come anticipate guillermo del toro's "at the mountains of madness" with me

it's in 3D
http://www.aintitcool.com/node/45949

Depending on the script, I'm fine with this one being 3D.

All these 3-D movies discriminate against those of us with lazy/wandering/crossed eyes

and those of us who think 3D is a bit bollocks

Lovecraft is so fundamentally un-adaptable to the screen would be happy if all rights to his material were withheld from adaptation in perpetuity tbh

Can't wait for the film to stop dead for thirty minutes while one guy explains to the other what the drawings all mean.

lol

Lovecraft is so fundamentally un-adaptable to the screen would be happy if all rights to his material were withheld from adaptation in perpetuity tbh

― Master of the Manly Ballad (Shakey Mo Collier), Thursday, July 29, 2010 2:47 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark

i agree with the premise here but i think it could be fun to try

who knows, something weird and cool could come out of an attempt at an unsolvable problem

"It's a huge transparent monster that's eating a bunch of monstrous penguins!"

"You're HIGH."

(Don't get me wrong, I can't wait to see this too -- like s1ocki, it's not going to be a question of a faithful adaptation but how they hell they figure this out.)

re: lovecraft adaptations that uber retro call of cthulu from a few years ago was pretty cool imo

I WILL JOIN YOU IN THE ANTICIPATING OF THIS FILM...

http://lolthulhu.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/king_xolotl-mountains.jpg

Lovecraft is so fundamentally un-adaptable to the screen would be happy if all rights to his material were withheld from adaptation in perpetuity tbh

I think it could be done, it's just no one's done it yet

best lovecraft adaptations have been the ones that go gonzo (reanimator, from beyond)

the best king adaptations don't really capture the spirit of the originals either tho (carrie, the shining)

i mean most of the scariest movies around do it by NOT showing, don't see why books should have the monopoly on that

ah Reanimator, yeah that's great. maybe I should've specified Cthulhu-mythos

hope this happens. would be so great to see hellboy II quality monsteration in 3D, plus mind-bending visions of the gibbering fear of course. disagree that lovecraft is unfilmable tho. that h.p. lovecraft society silent version of call of cthulhu from a few years back was faithful to the source and worked quite well. deliberately quaint and cheap by necessity, but i could see the same basic story materials and vibe making a very satisfying mainstream suspense/horror flick.

One of the things about the book; everything just out of sight - sounds, trails, hints, scrawlings, um, inverted burial of scientists in anarctic tundra. And massive alien architecture. Not in your face horror so much.

Supposedly Dagon is a good Chthulu-mythos adaptation, based on The Shadow Over Innsmouth, but I haven't seen it.

lovecraft is 'unfilmable' in the sense that a lot of the elder gods mythos revolves around physically impossible things--angles that dont exist in 3d space, colors that shouldnt be seen by the human eye

but i dont think that means no one should try. and i think del toro has the best shot of almost anyone working to actually make it work

yeah, dagon is awesome! one of my favorite movies. operates w/in the mythos and tells a great story. lead actor is atrocious though, as is the woman who plays his wife (a smaller role). doesn't bother me, but they're awful enough to warrant an advance notice.

a lot of folks rep for dagon but I couldn't get into it. starts off well, early stuff with the townspeople is creepy but goes downhill from there imo. final scenes get wild but it's too little too late.

Yeah, I loved Dagon.

angles that dont exist in 3d space, colors that shouldnt be seen by the human eye

yeah, but i think that these kinds of things can be suggested, even half-depicted. you know, like mc escher drew pictures of things that couldn't physically exist.

Angles that don't exist in 3D space - isn't this what CGI was invented for?

was watching hellboy the other day, the strange massive beast floating around in the beginning when rasputin opens the portal was def a nod to an elder god

true. lots of nods to the old ones in mignola's comics to begin with though. much more so than in the movies.

isn't this what CGI was invented for?

this is what multi-million dollar 3D CGI was invented for

i.e., hell yes

Yeah, that was kinda what I was getting at.

