The sounds of silents

I saw a fun double feature last night (projected from DVD, alas, which always looks awful, but I suppose it helps people make these things on the cheap). The Call of Cthulhu is an homage to period Lovecraft; they did a great job with the props and costumes. There was at least one very recognizable shot of Providence, RI. I even enjoyed the fonts on the title cards. It's hard to make a movie shot on digital look like a silent; the makeup, the lighting, and the grain of the "film" all wrong. Even if you duplicated somehow duplicated the undercranked herky-jerky motion, actors today don't have the same balletic physical expression (and broad-gestured overacting) that most of the silents, particularly the serials that are third-cousins to Lovecraft's florid pulp, had. But a lovely effort nonetheless, and the film did a great job of capturing the fever-dream mentality of Lovecraft, along with hints at his snobbishness, racism, and sheer narrative incoherence. Two IA IAs up, even if they didn't nail the weird geometries of sunken Ryleh. Perhaps those can't be captured on film.

The other was Trapped by the Mormons, an entirely different affair. It's a remake of a 1922 exploitation film ("a silent British film which is to Mormonism as 'Reefer Madness' is to marijuana usage", says the IMDB review), with the campiness cranked up to 11. The lead actress, Emily Riehl-Bedford, is lovely in a period and rabbity sort of way (she reminded me faintly of Illeana Douglas), and while the movie drags in the middle, the ludicrous Mormonozombic fight scene at the end is worth the price of admission and then some. I can only assume that some of the more laughable title cards came from ("He's a... He's a... A MORMON!") came from the 1922 version. The cast and crew, a bunch of members of a DC theatrical troupe, Cherry Red, which puts on cheese and sleaze shows such as Poona the Fuckdog -- the existance of which I thank Skot for introducing me to -- has no real interest in mimicking a genuine silent, which helps account for some of the amateur porn feel of the staging. (A great deal of it feels like it was shot in someone's bedroom, although I'm sure it was on a stage somewhere in DC.) The editing is also, charitably, better than I can do. Good fun regardless, and the best movie I've ever seen in which two Mormons kill someone by gnawing through their jugular vein.