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Ahh, yes - the Howard Philip Lovecraft Historical Society. They also recorded some very nice Lovecraftian Christmas, err... Solstice Carols with the Dagon Tabernacle Choir. Here is an example. Come to think of it, that is the only physical CD I bought in the last 3 years, the guys deserve it. Check out their homepage, if you don't know them. They also made an absolutely brilliant silent movie titled "Call of Cthulhu".

It's beginning to look a lot like.... fish men!

You can still get degrees

Yeah, I know. It's just disappointing is all.

But hey, with Kevin Smith saying they did a good job I'm willing to put my doubts on hold. And the trailer they've been showing is pretty fantastic looking, I'll admit.

It's just that I've been let down so many times already with book to movie conversions. It's safest to not go into the theater with high hopes.

I realize they're doing it to make the masses happy. And the masses like explosions every five minutes. And very few people are as OCD with their entertainment as I am. I know that too. It's just a bummer that they can't just tell the story in the way the original author intended.

You know what would be great? If movies didn't cost $100 million to make. Reign in the budgets. Hire some unknowns. If Hollywood would occasionally bang out a movie for $5 million. Then they could afford to make the occasional lemon. They could get away from the whole "Bruckheimer extreme movie" mindset and get back to making the occasional classic. I'd really like that.

Want to see how it's done (IMHO of course) correctly? Check out this. It's a low budget adaptation of The Call of Cthulhu. Nobody actors, zero budget. And it's just about dead-on target. Tells the story pretty much exactly. It's beautiful.

If Hollywood would ever get it into it's head that sometimes this is the best way to make a movie...with their resources, they could make absolute classics.

Ah well, I can dream can't I?

Heh! I already have the HPLHS' Call of Cthulhu. It's short, but a lot of fun. The making of is actually quite interesting, too. I saw a trailer they did for "The Whisperer in Darkness" and it was indeed a talkie. However, it doesn't seem to be available to buy yet. They may be waiting for some convention or something? Who knows... Anyway, their site is a gold mine of things to download and things to buy. My favourite simply has to be the Elder Sign Thong. Tagline: "Cause you don't want Shoggoths in your panties."

Run by very nice people, too. Definitely worth a look for anyone who "gets" Lovecraft.

Funny you should mention Lovecraft in connection with modern movies. Guilermo del Torro is directing "At the Mountains of Madness." I'm not sure if this is the Guillermo del Toro who directed Hellboy or the one that directed Pan's Labyrynth, but either way it's going to be a Lovecraft film with an actual budget. Also, at the other end of the scale the H P Lovercraft Historical Society produced a Call of Cthulhu film last year which is actually very entertaining (really!). They've also just released the trailer for The Whisperer in Darkness which looks even more fun. (I sincerely hope I haven't just slashdotted their servers).

Funny you should mention Lovecraft in connection with modern movies. Guilermo del Torro is directing "At the Mountains of Madness." I'm not sure if this is the Guillermo del Toro who directed Hellboy or the one that directed Pan's Labyrynth, but either way it's going to be a Lovecraft film with an actual budget. Also, at the other end of the scale the H P Lovercraft Historical Society produced a Call of Cthulhu film last year which is actually very entertaining (really!). They've also just released the trailer for The Whisperer in Darkness which looks even more fun. (I sincerely hope I haven't just slashdotted their servers).

Surely you mean the fiddle?

But that said, I've had no luck getting the local community theaters to do it. Something to do with legal threats by the owners of Fiddler on the Roof. *wry grin* As parody, it's protected under fair use, but who can afford the legal battle? Besides which, it's got questionable content (sex, occultism, violence) paired off with a musical which many actors view as a true classic to be cherished. Lastly, after having read the libretto, I'm not sure how technically feasible it is. There are some pretty extreme set changes and the last scene requires a 2-story tall Cthulhu who can appear suddenly, pick up an actor, and smash the majority of the buildings on the set. I can think of a few theater dodges, but it would be pretty darn dodgy. Still, one of these days I'll convince someone...

SPOILER

The last scene involves Cthulhu towering over the local houses, picking up a cast member (!), and then destroying all of the buildings on set in an orgy of destruction. ^_^ And then there's the happy ending with a zombie romance. "He can destroy the town. He can even kill all of us, but he can never destroy knowledge and as long as we have knowledge, there will always be a Miskatonic!"

This is the perfect X-mas present for my geeky lady.

