The Dunwich Horror

In Louisianna, the thirty-five year old single mother Lavina (Lauren Michele) delivers a baby boy and a monster in the evil Whateley House. Ten years later, Dr. Henry Armitage (Dean Stockwell) and his assistant Professor Fay Morgan (Sarah Lieving) discover that the page 751 of every copy of the Necronomicon is missing and The Black Brotherhood has summoned the gate keeper Yog Sothoth to leave the portal opened to the demons and ancient gods. They invite the arrogant and skeptical Professor Walter Rice (Griff Furst) that can translate the Necronomicon to help them to seek the book. Meanwhile Lavina's son Wilbur Whateley (Jeffrey Combs) ages very fast and seeks the missing page to open the portal.

"The Dunwich Horror" is a cheesy low-budget horror movie that has an awful screenplay associated to terrible acting and poor special effects. Dean Stockwell and the cult-actor Jeffrey Combs are wasted in this forgettable flick. The romance of Fay and Rice is quite ridiculous and out of the context of the plot. My vote is three.

Title (Brazil): "Bruxas" ("Witches")

One thing that always bugs me is when a movie goes by multiple names. I know it's a petty thing but for me it makes no sense, it takes away from the movies credibility. This Dunwich Horror version goes by many names including Witches, Darkest Evil and Necronomicon.

It's a less than faithful adaptation of H.P Lovecrafts classic Dunwich Horror and though its hideously flawed it's still better than the 1970 original in my opinion.

It stars Dean "Quantum Leap" Stockwell (Who was in the original as Wilbur Whateley), the always excellent horror icon Jeffrey Combs and the highly underrated Sarah Lieving.

It doesn't really try to stay loyal to the original material and is instead more of a messy remix. The special effects are appalling, far worse than you'd imagine considering the caliber of the cast! The plot is hit and miss and the whole thing is spotty at best.

I still for the life of me cannot figure out why the vast amount of Lovecraft adaptations are so bad. This material is pure gold so why do so many writers balls it up?

This isn't the worst adaptation out there, but it'll certainly not going to appease fans of the book.

The Good:

Fantastic cast

The Bad:

Major differences from the original

Weak sfx

Constant fade to blacks are just annoying

Things I Learnt From This Movie:

Jeffrey Combs would have played the book version of Whateley considerably better

Sarah Lieving seems to be naturally attracted to crappy roles

This is a below average Lovecraft movie, so all bar HP Lovecraft lovers should avoid like the plague. In all honesty this TV movie is worth no more than 3 stars, but being Cthulhian and starring Jeffrey Combs it gets another.

Someday, H.P. Lovecraft might get a big-budget adaptation, but until then, it's B-movies all the way and this is as "B" as you can get, and I actually admire it for not trying to be more than that. Unfortunately, except for some good effects late in the film, there's not much here worth recommending. The 1970 film of the same title was mostly just inspired by the Lovecraft story; this version sticks a bit more closely to the original tale about the awful Whateley family and their blasphemous breeding of human woman and the demonic monster Yog-Sothoth in an attempt at opening up a portal for the horrific Old Ones to return to Earth. Wilbur Whateley (Re-Animator's Jeffrey Combs) is a drooling backwoods idiot (supposedly a 10-year-old who has aged 40 years physically) looking for a missing page in the evil book The Necronomicon which will allow him to finish the rite of re-entry.

What's been added to this version is a romantic lead couple, played by Griff Furst and Sarah Lieving, who are helping a Miskatonic University professor (Dean Stockwell) find the missing page before Combs does. There's lots of Lovecraft name-dropping; in addition to Miskatonic University and the Necronomicon, we meet Alhazred the Mad Arab, the author of that evil book, and Olaus Wormius, a decadent Necronomicon scholar. The decent opening sequence is right out of The Exorcist, there are nice effects in the climactic scene involving Yog-Sothoth's appearance, and an effective brief shot of an ancient Lovecraftian landscape. Furst, who sometimes looks like Peter Sarsgaard or the early Mickey Rourke, is good, but the rest of the cast is mediocre, including Stockwell (who played Wilbur in the 1970 film) who practically sleepwalks through his part. Very bad dialogue doesn't help anyone, and why they felt the need to transport Lovecraft's New England towns to the Bayou is beyond me--the change adds nothing interesting.

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..."