Touches You

The Age of Commercialism

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

I can imagine the frustration of Hollywood producers trying to transmute a rich and reputed mythos into money by using the same old recipes that work for any other concept and failing miserably in the case of Lovecraft. But they have to try.Such an attempt is this adaptation of the short story with the same name. They start with the wise and nutty professor and his sexy assistant, join forces with an unbeliever and proceed through bad CGI to make him believe before he can use the knowledge that he already had to defeat the monster that had no chance to win in the first place. Yeah, the script is a mess, especially considering that The Dunwich Horror is one of the more classically good vs evil Lovecraft stories.However, that doesn't mean the film cannot be entertaining. As a nod to the 1970 version, Dean Stockwell plays again for the good team, while Jeffrey Combs is a really convincing Wilbur. The horror of the possible opening of the portal to the Old Ones is rendered well, yet everything else is cheesy in a "let's make some money" way that disgusts me. Yog-Sothoth take all money grabbing Hollywood people! I hated the entire useless romantic liaison added, as well as the "team" aspect that never existed in the original material and was put here only to standardize the story to something the public is used to.Bottom line: in the end, the Lovecraft aspect of the film is minimal, even if they kept the general plot of the story. It is the soul that they couldn't grasp. And it is strange, too, as Lovecraft is usually tending to the needs of the superego, distressed by "unnatural" events or beings; it should be easy to put that into a movie. I just don't think they get it! You need to make your viewers feel dirty inside for watching the film. That's the actual point of Lovecraft stuff!

It opens with a childbirth at home. The light is eerie. We see a woman in bed screaming horribly while she stares at her swollen belly. The attendants goggle as parturition proceeds. The camera pans around, never holding still. The cuts are instantaneous. A glistening black snake crawls up an attendant's arm.The rest of the movie -- as much of it as I was able to bear before an attack of restless legs syndrome set in -- follows the same template. There is hardly a pause for ordinary conversation. One shocking horror follows another, accompanied by loud music and diverse grotesqueries.There's a rural family involved. They all have bizarre appearances. The family head sits there cackling while skinning some kind of black-furred animal, maybe a cat or a skunk. A whirligig of a woman is bald except for a long fringe of blond hair.Dean Stockwell looks normal enough as the chief investigator of that "portal" that opened up during the childbirth. Stockwell was the chief investigator of a previous version of "The Dunwich Horror", filmed some thirty or forty years earlier. His assistant, Sarah Lieving, is pretty and thoroughly glamorized. I imagine she'll wind up strapped to a table in some dank cellar. There is a snooty expert on the mysterious Necromicon, a book that contains the spell that opens and closes "portals." He's pretty normal too, although he is, as I say, kind of disdainful and snooty. I hope he gets sacrificed.I've sometimes puzzled over H. P. Lovecraft, who wrote this tale, along with other stories of horror, fantasy, and science fiction. Edgar Allan Poe had a theory of literature -- throw everything else out the window and go for the effect. Logic counts for nothing. Imagine Poe and Alfred Hitchcock chatting about this. But H. P. Lovecraft seems to have taken this theory to its extreme. In one of his stories, nothing happens except that a guy wakes up in some underground chamber and finds his way to the surface. It's spooky but there is no substance to it.This movie stinks, a pointless exercise in ominousness and computer-generated effects. Any successful horror story begins in more or less placid normality and works its way into the abnormal. Look at "The Exorcist" or "Rosemary's Baby" or "The Shining" for good examples. Well, I'll mention Val Lewton's work at RKO in passing. This one begins with junk and, I expect, ends the same way.Recommended for self-haters, the guilt-ridden, those recently emerged from an eremetic existence, the irretrievably mad, and toddlers who have never seen a movie before.

If you put Dunwich in your title and add Witches to it then you are sure that it will sell. And when one old horror is already titles The Dunwich Horror then some people will think it's a remake. But not alone that, if you use the word Necronomicom then you automatically think of Lovecraft. And knowing that Lovecraft's short story The Dunwich Horror lays in the public domain, well, hell breaks loose (no pun intended). The acting is okay, we do have some well known names, Jeffrey Combs (re-animator), Dean Stockwell (The Dunwich Horror 1970) and Griff Furst. But names are not enough. From the start you know this is going to be so badly wrong. The possessed one, well, she just has colored contact lenses. Then she gets CGI wings. It's cold in the room, remember Exorcist. Her voice, remember Evil Dead, the pyramid is some kind of puzzle box, remember Hellraiser. But what makes this flick a turkey is one of the worst CGI that I have seen for a modern horror. Sparks shooting from fingers, soooooooooo eighties, It never was scary or bloody. It's just about incantations. well, do I have an incantation:"go away bad movie go away..."

Initially I was kind of excited to see that Jeffrey Combs was in the movie, so it was with some anticipation that I sat down to watch it. And I am a huge fan of H. P. Lovecraft's work and all the Lovecraftian work that followed in his wake. This movie, however, was somewhat of a lukewarm attempt, to be bluntly honest.The story does stay fairly close to the story of the Whateley's as Lovecraft initially built it up, but at the same time there is a bit too much other loose ends thrown into the frame. Ends that are never really seen through and come full circle. In that way, there is a lot of things going on in the movie, too many things in my opinion, and most of these things doesn't really get to be concluded."The Dunwich Horror" suffered from a fairly weak acting crew, with most performances being mediocre to look at. Had they managed to put more enthusiastic people into the movie, it would have come out with a more vibrant and appealing result. And the dialogue didn't really help lift up the movie, because it was halting and at times embarrassing to witness.What did work for the movie was Jeffrey Combs, of course. As always it is nice to see him in a Lovecraft-inspired movie. And his name is usually associated with such. Unfortunately, his character wasn't given enough on-screen time. "The Dunwich Horror" is not one of Comb's more impressive performances, but being a fan of his, I just had to sit through this movie. And aside from Combs, then the core essence of the Whateley's was also pretty nicely interpreted.There was a bit too much name-dropping in the movie, with lots of references to places, people and such in the Lovecraft-created Cthulhu mythos. But most of this was irrelevant, and seemed to be put in there only to impress the really hardcore Lovecraft fans, people who are familiar with these names. To other people, it is just a bunch of random and pointless facts. The reference to (August) Derleth was, however, a bit surprising.As for the effects and CGIs in "The Dunwich Horror", well, they were low-budget, and it was showing clearly. Hats off to them for their effort, just a shame that they didn't have a bigger budget for these effects. There were some shots where Yog Sothoth actually looked rather nice. So the effects weren't all bad. The storms that ravaged the buildings, well that is a whole other story. You have to see that to believe it!In my honest opinion, then this adaption (or interpretation) of "The Dunwich Horror" is not really one of the better Lovecraft-based pieces of work around. Sadly, most of these movies are B-movies and often fail to leave impressions in the viewers. This is one such movie, which is a shame, because it had potential. Had they trimmed down the plot-lines and put in some more whole-hearted actors, the outcome would have been much better and would have had a chance to actually become noteworthy.