(I have yet to see a nu-3D movie but I imagine the possibilities for non-Euclidean architecture could be mind-boggling)

if del toro can't do this no one can

i guess? i mean, when i say "cant exist in 3d space" what i mean is "cant physically exist such that the human mind can process them" which is what i always understood to be going on in hpl stories. like--what i imagine those descriptions to be is of stuff that literally cant be imagined, in some sense. its what i love about lovecraft!

thats an xxxxp or something

with 3d you probably can't drive people mad, but you could make a few of them barf.

here's hoping for some barf.

come anticipate assayas' "at the mountains of madness" with me

I took it more to be like, perceptual illusions that fucked with the human mind's concepts of space and time.

x-post to max

would be funny if they advertised this film with a disclaimer that seeing it might DRIVE YOU INSANE

too bad brakhage is dead

contenderizer and i are talking about the same cthulhu film i think.

there are some other ones floating around that are utter shit tho

they should have a nurse outside the theater in case anyone DIES OF FRIGHT

this one?

xp

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHuY2wXTd0o

i have that one on dvd, it's bitchin'

pretty faithful, too!

3d really needs to embrace it's chintzy william castle heritage

as soon as i make this argt i realize i don't know what i'm talking about

no way you're totally right!

think about it! dudes dressed up as shoggoths popping out of the aisles at the right moment of the movie. it would be awesome.

miike should be making 3d movies instead of cameron

I took it more to be like, perceptual illusions that fucked with the human mind's concepts of space and time.

x-post to max

― procedurally generated pidyn (Masonic Boom), Thursday, July 29, 2010 5:23 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

aw no man i always conceived of those descriptions as like... stuff completely incomprehensible by the human mind. not 'illusions' but i dunno. crazy n-dimensional stuff of which humans can only grasp a portion of. i like reading him next to irritating hard sci-fi authors who are super concerned w/ making their stuff scientifically accurate to a certain extent, b/c hpl goes in the completely opposite direction--if its not literally impossible w/in the realm of scientific thought than he doesnt care

my reading/interpretation follows max's - always thought this was key to the Elder Gods/Cthulhu mythos stuff, that these are things that are beyond the grasp of our pitifully limited consciousnesses, and thus when we come into contact with them, our minds are broken, are souls crushed, etc.

The Hammer versions make a good contrast with the Universal ones - Universal's about the monster, Hammer is much more interested in the scientist.

heh

https://bsky.app/profile/ddiamond.bsky.social/post/3m54m7prcgc2j

I thought this was really good.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0NGBCzF1JY

I will forgive his praise of Avatar in exchange for his stories about Cameron. Maybe I knew this at one point, but they've been friends for decades. Del Toro lived at his house in the '90s, and Cameron helped him get Cronos made. Fast forward many years, and when del Toro's dad was kidnapped (forgot about this, too), Cameron paid for a top international negotiator to help get him back. How Cameron knew or had access to the guy, who knows.

He also makes a really good point about Baroque filmmakers like Ken Russell, or Baz Luhrmann or Derek Jarmen, that (essentially) once you commit to going over the top you are basically stuck there, there's no way to pivot, which makes it harder to pull off than maybe they get credit for. He says the same of Uncut Gems, basically how hard it is to sustain something that manic, which in turn underscores how risky it is to go that route in the first place. Even if I don't personally like a lot of their results, I get what del Toro means.

Anyway, del Toro is one of my favorite talking-about-movies directors, up there with Scorsese.

Over halfway through my episodic viewing and not feeling it at all. Very bad CGI, ridiculously over the top staging. Having the baron climb a steeple in the middle of a lightning storm in order to install a critical part of his ludicrous contraption at the last possible moment perhaps counts as an example of Alfred's "overdetermination". I've hardly overdosed on Frankenstein - I read the book and saw the Branagh film both a long time ago - but my feeling what is the point of retelling this story?

Same feeling with Peter Jackson and King Kong. Maybe they’re a director’s Hamlet, thinking they can bring a novel interpretation?

I'm trying to recall what I would consider bad CGI in this. I mean, CGI is there, but the only time it really caught my eye was for animal attacks or maybe a couple of CGI matte-style shots, iirc. Maybe it looks worse on TV?

I agree I didn't get much new from this retelling, but I still thought the retelling was pretty good.

The giant batteries or whatever falling over in the castle looked less weighty than smaller real models would have done, and the animals were shocking and utterly unconvincing - the stationary deer lacked any spark of life and the movement of the wolves and sheep was laughable.

i watched on a TV and definitely thought the CGI in the first part of the movie was distractingly bad. lots of badly-matched Star Wars prequel style moments of people pretending to be awed by grand vistas and vast architectural spaces which they are noticeably not occupying or seeing.

i forgot all about it when Elordi shows up, who saves the movie. even considering its embellishments and departures from the book i'd say its still the best version of mary shellys novel we've gotten so far. obviously theres better frankenstein-adjacent movies, but for a movie version of the book frankenstein, this is the best anyones done imo.

