Directed by Henry Saine. Starring Kyle Davis, Devin McGinn, Barak Hardley, Gregg Lawrence. Horror/Comedy, USA, 75 mins, cert 15.

UK release date 4th April.

It's actually a touch ironic that this film has turned up within a few weeks of what would probably have been the ultimate Lovecraft film, Guillermo Del Toro's expensive and epic adaptation of AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS, being dropped by Universal. And it's sad that the message would appear to be that if you want to feature Lovecraft on screen, you have to do it fairly cheaply and have modern nerds in the lead roles.

Essentially what they've done is give HP Lovecraft the SHAUN OF THE DEAD treatment but shorn of the wit: a couple of comic-book obsessed dweebs find themselves entrusted with half of the ancient key that, if reunited with its other half, will release the evil Elder God Cthulhu from his long imprisonment in the underwater fortress of R'lyeh, allowing him/it to rise and wipe out humanity in an ongoing war against the Shoggoths. Or something. With the devoted Cult Of Cthulhu also on the relic's trail, our heroes' only hope is firstly with a fellow ubergeek and Lovecraft buff - the great author's "novels" are actually documented real events - and then with one Captain Olaf, a one-time monster hunter now living in an RV in the desert with his half-fish son (Olaf, if Wikipedia is to be believed, doesn't show up in any of Lovecraft's works).

It's nonsense, obviously - the only reason this vitally important relic has been left with these fools is that one of them is a direct descendant of HP - and frankly it's frequently hard to warm to them as saviours of the human race with their nerdiness and childish bickering. It has a nice cinematic widescreen look, but it clearly didn't have much of a budget to work with and sadly the big confrontation takes place in and around a mobile home in a drab canyon somewhere. Despite the overwhelming threat to mankind there's little in the way of darkness in the film and it's being played far more for laughs; and I think I'd have liked it with more horror and less geek comedy.

While it's honestly not any kind of masterpiece, THE LAST LOVECRAFT: RELIC OF CTHULHU certainly isn't terrible either. There are some laughs, some neat monster effects (and some less than stellar CGI ones) and, while there are several occasions when you wish the leads would grow up and stop being idiots, they aren't hateful enough to have you rooting for Cthulhu to win. What the film does achieve, however, is to get me looking for the novels and stories - no mean feat, as I've never been much of a reader.

Pleasingly, and appropriately, all the backstory about Cthulhu, the Shoggoths and StarSpawn - Cthulhu's top minion, and as seen here seems rather of the Golden Age of Doctor Who - is told in cartoon comicbook style, and the similarly animated payoff hints at an already-proposed MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS sequel (although personally I'd rather have Guillermo Del Toro do it). (;,;)

Richard Street.

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