. Predator meets The Thing” isn’t the script they’re going to shoot. Yet, if it is, why did del Toro encounter such resistance from the Hollywood execs to filming it? It sounds like just the sort of thing that the mouth-breathing idiots in cinema audiences will lap up. Although perhaps we shouldn’t underestimate how dumb movie studio executives can be.

I suspect that Ognjanovic has an old script — since, at the 2010 Comic-Con in Summer 2010, del Toro went into detail about his work on the script with Matthew Robbins — he’s on record as saying…

“We are rewriting slightly the screenplay we’ve had for 12 years,” he told MTV News. “Matthew and I believe that a screenplay like that you have to tackle again every so often. We tackled it last about two years ago, [when] Matt and I felt like we needed to rewrite some stuff. Matt is my greatest writing partner because we keep updating anything we haven’t shot, we keep saying, ‘Let’s do another rewrite.’ So we’re going to do another rewrite in the next couple months.’ [because] “There [are] movies that have come out that have done things that are similar to some of the stuff we were trying,” he further explained.

Ancient Egypt Film Site…

“This site offers an elaborate overview of motion pictures and TV movies that prominently feature Egyptology and ancient Egypt, its monuments or sites. […] More than 700 movies, television films and episodes from television series are featured here, with over 190 picture indexes giving impressions of the visual elements involved.”

[ Hat-tip: AWOL blog ]

It’s inspired me to make a new faux Lovecraftian postcard…

With thanks for the Creative Commons photos to Elizabeth Hollins (pyramid) and Zanthia (tentacle).