You know, I've seen them all.
And yet I seem still have a lot of energy to watch more them.
Of course I'm talking about fake footage films.
One I never seen but had me recommended for many years by a dear friend and sleazemongler, is Il Mistero di Lovecraft - Road to L. Yeah, that's the full Italian title. What makes this one so fresh and intelligent is that it stays away from the - nowadays - most over-used gimmick in these kind of movies: ghosts. For once they tried something different.
Have you seen Lunopolis? You should. It's a bit fragmented to be perfect, and still it's one of the best. Also because it brings up a subject that no one would think of: people living on the moon. I mean, who makes a fake footage film about that? And here we have the genius of Road to L: the directors takes something old, something legendary, and makes a new twist of it.
In Road to L we follow a documentary crew, part Italian and part American, who meets up in Italy to make a movie about a rumoured trip that H.P. Lovecraft did. According the official biography Lovecraft never left the US, but here they present a series of letter written by L that claims he indeed was in Italy and there found the inspiration for his classic mythology. The crew digs deeper in to libraries, interviews experts... and soon they find their selves even deeper into the Italian countryside where the roads always seem to go in circles...
It's not 100 % successful when it comes to the visual presentation. It's a bit too much improbable angles, impossible to shoot under the circumstances. But the hell with that. I've seen worse and here it wors alright. I'm just feeling whiny here close to bedtime. Road to L is a very mysterious, beautiful in it's simplicity, but most of all CREEPY fucker of a film. Big words, but this is one original story.
I know that's the way we want it - monsters - but don't expect too see much here. It's very little of the creatures, more or less zero - just a couple of blurry frames on a VHS tape. And it works so good. The ending is so abrupt and so eerie that it's one of the best endings I've seen in a movie like that. It's in the middle of tension and then... bam. The end. Leaves a lot to the imagination, in a good way of course.
The concept of mixing reality with fiction, fact with... no fact at all and in a wonderful setting like this... well, I'm surprised it never got any big distribution. Maybe the genre was on the financial low point of success and no one thought it would sell? It's been resurrected since then and maybe if someone gave this movie a wider distribution... it could be the modern genre classic it deserves to be.
For fans of Lovecrafts and lovers of mystery and the occult, Road to L is a minor masterpiece.
"What makes this one so fresh and intelligent is that it stays away from the - nowadays - most over-used gimmick in these kind of movies: ghosts. For once they tried something different."
Yeah, ghosts is overused in the fake footage genre, but sometimes it works.
But of course I´m very glad to see new creature features using fake footage.
"Have you seen Lunopolis? You should."
No, I haven´t.
"The concept of mixing reality with fiction, fact with... no fact at all and in a wonderful setting like this... well, I'm surprised it never got any big distribution. Maybe the genre was on the financial low point of success and no one thought it would sell?"
Could be that the makers of this film never got any good reviews on websites like AICN or that they simply couldn´attract any big distributors.
Also there are some distributors who claim that the horror genre market has been oversaturated, and therefore indie produced horror is no longer a moneymaker for smaller indie distrubutors.
"For fans of Lovecrafts and lovers of mystery and the occult, Road to L is a minor masterpiece."
Well, they should make more Lovecraft adaptations, I think, this sounded very interesting.
Good review and thanks.
Posted by: Megatron | April 18, 2013 at 23:54