The Call of Cthulhu -

Wed, Jun 7th - 7:00 pm Through Wed, Jun 14th - 7:00 pm

Trapped By the Mormons - 1/2

Wed, Jun 7th - 7:00 pm Through Wed, Jun 14th - 7:00 pm

A few years back, motion pictures marked their 100-year anniversary. To paraphrase Buddy Hackett, 100 years went by just like a century. Sometimes it seems it took half that time for Hollywood to run out of ideas. But two 2005 features, screening in delirious tandem on the Case campus, boldly go forward into the past. They are The Call of Cthulhu and Trapped by the Mormons, indie DV works shot in B&W with title cards, in the style of the silent-screen cinema.

Filmed in "Mythoscope," Cthulhu adapts a canonical short horror story by H.P. Lovecraft, the Poe of Providence. His weird tales of ancient, baneful cosmic entities, Elder Gods and Great Old Ones, whose manifestations drive men mad, seldom make successful movies. This lovingly literal version (produced by the L.A.-based H.P. Lovecraft Society) has the clever conceit of primitive-yet-surreal staging and production values mostly true to 1924, the date of the story, thus dodging challenges of f/x, dialogue, even how to pronounce Cthulhu.

Narrative is a dossier of disquieting incidents revealed by a nameless protagonist, nightmares and outbreaks of insanity connected with tentacled, bat-winged idols of the dreaded alien deity Cthulhu. Ultimately a boat full of unlucky sailors (a la Kong with no Fay Wray) find the giant puppet-monster Cthulhu in person, his tomb-city having risen from the South Sea.

Using Cabinet of Dr. Caligari twisted sets to suggest the non-Euclidean geometry of the Big C's unearthly realm is ingenious — one wishes there were more flourishes of neo-German expressionism. But the disjointed storyline is cumbersome and uncinematic (there's a flashback within a flashback within a flashback). HPL fans will adore it; non-initiates may just find it an esoteric curio, like the same troupe's Lovecraftian stage musical, A Shoggoth on the Roof.

Also bizarre, but wildly funny, is Trapped by the Mormons, filmed by D.C.-area theater troupe Cherry Red, based on a 1922 British feature of the same title, one of many anti-Mormon propaganda screeds from the period. I haven't seen the original, but the remake is a riot, featuring N.Y.C. "drag king" Stacey Whitmire, a.k.a. Johnny Kat, as an alpha-male Latter-Day Saint named Isoldi Keane, who brings "the curse of the Morm!" to Manchester, England.

Keane — whose black Dracula cape is a giveaway — and two murderous LDS elders with atrocious fake beards use evangelical preaching and staged miracles to mesmerize a bunch of English office girls. Isoldi's obsessive love interest, heroine Nora (the exquisitely retro Emily Riehl-Bedford) and all other females are na•ve, scantily clad and helpless, as Keane prepares to ship them to Salt Lake City as polygamous sect-slaves.

You'd think this would be one-note material, but the script keeps raising the level of Mormo-phobia (and gore) to hilarious extremes. You may find yourself musing whether a subversive, campy remake of Jud Suss (directed by Mel Brooks) could possibly work, or if in 2105 Trapped by Scientologists (the Tom Cruise-Katie Holmes story) will employ real old-school cinematic techniques, like flesh-and-blood actors, instead of holograms or genetically-modified replicants.