The White Monster

This movie is scary at sometimes, but at other times it's gory. I just love the gore murders! They're pretty cool! You get a ripped-out throat, decapitated body, broken neck and more! See this film if you're looking for some gore!

If I start writing all that's wrong with this movie, it would be faster for you to watch the movie and make your own conclusions than to read my review. So, I'll just make a few notes about what's good in it:

• The movie is based on H.P. Lovecraft and, although this is one of the worst adaptations, Lovecraft is still Lovecraft, and it is very hard to destroy it so much to be unwatchable.

• Dancer Katrin Alexandre and team that takes credits for the look of The Unnamable did an excellent job and made one of the best monsters in the history of cinematography. Unfortunately, it's shown in its full glory just briefly.

• Few moments of naked Laura Albert.

Everything else is mediocre and boring, so I recommend this only to the most hardcore fans of Lovecraft and '80s B-production horrors. For the rest of average audience this is just another crap.

5/10

I have heard some people say that H.P. Lovecraft's works are unfilmable. I guess that I would say that they did a worthy job with "The Unnamable", but aside from the fact that another movie with a grotesque monster's property getting invaded by horny teens seems a little silly, the people here can't really act (well duh; these movies don't star Katharine Hepburn). Particularly laughable is the line "You're very brave." And if you remember the rules laid out in "Scream", you can guess which people survive here.

So, this is pretty much a way to pass time. For better efforts at filming Lovecraft stories, there's "Die Monster Die!" and "The Dunwich Horror".

Howard Philipps Lovecraft was a remarkable author, and it's often an acquired taste to enjoy many of his stories. It's my opinion that the duller the original Lovecraft story, the more entertaining the film, and vice versa.

This story is middle-of-the-road, and so is the film. It bears all the hallmarks of a standard 1980s horror film, but it has little allusions and touches that those who read Lovecraft would be familiar with would be entertained by. In-jokes, if you will.

The original story was relatively short, and expanding it to feature length probably required the mortising in of the standard horror elements found in 1980s type films. There have been some pretty good films that use these elements -- Pumpkinhead springs to mind -- that even if this film uses those elements, that shouldn't detract from the overall story.

Students from Miskatonic University pay a visit to an abandoned old house that, as legend has it, was once home to a creature so ugly that it was dubbed 'The Unnamable'. Surprise, surprise... the monster is still there, trapped by a magic spell cast by its father, and it's not a happy bunny!

After the success of Re-animator and From Beyond, H. P. Lovecraft was hot property. The Unnamable is based one of the horror author's short stories, which is padded out to feature length by lots of aimless wandering around the film's spooky house by the protagonists. The filler material is rather pedestrian, but director Jean-Paul Ouellette livens things up sporadically with some gnarly gore (best moments: a juicy torn throat, and a mangled body falling to the floor, brains spilling from its open cranium) and a spot of nudity (courtesy of Laura Albert, as freshman hottie Wendy), all guaranteed to keep the audience watching until the final reveal of the monster, which looks a lot better than I had expected given how long it had remained hidden: with vicious fangs, wings, and horns, and a natty pair of cloven Ugg boots for good measure, it's a creepy looking creature that is worth the wait.

The fun ending sees bookish student Randolph Carter (Mark Kinsey Stephenson) reading from the Necronomicon (which just happens to be lying around the house) to invoke tree spirits that defeat the monster, allowing fellow students Howard Damon (Charles Klausmeyer) and Tanya Heller (Alexandra Durrell) to escape from the house.