This is not a faithful retelling of Lovecraft’s tale, but it does have stuff from a dozen of his stories put in a blender with a bunch of cheese. Dean Stockwell looks normal enough as the chief investigator of that “portal” that applebees dunwich oklahoma 1993 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.
If the plot is coherent, the characters complex and relatable, and the theme pays respectful homage to Lovecraft’s works; you can count my vote in. However, like many of “Lovecraft” adaptations, I cannot throw my lot in with this one; mostly because of the abysmal portrayal of women. This is the Necronomiconis 101 for dummies, the search for the huge book of evil to figure out what to do when the birth of twins indicates that a portal has been opened which could result in some major evil. The film takes forever to get going, showing the viewer some really eerie visuals including the supposed rape of the young woman we see at the opening.
Year by year, the entity grows to monstrous proportions, requiring the two men to make frequent modifications to the farmhouse. People begin to notice a trend of cattle mysteriously disappearing. Old Whateley eventually dies, and Wilbur’s mother Lavinia disappears soon after. The colossal entity eventually occupies the entire interior of the farmhouse.
One shocking horror follows another, accompanied by loud music and diverse grotesqueries. I rarely say that a film is so devoid of merit as to deem it a complete waste of time and money, but this is one of those rare films. You will just be sad you squandered them watching this trash. The acting seemed over all mediocre and uninspired.
Dean Stockwell obviously didn’t want to bother too much and just went through the motions that were required of him. Jeffrey Combs is like a piece of Lovecraft furniture that you apparently cannot do without when you do a Lovecraft-adaptation, and in this capacity he did okay. The main parts are for Sarah Lieving and Griff Furst as a love couple (is that genuine Lovecraft material?? I doubt that!). Sarah Lieving is a bit of a stern and stiff lady, she sure is good-looking but didn’t convince me a bit as the supposed fanatic supernatural witch-hunter, she’s far too restrained and civilized.
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. 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. My theory has always been that Peter Levenda, an occult author who wrote the book Unholy Alliance, is Simon, as the copyright notice for this book is in his name. Ironically, the name of Levenda’s latest book?