Director/Screenplay – Matthew B.C., Story – Matthew B.C., Scott Jeffrey & Mario Von Czapiewski, Producers – Scott Jeffrey & Rhys Waterfield, Photography – Jack Peter Mundy, Music – Mike Ellaway, Visual Effects – Rhys Waterfield, Special Effects – Chelsea Murphy. Production Company – Jagged Edge Productions.
Cast
Sian Altman (Celine Leighton), Louis James (Rich), George Nettleton (Nick), Sarah Alexandra Marks (April), Judy Tcheniak (Edda), Richard Harfst (Peter Leighton)
Plot
Following the death of her father, Celine Leighton inherits a large country estate and house. She, her boyfriend Rich and another couple that are friends, arrive to look over the house. Celine then starts to find strange things happening around the estate. Mysterious hooded figures lurk and then her friends begin to go missing. She then finds that her father has opened a portal to another dimension that can unleash ancient entities.
H.P. Lovecraft’s Monster Portal/The Offering was the second directorial film for British director Matthew B.C.. Matthew is an associate of prolific producer Scott Jeffrey, best known of recent for the modest hit of Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey (2023). Jeffrey had produced and co-written Matthew B.C.’s directorial debut Medusa: Queen of the Serpents (2020), while Matthew subsequently went on to write the Jeffrey produced Blood in the Water (2022) and the Jeffrey directed Exorcist: Vengeance (2022).
By placing the name of Lovecraft above the title, this gives the suggestion that we are watching a Lovecraftian Film. This use of Lovecraft’s name in the title is a trend that a number of other films of recent have adopted – as with H.P. Lovecraft’s The Deep Ones (2021) and H.P. Lovecraft’s Witch House (2021). That said, there is little to the film that can be considered Lovecraftian. The film was originally entitled The Offering but was presumably retitled to avoid confusion with The Offering (2022) that came out a couple of weeks earlier.
Most of the film draws on the tradition of the Haunted House story where a quartet of young people move into a mansion that Sian Altman has inherited where they see strange visions, while hooded cultists lurk in the grounds and various members of the group begin to disappear. There is also Judy Tcheniak in a wildly overacted performance as the maid who issues strange warnings and philosophical insights.
Cthulhu appears above the gazebo
There is not really much in any of this that resembles a standard Lovecraftian tale until right at the end. We do get the impressive appearance of a massive crab-like deity at the start and more fully at the end, while there is some talk about opening portals to other dimensions. Towards the end of the show, there is a single mention of the summoning of Cthulhu.
The film never emerges out of being anything other than a low-budget production made by novices. There is never anything that produces an eerie atmosphere or causes you to jump. In fact, nothing much happens. The scares are fairly predictable and consist of a fairly ordinary assemblage of clichés from the haunted house genre – no more, no less – before the appearance of a reasonably impressive low-budget Lovecraftian entity at the end.
