H.P. Lovecraft: Two Left Arms

This film cultivates a Lovecraftian atmosphere; but meanders in storytelling. By the end, I wasn't sure what the climax of the film achieved.

I do want to give a shout-out for the attempt at making an English movie-where it doesn't seem it was everyone's first language.

Good atmosphere, poor execution.

Letterboxd: 2.5 out of 5.

I toughed this one out and watched the entire movie. WHY !? There was no single, understandable plotline and nothing made sense. The dialogue also shuttled back and forth between heavily accented English and Italian without benefit of subtitles. None of the characters were either well-developed or particularly believable and the scenes kept changing with astonishing irregularity; I could never figure out what was going on. Bad shooting, bad script, bad acting. At lease, if they were shooting in the Italian countryside, they could have given us some beautiful shots of architecture and local scenery. Unfortunately, aside from a couple quick shots inside a generic church, everything was drab, decayed and downright ugly. We were also offered up the obligatory quick shot of Paolo Stella's wee-willie-winkie. Again...WHY !? The only barely suggestive Lovecraftian element in this drek is the strange suggestion of cephalopod tentacles in silhouette towards the end. If throwing an odd tentacle or two into a movie is all it takes to claim connexion to H.P. Lovecraft, then I get more horror fare and satisfaction every time I go to the marina and order calamari and fried octopus. The only reason I couldn't give this movie a perfect zero is because the ratings system on IMDB ? It doesn't have a basement.

When I was in college I was assigned to read a piece of native American literature. For me, it made no sense. Something happened, the lead character set off on a journey, one ine which he traveled always due East. When he came to a tree, he cut it down so he could travel due East. When he came to a lake he made a canoe so he could travel due East across it. Then he got to his destination.

This story made no sense to me. I'm sure it had loads of meaning to native Americans hundreds of years ago. To me, it meant nothing.

Being overly kind, that's a lot like Two Left Arms. I understand basically what happened, but nothing of the why. This may be a result of it being written and produced in Italy, in Italian, for Italians. Maybe there's stuff that didn't make it through the translation. Dunno. All I can say is that it didn't make a lot of sense.

As a final note, most people who try to make Lovecraft films don't really get Lovecraft. The horror in his works is, simply, that it engages the perceived pointlessness of human existence. If they can't get that, they'd be better off doing Twilight films.

EDIT: Seeing some people were unsatisfied with my review I looked it over to see if I could improve it. But the language was such a problem for me I'm not sure what else I could say. If there were even a couple of other reviews I would take mine down and let them speak. But there aren't so I am thinking my review is better than none. Honestly the movie is so incomprehensible I probably shouldn't have tried, I suspect that is the main reason there are no other reviews to date. Also, I tend to grade on a bell curve, i.e. Few 1s or 10s. Off the top of my head I honestly can't remember ever giving a movie a 1 before. This was THAT bad. Sorry I couldn't do better folks.

*****

Half broken English, half Italian, and no subtitles. I had to turn on cc to even understand the English portion. Maybe this movie was made for the large bi-lingual Italian/American horror audience which I don't happen to be a part of. I can say that the English dialogue must have been written by someone with a very poor grasp of the language because even with closed captions I often couldn't make sense of it.

I'm starting to think being an avid reader of Lovecraft is a curse. I keep hoping I will someday find a Lovecraft movie, show, play, something, anything, that does justice to his writing. As best as I could tell (from what I could understand) this doesn't come close.

Do yourself a favor and avoid this at all costs. Use the time to read one of his stories instead.

PS - How the heck' critics gave this a 6 boggles my mind.