Teaser Trailer, but the site is slow. Coral Cache didn't give me the cached version of the trailers and this specific Web page. :(

Might as well go all the way then.

Seriously though, it's awfully fun to be able to sing "antidote" lyrics to the incredibly sappy tunes that have become commercialized to the point of mindless oblivion.

The other night in a shopping mall when I might have otherwise been cringing at the seasonal Muzak, I was instead happily humming about Shoggoths, Fishmen and the Yog-Sothoth.

Put everything in a whole new perspective. :-)

(Absolutely no connection to CthulhuLives.org - I just stumbled across the CD last week and have been playing it daily since.)

The Great Old Ones and their minions? Those Mi-Go are pretty hardy buggers.

On the specifics of this report's premise, it seems to me to be a hell of a lot cheaper (and more realistic at the present) to ensure humanity's survival by being able to "Go Deep". If the we could harness geothermal power down deep, we could power lights that could grow plants in our subterranean cities, etc. and keep ourselves going.

Sure we'd end up living on glowing fungus in the end, and evolve big giant eyes and go all pasty-white pale, but then when we travel back in time to visit Earth in the 1960s-80s we'll look like we're supposed to.

Must be Friday. I need a drink.

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Cthulhu holiday songs, for the gift that keeps on loathing.

Why am I suddenly picturing an ancient petroglyph that appears to combine the symbols "IE" and "0wned"? :-)

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Cthulhu holiday songs, for the gift that keeps on loathing.

Absolutely, but you only get the mega-Locals Only bonus points if at some point they made toy balloons out of an animal's bladder. :-)

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Cthulhu holiday songs, for the gift that keeps on loathing.

Yeah, lots of exposure in the media. But did mobs vandalize their places of worship? Did members become victims of hate crimes? Or those that merely looked like sect members?

In Phoenix, AZ a Sikh was gunned down after 9/11. Hate crime. When arrested he shouted, "I'm a damn American all the way! I'm an American! Arrest me! Let those terrorists run wild!" Ignoring the absurdity that all Arabs/Muslims are terrorists, Sikhs of course are not Muslim. Nor are they typically Arab. He just "looked" like a "terrorist" to that sorry puke of a bigot.

I'm not denying your point or condoning any level of hateful prejudice, but clearly militias and Christian splinter groups did not suffer in any way similar to what the brown-skinned Middle- and Near-Eastern ethnic groups have endured since 9/11.

"I believe native americans immigrated too, just thousands of years earlier across the land bridge.There are no "real" americans "

Though I think the folks who first made it across the Bering Straight and down Alaska earned it and deserve it. :-)

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Cthulhu holiday songs, for the gift that keeps on loathing.

Better still, when Timothy McVeigh killed hundreds in the bombing of the federal building in OK, where were the mobs running around threatening white males of Christian background?

"Real" American? Unless your family was hunting buffalo here thousands of years ago, you're just a newbie tourist.

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Cthulhu holiday songs, for the gift that keeps on loathing.

So... it reduced your incoming porn spam by 200%. Which means you somehow processed negative numbers of porn spam. Which, to balance the books, must mean you became a net exporter of porn spam? :-)

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Cthulhu holiday songs, for the gift that keeps on loathing.

In OSX's Mail app it's easy to set up a rule to do that. I haven't tested it with a live message yet (just created the rule to see if I could), but I think it would keep the headers intact.

The risk then becomes the false positives of your spam filter. Forwarding non-spam to the FTC is probably not a good idea. ;-)

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Cthulhu holiday songs, for the gift that keeps on loathing.

It's for this reason I have my OSX Mail app configured to not load embedded images and objects in incoming HTML.

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Cthulhu holiday songs, for the gift that keeps on loathing.

There are some things that man was not meant to adapt to musical theatre. And you can get the album, too!

Quite aside from being legally questionable and ethically bankrupt, isn't C&D-ing Shoggoth On The Roof a bit...risky? I mean, I sure wouldn't be reading the response from the Old Ones' legal team. (Does anyone doubt that the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred, J.D., would be drafting counsel?)

For a taste of the horror that awaits these litigious fools, check out this 401 page from yog-sothoth.com ...

The Underwood mod was meant to be used as a prop in a live-action role playing game (which looks like it's a lot of fun) called "Cthulhu Lives!".

Keep in mind the 'why not' factor has been the cause of far stranger human activites than case-modding.