Monster Zero x SciFi Japan - Archive Only

Anyone seen this? It was a film made by the The H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society and it is made in a pure old school fashion. It is a silent film in black and white, with the creature done all by stop motion.

Anyway it sounded great and was wondering if anybody had ever seen it?

Here's the website:

Nope because nobody has it available for rent.

I do believe dvdtalk.com has a review for it though.

I have it. Bought it right from the HPL Historical Society. Thought it was pretty good with one MAJOR flaw. In the online trailer, the very brief reveal of Cthulhu reaching down towards the camera and the end of the trailer seemed to be "suitmation" or a makeup job on a live-action human arm. Looked good. The actual stop-motion Cthulhu we got was pretty bad in my opinion. Maybe the stop-motion wasn't finished when they made the trailer but I kinda took it as a lame attempt to make you think Chtulhu was gonna look better and not tip-off how poor the effect was really gonna be.

But other than that I thought it was pretty fun.

Die! Monster Die! is based on "The Colour Out of Space" which in the 80's there was another version with Wil (William F^<King Shatner) Wheaton and Chet Atkins called The Curse. This was startlingly faithful but a baaad movie. Though from what I remember (just saw it once when it first came out) it had a good strong plot element of descent into madness.

Probably the earliest HPL adaptation is "Egdar Allan Poe's The Haunted Castle" with Vincent Price, which is based on "The Case of Charles Dextar Ward" and not on the Poe poem at all. It is actually a fairly accurate rendition outside of having the Hammer "period" look and feel. The later version by Dan O'Bannon called The Resurrected is very good.

"In the Mouth of Madness" is an ode to a lot of different HPL elements and is lovingly and tongue in cheekedly crafted into something that reeks of Lovecraftian horror much more than most books, stories and whatnot that try to ape him in pastiche.

There's a whole culture of amature Lovecraft short film adaptors that's been developing over the past 15 years or so. A lot of it is chronicled at unfilmable.com

Of course for the tagline of the site is the HPL quote "It is not likely that any really finely wrought weird story - where so much depends upon mood, and on nuances of description - could be changed to a drama without irreparable cheapening and the loss of all that gave it power."

- H.P. Lovecraft