Right, well I stumbled upon the 2022 horror movie titled "Monster Portal", and seeing that the movie brandished H. P. Lovecraft's name on the cover, and having rather interesting cover, I must admit that I was intrigued.
Did I harbor much of any expectations to the movie? No, not really, because I had never heard about is before watching it.
And what a dumpster fire this was. First of all, this movie has nothing to do with H. P. Lovecraft, aside from the fact that writers Matthew B. C., Scott Jeffrey and Mario von Czapiewski opted to put Cthulhu into their movie. Yeah, this story has never even been anywhere near being spawned by the great H. P. Lovecraft himself. And just because you opt to put something that Lovecraft created into a movie doesn't really give you the right to put "H. P. Lovecraft's" as part of your movie title. But hey, anything to lure in the audience, right?
The storyline in "Monster Portal" was not a great one, not even by a longshot. It was sluggish and slow paced, with nothing overly exciting to offer the audience that manages to endure the staggering 80 minutes of nonsense that "Monster Portal" turned out to be.
The special effects and CGI in the movie were so-so. Some of the CGI was actually fair enough, while some was just taken straight out of a 1990s computer game. And how wonderfully clever to make the scenes so dark that you can hardly see any of the special effects when they were actually on the screen. Yeah, this formula doesn't really work, and if anything it just makes attempts of horror turn into a parody.
The acting performances in "Monster Portal" were fair enough, I will say that much. I wasn't familiar with the cast in the movie, and that is normally something I enjoy when I watch a movie. But the actors and actresses literally had nothing worthwhile to work with here.
I got suckered in by the "H. P. Lovecraft's" part of the title and ten tentacles and faceless creature on the cover. Make sure you don't do the same mistake, because "Monster Portal" is not worth the effort. And seeing a CGI rendering of Cthulhu's head shrouded in 90% darkness hardly constitutes a movie as being Lovecraftian.
My rating of "Monster Portal" lands on a two out of ten stars.