This was ok, not great. Oscar Isaac didn't bring enough derangement along with the egotism, imo. I went in not knowing del Toro was inspired by Bernie Wrightson's visual concept of the monster, thought "this is straight Wrightson" during, and was happy to see the acknowledgement in the credits.

I really enjoyed the movie for the most part, but yeah, the CGI/effects stuff was almost enough to turn me off. Victor's castle looked like some crap out of a video game, even though I guess it was partially practical. It looked ridiculous when it exploded too. Felt like I was watching a dang-ass Transformers movie. Sailor-tossing in the opening scene was pretty stinky as well.

Overall though, I had a really great time and was glad I caught it in theaters.

Lousy special effects
Terrible pacing
Bad acting from everyone but Walz and Isaac

It STINKS.

Del Toro hasn't made a great movie since Pan's Labyrinth.

And he probably never will again. (He’s never made a great one in English at all.) But he’s made some good ones, and there’s no harm in talking about what’s good or interesting or entertaining in any of them as they come out.

Glad i’m not the only one underwhelmed by Shape of Water. Is Cronos good?

I've heard good things about the B&W director's cut of Nightmare Alley. Anyone seen it?

Cronos is excellent, probably because it is rooted in Mexico City's cosmopolitan heritage and does innovative things with the vampire mythos. The short Geometria is a very black comedy--I don't know if that could be sustained over a feature-length film, but....

GdT's Nightmare Alley (in B&W or full color) looks splendid but doesn't otherwise improve on the original film.

I do find it frustrating that he is so creative and imaginative, and he keeps getting money to make movies, but then those movies are mid Beauty and the Beast retreads, or Godzilla retreads or Frankenstein retreads, or Nightmare Alley remake, or whatever Gothic horror (the great looking) Crimson Peak was riffing off. (Pan's Labyrinth was a bit of a riff, too, but it didn't feel a retread of an idea passed through the del Toro filter.) He and Hellboy (or Blade, for that matter) felt like good fits, because they offered comic book and blockbuster pleasures with plenty of room for his more creative sensibilities, though I haven't seen those movies for a while. I haven't seem his Pinocchio yet, either. Still, I'll take del Toro over Burton any day.

For sure. Ten-year old Cow-Art would not be able to fathom why I have no interest in the Beetlejuice sequel.

Cronos is a lot of fun.
Mimic is really good.
The Devil's Backbone is probably my favorite Del Toro movie, tied with Hellboy.
Blade 2 is the best Marvel movie.
Hellboy 2 was fairy-tale bullshit. So was Pan's Labyrinth, but good, and scary.
Nightmare Alley was at least an hour too long.
I never finished Crimson Peak; have never seen I Fucked A Fish-Man I Stole From Work; have never seen Pinocchio.

*snorts and lol’s*

Nightmare Alley tries to turn pulp into art and is self-serious and stiff, yawn.

Nightmare Alley amazed me due to how painstakingly faithful to the original film it was, almost an exact scene-for-scene match, and yet manages to be 40 minutes longer. I still don't quite understand how he did that.

crimson peak is good fun

Pan's Labyrinth was a bit of a riff, too, but it didn't feel a retread of an idea passed through the del Toro filter

― Josh in Chicago, Thursday, November 13, 2025 2:46 PM (three hours ago)

I seen some people saying it was a ripoff of The White People or Spirit Of The Beehive, that's nonsense but they're definitely influences on it.

Despite my problems with the special effects, I think Frankenstein is maybe his best.

A lot of my favorite films of the past 15 years or so have an absolutely baffling use of cgi. I get how the wolves and burning mansion scenes could be regarded as too important to work around but cgi mice and deer? The very next day I seen All That Heaven Allows and there's a guy feeding a real deer.

It's not a rip off of Spirit of the Beehive, but there is a lot of Spirit of the Beehive in it. And Frankenstein!

Just watched it tonight. The cgi didn't bother me too much, but I agree that there was a generic goth-fantasy vibe to the art direction. It did not have a distinct look (something Nosferatu achieved better imo). But overall, I was pretty engaged by it. Especially Elordi, like everyone says. Oscar Isaac is fine but he's so punchable in the role that it's partly just a relief to spend time with another character. I didn't mind Del Toro turning the creature into something of a superhero, it seems like a natural connection for him.

I liked this a lot!

i think the yardstick is if you liked Crimson Peak you’ll at least find this more tolerable than most ppl imo.

it’s very Bad Dads Gothic/telenovella and i enjoyed the ott-ness of that in particular, the shirtlessness & the storms & the reds, all great.

unfortunately i think Isaac maybe has too much natural warmth/charisma to portray Victor with the coldness required - he’s a little miscast. which sucks bc i do really love Oscar Isaac in everything always. also the accent was a little :/ but i think the character is forced to indicate a lot very quickly so you don’t get much sense of him except what yr told.

