The Resonator: Miskatonic U (2021) - Movie Review
What do you get when a cut-rate production company makes a half-assed attempt at making an unofficial sequel to one of the best Lovecraft movies ever made?
The worst movie I’ve watched so far in 2024.
Let’s discuss.
The Resonator: Miskatonic U is a cosmic horror film brought to us by writer/director William Butler. If you don’t know his name, you’re part of the loud majority of folks in this world. Butler’s career is almost entirely made up of terrible sequels, Full Moon Production films from the 90s. His rate must be cheap to do this many projects, the current incarnation of the once-groundbreaking company.
The film focuses on a young scientist and student, Crawford Tillinghast, as he approaches graduation at the eponymous Miskatonic University. He’s a man on a mission, but the mission is not his own. His father built a machine with the potential to change the world, but vanished before he could complete his work. Crawford has taken up the onus of his father’s dream and has rebuilt the machine, but what he discovers when he turns it on is more than he can handle. Driven by his need to push the boundaries of science, he puts everyone and everything in his life at risk. Will he find the answers he seeks, or will he be consumed by whatever lurks in the beyond? Find out in tonight’s feature, The Resonator: Miskatonic U.
I LOVE Full Moon, but the Full Moon company that I love died a long time ago.
The straight-to-VHS juggernaut that brought us Dolls, Trancers, Subspecies, and Puppetmaster is long gone. Yes, the Band family is still involved, but mainly just to pump out shitty, redundant short films to attempt to lure people to subscribe to their terrible GEOcities-like streaming service.
Yes, I tried it as an Amazon Prime Video Channel, it sucked.
With that being said, it’s no surprise this unofficial sequel to the Stuart Gordon 1986 classic, From Beyond sucked.
This movie is so bad that it went past so-bad-it’s-good and straight to please kill me so I don’t have to finish watching.
Let’s start with the positives, what few there may be.
The marketing team did an amazing job on the posters, box art, and other advertising materials. It’s gorgeous artwork that is way better than anything in this movie.
It’s always great to see Nightmare on Elm Street Alum and one of my childhood crushes, Amanda Wyss.
She’s a genre icon who never gets enough praise. If you want to watch a good B-movie with Wyss, check out the underrated To Die For series from the late 80s. Wyss turns in the only full-fledged acting performance in this film. Her scenes are the only truly watchable ones.
Now for the half positives.
Amanda Jones is adorable and more than that, she’s eye-catching. I can’t tell if she can act, and it’s unfair to judge her with what she was given here, but I hope she can because she’s about the only new face here that came off as an actual star.
It’s always nice to see Michael Pare kicking around, but it always makes one question come to mind.
What the f*ck happened to Michael Pare?
The star of cult cinema hits like 1983’s Eddie and the Cruisers, 1984’s Streets of Fire, and the criminally underrated 1996 werewolf flick, Bad Moon, has been reduced to doing public access drivel like this? I know he’s done Uwe Boll films, but at least in those films, I know he got paid.
Say what you want about Uwe Boll. In my opinion, he’s a terrible human and a blight on the art of filmmaking. But somehow, he gets his films funded, and they look somewhat professional.
Finally, the pure, unadulterated negatives…
This film looks like it was produced by a high school theater class.
Which, in all honesty, isn’t fair to the average theater class, because they’d probably have made a more entertaining production.
This film is cheap, like all recent Full Moon Features. The sets, special effects, and production design are made up of iMovie CGI, papier mache, and poorly utilized Cosplay EVA foam. I know I have more experience in fabrication and sculpture than the average person, as I’ve done both for more than 20 years at this point, but by God, this was bad. The only good effects are the old practical props and things reused from other, better Full Moon pictures. And even then, they are shot with a stunning ineptitude, showcasing every single seam or crack. The showcase create, which looks beautiful in the marketing artwork, is a wet fart of practical execution. The sexy, tentacle-haired sex goddess is a mess. It looks like they took an exotic danger, sprayed her with spray paint, and then stapled together her headdress out of EVA foam. It doesn’t even look like they heated the foam to give it a more natural, hardened look. You can see the jagged seams of the poorly cut foam in pretty much every shot. I could have manufactured them something far more presentable, and it’s not like my services are expensive. I mean, Christ, did the Band Brothers snort all the profits Full Moon ever made?
The lack of production quality doesn’t always tank a film like this. Normally, if there’s a charismatic lead or fun ensemble chemistry, the film could become a cult hit.
In this case, the acting is below the average Vivid Video production.
If you know, you know.
The lead actor, Dane Oliver, is made of wood. I don’t think he’s human. He shows no real emotion and is only capable of a single facial expression. The fact that he’s supposed to be playing a scientist who never leaves the lab, but is somehow jacked to the gills, aside, he’s not an actor. There isn’t a single scene where his performance feels authentic, real, or believable. He acts like he’s reading off cue cards.
Then again, that’s how almost everyone seems, except for the two previously mentioned actors Wyss and Jones.
This is a bad movie.
No, no, that’s too generous.
This is a terrible cash grab attempt by a production company that should have stayed dead, and one of the worst Lovecraft adaptations put to film.
Don’t waste your time on this, there’s no redeeming factor. It’s so bad that it’s hard to laugh at it.
It’s like coming upon a wounded deer in the forest; you feel terrible for everyone involved, but the only thing you can do is press stop and end their misery.
