The Tomb (2007 film)

The creepy doll used by "The Puppet-Master" from from The Tomb (2007 film)... any resemblance to the creepy doll (and plot) from Saw is purely "coincidental"...

The Tomb, AKA H.P. Lovecraft's The Tomb, The Tomb - Condemned to Agony, H.P. Lovecraft's Dreams of the Witch-house, Witch-house

Summary

"Eight nails, who fails? Curiosity will lure you in." A being known as "The Puppetmaster" holds victims captive in a tomb and tortures them.

Details

• Release Date: 2007
• Country/Language: The Shadow Factory Inc.
• Genres/Technical: Horror ("torture porn"), Thriller
• Runtime: 1 hr 21 min
• Starring: Victoria Ullmann, Christian Behm, Gerard Griesbaum
• Director: Ulli Lommel
• Writer: Ulli Lommel (story and screenplay) H.P. Lovecraft (unfairly gets the blame)
• Producer/Production Co: The Shadow Factory Inc.
• View Trailer: (link)

Ratings

MPAA Ratings

• Rated: R (ultra-low-budget Violence, Profanity, Sexual Situations, Adult Content, Nudity)

Tentacle Ratings

A rough measure of how "Lovecraftian" the work is:

• s____ (Half Tentacle: Lovecraftian in name only)

I've not seen this film yet, but it appears to be a low-budget "torture porn" film (clearly ripped off from the Saw franchise) with nothing to do with Lovecraft or his work except having Lovecraft's name and the name of one of his stories (either "The Tomb (fiction)" or "Dreams in the Witch House (fiction)", depending on the distributor's mood) printed on the label, and maybe even a lazy and cynical name-drop or two somewhere in the dialogue.

Note that Lovecraft's original stories are on one hand about a young man who becomes obsessed with an ancestor's tomb, sleeping beside it and imagining himself buried within it, until he is finally institutionalized, before a plot twist suggesting time travel and personality exchange occurs, and on the other about a young man who sleeps in a haunted house and believes he dreams of accompanying an evil witch and her repulsive familiar through strange geometries onto alien worlds; there doesn't seem to be much room in either of Lovecraft's short stories to accommodate this film's plot about a sadistic madman who locks victims in a tomb and forces them to play sadistic games with their lives.

Note: This rating is not intended as a measure of quality, merely of how closely related to Lovecraftian "Weird" fiction the work is.

Reviews

Review Links:

• (review needed)

Synopsis

 Spoiler Section (Highlight to Read)

A film-maker makes a low-budget "torture porn" film about a being known as "The Puppetmaster", who holds victims captive in a tomb and tortures them, and claims this film bears no resemblance whatsoever to a completely different film about a being known as "Jigsaw", who holds victims captive in a tomb and tortures them, but instead was inspired by a randomly-selected public-domain work of a randomly-selected famous horror author; the film-maker then forces an audience to play a sadistic "game" in which they choose between watching this film, or getting tortured to death....

Notes

Associated Mythos Elements

• TO DO
• race: Human Cultist(?) (more like a vaguely Satanic-themed rip-off of "Jigsaw" from the Saw torture/slasher franchise)
• fiction: allegedly based on H.P. Lovecraft's "The Tomb (fiction)" and/or "Dreams in the Witch House (fiction)"
• locations: The Tomb and the Witch House from Lovecraft's stories are mentioned briefly
• characters: the names Richard Upton Pickman and Charles Dexter Ward (who have nothing to do with either of the two stories this film was allegedly based on) seem to have been mentioned somewhere in the film