Elordi was great as the monster, the movement work was excellent, just a terrific performance that felt like a good marriage of actor + makeup effects where you get the combined effect of both without one overshadowing the other.

i think though Elordi’s success as the monster in the story is also bc it’s a character that is SO emotional (vs Victor), delToro’s inherent sympathies gives the monster more to do & more depth. I mean the monster has that benefit in the book to some degree too so that is kinda baked-in but still, i definitely felt even more of an imbalance there.

i didnt like the Waltz stuff at all, it felt like he was just added to explain where the money & the bodies came from - all of his stuff & most of the actiony ship stuff I could have done away with completely in favor of giving Victor & even Mia Goth more development idk

but i found it really beautiful and mostly pretty enjoyable as a monster movie/gothic lit/guillermo nerd

also quite funny in places! the confession scene w Mia Goth was v funny

shoutout to costume designer Kate Hawley. Stunning! (same costumer for Crimson Peak so, goated obv) every single Mia Goth costume she looked like an ornate Victorian insect, just incredible stuff

I didn't enjoy Crimson Peak at all. And the things about this that annoyed me were similar to the reasons I disliked CP. That said, this is a better film

I prefer the grittier, subtler Del Toro of the Pan's Labyrinth / Devil's Backbone years, and i always forget that he's moved on to a kind of heightened camp, luxuriating in gothic signifiers, elaborate costumes and scenery, fantastical setpieces, and a near Burton-esque level of campiness.

I wasn't really sure what I was.menat to take away from this -Shelley's philosophical and moral musings were all but dispensed with, and yet every line was delivered as though it were imbued with meaning.

For me, Victor Frankenstein is a solitary obsessive driven to madness and eventually revulsion by the significance of his work.

Del Toro's Victor is pretty much just a conniving and cowardly asshole whose morals and motivations seem to switch on a dime, with little reason. One minute he's practically nuzzling the Creature, fascinated by it; next he's chaining him up and violently thrashing him, disappointed that he can't say more than the word "Victor".

My favourite parts were actually the parts on the ice and the middle section with the blind man.

Well, obviously Victor takes after his dad in a lot of ways.

So is that all it's really saying? Like father like son?

It was told as a fairytale imo so not sure we're gonna get some deep psychological revelations about fathers and sons, but I thought within that form it was quite neat and symmetrical in a way I enjoyed.

The two brothers provide an alternative model to lfls from the start. del Toro is unsubtle enough already, you don’t need to reduce him further to divine an actively stupid intent!

I'm not absolutely sure what you mean there. Personally, I don't feel satisfied by his sudden switch into sadism. Like you say, if it's just a matter of a fairytale-simple "wicked stepfather" narrative then fair enough.

But "He suddenly decided to treat his creation cruelly because he is an asshole and his dad was an asshole" is a far cry from the themes within Frankenstein. From what I remember of the book, Victor's upbringing is far from cruel, and his parents are very nurturing.

And even if that's not the point of this film, it's not a very interesting idea in itself. I was almost expecting, when it turned out he was being bankrolled by a Crimean arms dealer, to hint at an allegory about AI and our relationship with it.

But much as every line of dialogue seemed to be delivered with profound meaning - Elizabeth's challenges and The Creature's own musings while in the rural sanctuary - they didn't really amount to anything more than "No it's YOU who is the monster".

Then at the end, after everything they've been through and so many snapped necks and drowned sailors, Victor and the Creature just seem to forgive each other - not because they have each reached a point of enlightenment, but because they seem knackered.

I left thinking "Well what was I meant to take away from this after two and a half hours?" Is it just a romp? Am i asking too much of this film to have a coherent theme or moral centre? Or is Del Toro just stuck telling more-or-less the same story over and over again?

Victor and the Creature just seem to forgive each other - not because they have each reached a point of enlightenment, but because they seem knackered.

I think I mentioned it after I saw it, but this reminded me of the end of "Blade Runner," where creation/erstwhile antagonist surprisingly flips the script through the particularly human attribute of empathy. Not particularly deep, there or here, but it's imo effective. In "Blade Runner," of course, the angry and frustrated Batty's empathetic resolution is ultimately driven by a realization of his mortality. The similarly angry and frustrated Monster in this movie is faced with a different dilemma, immortality, but quickly comes to the same conclusion. I would have liked to see this movie show the Monster's evolution toward this conclusion a little better; he seemed a sensitive sweetheart from the start.

