Cthulhu Mansion (1992)

Original title: La mansión de los Cthulhu

The gang of young hoodlums around one Hawk (Brad Fisher) has bitten off more than they can chew, and find themselves having to cope with the fallout from one dead security guard, as well as one dead drug dealer (and a bunch of stolen cocaine) that sets the police as well as some Very Bad People on their trail. One of their own (Luis Fernando Alvés) is hurt with one of those movie gunshot wounds of permanently fluctuating seriousness. Because the series of minor catastrophes happened at a carnival, they manage to “persuade” stage magician Chandu (Frank Finlay) – not that Chandu, we very much hope – to help them escape to his house, where they proceed to keep him, his daughter Lisa (Marcia Layton) and his mute servant hostage until they’ll get a better idea, which, given the lack of brain power in play here, might just take forever.

Alas, Chandu’s mansion is not the best place for this sort of thing, and soon the Evil Chandu keeps locked behind a door in the cellar becomes rather excited by the new company. Poltergeist phenomena, demonic possession and all sorts of shenanigans ensue.

If you’re going into Cthulhu Mansion by perhaps not Spain’s best director Juan Piquer Simón expecting either things Lovecraftian or a Chandu the Magician movie, you’ll be sorely disappointed. You see, Chandu’s mansion is actually called Cthulhu, because the mucky brochure (no compliments to the prop department for that one) that taught him true magic and cost his wife her life was simply entitled “Cthulhu”. Yup, the film didn’t even go for the Necronomicon there. Which is somewhat fitting, because the film’s idea of Evil is clearly one of the Christian demonic kind (what with it showing an allergy against crosses), and there’s nothing else having to do with Lovecraft (or even Derleth, for that matter) going on here at all.

Instead the film’s mostly concerned with being a very late attempt at ripping off the horror sub-genre of films – mostly from Italy and the USA - from the 70s where a bunch of more or less bad guys takes a group of (generally rich) people hostage in their own homes and does decidedly unfriendly things with them and crossing it with the cheesiest haunted house movie you could imagine. The former genre isn’t done much justice by a film that doesn’t seem to realize it is very belatedly trying to cash in on a sub-genre that thrives on nastiness and brutal social commentary and instead opts for keeping its hoodlums (you wouldn’t want to use a more modern word for these guys and gals) just mildly mean and very slightly brutal.

Simón does better by the cheesy haunted house movie, if your interpretation of better is “has a lot of furniture fly around, has some plants mumble, shows a woman drawn into a refrigerator by ridiculously awesome large claw hands, and includes more poltergeist nonsense than you can shake a stick at”. Add an idea of demonic possession that’s mostly about really icky looking skin, and adorably stupid death scenes, and you most certainly don’t have a decent, spooky, or whatever horror film. Instead, you get exactly the cheesy, stupid yet fun and pretty nonsensical kind of film you just might expect from Juan Piquer Simón. Despite missing my Lovecraft, I did find myself decently entertained by the brainless shenanigans.

In short: The Three Musketeers (1973) & The Four Musketeers (1974)

(I treat both films as one because there's really no good reason not to, seeing as they were filmed back to back and absolutely belong together).

It is always a dangerous proposition to visit one's childhood favourites again, particularly when those favourites are comedies like Richard Lester's version of Dumas's Three Musketeers. Once, most of us found farts inherently funny, and now - hopefully - we no longer do.

So it is a particular delight when one can watch movies like the ones at hand and come out with the feeling that one was a particularly clever gal or guy when one liked it, already of impeccable taste and with an eye for strangeness.

For strange Lester's film surely is: turning the romantic splendour of the previous versions of the story into a mixture of the comedic, the veracious, and the absurd with the help of "Flashman" writer George MacDonald Fraser does not sound the most - or even fourth-most - obvious way to go about another adaptation of Dumas's novels, but Lester and Fraser really pull it of. A large part of the films' charm is based on the way the often very broad humour and the greater than usual in a swashbuckler authenticity collide, showing off much of what is splendour in other versions of the tale as just as silly as the fashions and mores of our times will look a few hundred years on. The past, the films make clear, was another, quite muddy and rainy (even in undramatic moments), country where people lived and loved and dressed and acted like fools, and where France was overrun with people with - or at least pretending to have - various British accents who were totally unable to agree on a pronounciation of D'Artagnan.

The Three Musketeers could easily have drifted into the realm of deeply cynical deconstruction with this approach, but the film looks at its strange people and times with a look that is as much one of wide-eyed wonder and compassion as it is one of mockery, as if Lester and Fraser had begun with cool distance to their material but soon enough fallen in love with all its inner ironies, its unconscious naiveties, and its sense of adventure that transcends morals.

Add to this a cast of actors like Oliver Reed, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Faye Dunaway, Geraldine Chaplin, Christopher Lee, Michael York, Frank Finlay, Raquel Welch and Richard Chamberlain in a very good mood (well, Welch is absolutely dreadful and has zero comical timing, but that was to be expected), and Lester's hand for heroically ridiculous (or is it ridiculously heroic?) swashbuckling action, and you have a film I'm inordinately proud to already have loved as a little boy.

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