Glorious

  Where you wondering what to watch the next time your in-laws are in town? How about Glorious, the heartwarming tale of a man whose whole life is upended when he is trapped in a bathroom with an eldritch being who communicates with him through a gloryhole? He lives, he learns, and maybe, if he plays his cards right, he'll get a blowjob from an elder god. That's one way to lose your mind and end up in an asylum, I guess.

 Wes (Ryan Kwanten) has just gone through a messy split with his girlfriend Brenda (Sylvia Grace Crim) and is living off his car, like a less hairy version of Macon Blair in Blue Ruin. After a bender outside a rest stop, he stumbles into the toilets to kneel before the porcelain throne; There he strikes an awkward conversation with the congenial gentleman (he assumes) locked in the next stall over. The cubicles are connected by the aforementioned gloryhole, adorned with a pretty off-putting picture of a lady with some extra bits. Not to kink-shame all you tentacle enthusiasts out there; You know who you are.

 Ahem. The gentleman is played by none other than the great J. K. Simmons, and while unfailingly polite and friendly, he does have some hangups about Wes getting a look into his stall... or leaving the bathroom, for the matter; And as it turns out, he can enforce both preferences with magical powers. He quickly reveals that he's some sort of trans-dimensional all-powerful being named Gathanatoa, and he needs to avert some sort of cataclysm with Wes's help.

 It's a Weird (as in Weird Fiction) as well as a weird (as in willfully fucking weird) chamber piece, and gets a lot of mileage out of its batshit premise as well as from a few extremely funny jokes. Despite an extremely low budget and a script tailored for a shot during COVID isolation, there's some effective gore, some appropriately weird imagery, and a fair amount of imagination on display.

 The problem is that, for such a character-driven piece, the protagonist is pretty damn weak. Most of the specifics of the character's situation, at least for the first stretch, are pretty generic, and while director Rebekah McKendry tries to add some style to the proceeds, her attempts also come off as slightly generic. What's worse, the script doesn't give Wes many convincing lines - much of his muttering seems both writerly and generic at the same time - and I am absolutely not a fan of Kwanten's acting here.

 I really wanted to like the movie more than I did. There's not a lot of cosmic horror out there that's... well, as out there as this, and the jokes that land are pretty damn funny. As with most of these things it leans more towards comedy, but Wes's situation does get fairly horrific once what's really required of him is finally revealed. Simmons is, of course, a treat, and there's a good spread of weird visuals that are effective even as they drive home how little money the production had to work with.

 But even as the Lovecraftian madness is fully unleashed, there are as many misses as there are hits. I would recommend it overall, but it's a very flawed movie.

 Rebekah McKendry also wrote and directed All The Creatures Were Stirring, a movie I'm happy to report I remember now better for its bright spots than its sour notes. The screenplay here is by Joshua Hull and David Ian McKendry (who also co-wrote and co-directed All The Creatures...) based on a short story by Todd Rigney.

 Gathonatoa comes from a tale by Hazel Heald, revised by H.P. Lovecraft. The film alludes extremely obliquely to the short story, and is perfectly happy to wander off in a direction which the original authors never intended - par for the course with Mythos adaptations, really. I vaguely remembered the monster, but only as a bit player in the Call of C'thulu roleplaying game; Had to look him up to remember what he was all about.
 No offense, Gat - you're all right.