Proudly ridiculous mash-up of H.P. Lovecraft with a hardboiled private eye story. It doesn’t go too deep into either. The Lovecraft references amount to little more than in-jokes and the film’s Raymond Chandler inflections play out as light parody. The setting is an alternate 1940s Los Angeles where magic is more popular than Benny Goodman and Lucky Strike cigarettes combined. Everybody’s into it. Everybody except Fred Ward, at least. He’s a Phillip Marlowe type hired to find a stolen Necronomicon and he runs up against two contrasting femme fatales just like in The Big Sleep. This thing went straight to cable because not many others in the movie business are gonna touch something with this many screws loose.