That's OTM

I don't think it is a sudden switch to sadism, the film implies the passing of time and a festering disappointment. Time in the film is generally moving at a decent canter in the way it often does in story within a story.

I don't think this film is particularly complex but if you think what's being said is "he is an asshole because his dad is an asshole" then I think you're missing some fairly unsubtle and constant theme building throughout. He hates his creation because he doesn't believe it's alive, since it can't communicate, and this means he thinks he's failed, and it represents his failure. Then in the end he realises that the real free will or genuine independent life is the rebellious rampaging depressive we made along the way.

They both cease to judge each other as they come to a shared understanding that their ability to be different gives them something to love in the other. Their reconciliation is if anything too perfect and plotted, so it's wrong to say it happens for no reason. It's quite a sentimental father son journey!

It's obv fairly cheesey I guess and kinda hammered home but I still sort of liked it as a fairytale. This is why I disagree it's a story about them being the same, it's about them being different, and each realising this means the other has in some way succeeded. Albeit with the help of a magic blind man in a hut in the woods.

Feels a bit daft but it really went big on this with such a huge do you see type ending that I think it can't be critiqued as empty, just for plenty of other reasons.

Fair enough.

For me that's a dissatisfying and unnecessary deviation from the story of Frankenstein. While it works (if flimsily - ffs you gave it LIFE, is that not enough?) as a plot explanation, and to some extents a quirky fairytale movie, to me it's doing Shelley's book and the fundamental ideas behind it a disservice.

Victor and the Creature just seem to forgive each other

Heavily prefigured on the Creature's part by the old blind man telling him the importance of forgiveness. I agree that none of this is very subtle. The real lesson or moral arrives with the ship captain telling his men they're going home and giving up pursuit of the Pole — because that way lies madness!

xpost i mean idk, fairly sure if i googled 'themes frankenstein book' some of the same things this film gets at would be there. doesn't mean you have to enjoy it.

the entire thing is that he doesn't think he has given it life, he thinks it is not alive. then he realises, thanks to the slightly forced blind man sidequest which lets the creature learn to speak, that he was wrong. and the creature's ability to forgive him concludes that realisation.

also lol i forget that the ship captain too learned a lesson. i know it's sort of dumb but i found it mildly refreshing for a film to go so freely into sentimentality. idk, it felt quite brave.

Also, obv. the movie is very Catholic, not just in the usual Jesus/back to life way, but in those deep-seated philosophies of forgiveness/confession (which of course Victor at one point very literally corrupts to his own sacrilegious purposes). Just as the monster learns to forgive, so too does Victor finally acknowledge his own guilt/failings, at least to an extent. Again, yeah, not subtle, but the whole sequence on the boat is a damned man recognizing his fate/status and finally confessing his sins, in parallel to the monster's own ethical (if also pretty superficial) journey. So in this way we get man (Victor) playing God, and God (monster) becoming man (which is also very Jesus-y).

iirc gdt said that this version was intended to be mexican af so i think the catholic sentimentality has gotta be part of that

https://deadline.com/2025/10/oscar-isaac-guillermo-del-toro-frankenstein-mexican-catholic-1236572220

okay this is oscar isaac quote but yeah:

Isaac added, “And it’s this very European story, but told through a very Latin-American, Mexican, Catholic point-of-view. So, it was just high passion all the time.”

Biggest surprise for me in hearing Del Toro talk about this film is that he said there was no intention of sexual attraction between Goth and Elordi's characters, when I was watching the film I was expecting that that kind of relationship was going to develop.

is Oscar Isaac nude in this

oh yes

Xps this happened a lot in this film, I felt. It kept breadcrumbing ideas and glimmers of plotlines but never really followed through with them.

Elizabeth's character was set-up to present a counterbalance to Victor's masculine hubris.

But this all came undone very quickly for me; first when she was moved into the role of a secret love interest, then when all her protestations and challenges appeared to boil down to her fancying the Creature.

Both those narrative threads were frayed at the ends, and got largely abandoned almost as soon as they were taken up. And that's a shame because they could have done so much more to flesh-out Elizabeth as one of the only female characters in the film. She becomes largely unimportant to the plot, despite being set up as a major character near the start.

Instead poor Mia Goth ends up being a clotheshorse to hang fancy costumes on.

I thought the monster would try to revive and marry her, but instead we got an odd frenemies trip to the North Pole for some reason

Not sure how him pursuing her made her more like him.