Dark Heritage: The Final Descendant (1990)

Posted on Apr 11, 2007 under Horror |

Produced and directed by David McCormick
No writer credited (based, uncredited, on “The Lurking Fear” by H.P. Lovecraft)
Starring
- Mark LaCour
- Tim Verkaik
- Eddie Moore
- Joan Parmalee
- David Hatcher

Of the movies based on or inspired by Lovecraft’s story “The Lurking Fear” (the other two being 1994’s The Lurking Fear and 1997’s Bleeders), this one proves most faithful in terms of story events and structure. This despite no credit being given not only to Lovecraft for the original story, but even to whoever adapted and wrote the screenplay. Yet despite the fact that it follows most closely one of Lovecraft’s most cinematic short stories, it’s no more successful than the other two at making the adaptation work as a piece of cinema. In fact, once you factor in the problems inherent in it being a cheap independent production (largely related to a restrictive budget and an amateur cast), this version might prove the most inferior of the three. And that’s even more of an insult than it seems if you haven’t seen the other two movies.

From the outset, it’s clear that we’re going to be blending a healthy respect for the original short story with a grasp of human behavioral psychology gleaned almost entirely from previous bad horror films. Take, for example, the initial scene: A camper trailer in (what we later learn is) a public though secluded Louisiana campground at night as a thunderstorm rolls in. While the man cooks over the camper stove, the woman utters the line you never want to hear as the first words of dialogue in a movie: “I thought I heard something.” To keep his woman happy, the man sticks his head out the camper door, then declares that there’s nothing. When the woman starts becoming agitated and retroactively becomes more and more sure that she heard something, the man does not very sensibly point out to her that there are other campers around and a storm is rolling in so there’s no reason she shouldn’t hear something; no, he reluctantly grabs the flashlight and opens the door wider. Given the lead-up, it’s almost unfair to the man that she turns out to be right: A hideous something (seen only as a blue hand) guts him, then comes after her.

“Hey! Not on a first date!”

According to the next day’s news report, the entire campground was killed by mysterious somethings, with fewer than half of the 37 or so registered campers accounted for bodily. Armed with this information, newspaper editor Mr. Daniels (Eddie Moore), on orders from the publisher Mr. Jordan (whom we never see), gives the case to their crack investigative reporter, Clint Harrison (Mark LaCour). Mr. Jordan’s a man of many crackpot ideas, and his current one is that this massacre may have something to do with the abandoned Dansen estate, five miles from the campground, and that Clint should begin his investigation by spending the night at the old mansion. Above Mr. Daniels’ own misgivings, Clint happily accepts the assignment, along with two compatriots, Roger (Joe Jennings) and Daryl (Todd Leger) from the production department.

(Join me for a moment in pondering the reaction of Mr. Howard Philip Lovecraft, he of the bookish diction and a general disdain for all things degenerate and backwoodsy, to an adaptation of one of his pieces which features for protagonists a cadre of Deep South good ol’ boys.)

Clint and his compatriots drive and then hike to the old mansion, which is spooky and old and columned but, I’m sorry, it ain’t been abandoned for a hundred years as everyone says. If you’ve ever seen a house that’s been abandoned even for twenty years, you can imagine what a century of neglect would do to a building, especially in the moist South. This place has no animal spoor, no broken windows, no sagging floors, no flaked paint or crumbling plaster… in fact, none of the details which Lovecraft would have used to describe such a derelict mansion. Instead, there are a few pieces of serviceable furniture, some still with pristine sheets draped over them. At least, when the three see a bed in one of the rooms, they don’t immediately decide to sleep on it. That’s one of my pet peeves, you know.

Just imagine what would happen next if (a) these three were women, and (b) this movie were directed by Jim Wynorksi.

No, the three pick a room and set up, playing poker until the wee hours, at which point they take turns on watch for, like, whatever. With a videocamera running, to capture the whatever should it appear. And when thunder awakens Clint later in the night, he sees (a) the absence of both of his friends, (b) the tipped-over videocamera, and (c) a mysterious silhouette thrown on the wall by the lightning. He doesn’t stop to investigate the shadow; instead, he grabs the videotape that’s lying half-out of the smashed machine and runs for the hills.

Subsequent police investigation not only fails to uncover any sign of the two missing fellows, but can’t even find their gear or anything to indicate that the three had ever visited the house. The videotape only shows one of the missing men being dragged away by something unseen in front of the upended camera. Mr. Daniels decides that this would be a good time for Clint to take a couple of weeks off and ~~stew at home~~ try to forget all about things. Because that always works, right? Instead, Clint starts going through the special collections at the library for clues about the old Dansen place. That’s where he meets a couple of parapsychology grad students, Jack (Tim Verkaik) and Greg (David Hatcher), who are themselves looking into the old place as a basis for local folklore. Time to compare notes! Seems that the Dansen clan, after establishing themselves in the area a couple of centuries earlier, had become progressively more aloof from the locals until they cut themselves off sometime in the mid-1800s; it wasn’t until a decade or two later that someone realized they hadn’t seen any lights in the windows of the mansion for a while, and when they investigated, the place was empty. The Dansens had disappeared.

And then, time for a field trip! Out they go to the ill-fated campground. Only one sign of the tragedy hasn’t yet been hauled away by the police, a single camper trailer (in fact, the one from the prologue). The three men use it as a base of operations as they putter around with no idea what they’re looking for. When the evening brings yet another lightning storm, the three take shelter in the camper, watching out the windows and open door just in case whatever cast the silhouette that Clint saw at the house likes to caper about in the storm. But when the rain abates, they find that Greg, who was watching with his face out the door, is dead — his face gashed open!

Wait — where exactly was the lightning to cast a shadow like that?

This is, by the way, one of the most effective moments in the original short story; it’s not a technique Lovecraft ever mastered, but here at least he keeps the reader in the moment of the story, rather than always looking forward to the end with anticipation. So it’s good that these filmmakers retain the scene, even engineering things like the leftover camper in order to set the scene up. On the other hand, the succeeding scene, also taken from the story, doesn’t work nearly so well in the modified context: Clint and Jack decide to bury Greg out there to avoid inquiry. That kind of thing works when your setting is a backwoods community sixty years before and the individuals in question had only met a their individual investigations of the matter brought them together; it’s a lot harder to swallow when it’s the present day, the location is a campground, and one of the the people doing the burying is known to be the deceased’s best friend. I don’t think any questions are going to be avoided.

After a night of nightmares back in town, Clint and Jack meet up again to go after whatever got Greg. Jack’s idea is to find the gravesite of Eric Dansen, the fabled son who had left the family enclave for college and returned, not long before the disappearance, only to be killed by his kin with whom he didn’t reintegrate so well. Since the wronged ghost of Eric Dansen ha been a figure in local folklore, Jack’s idea is that his gravesite might have some connection to whatever killed Greg. So they locate the overgrown family plot in the woods, dig up an empty (though surprisingly intact) coffin, and discover beneath it a mysterious tunnel. (If I were feeling really snarky, I could say that the most mysterious thing about it was where its diggers had found the chickenwire to use as the visible structure under the paper-mache tunnel walls. But I’m feeling magnanimous today, so I’ll remember to delete this comment before posting.)

And in the tunnel, as yet another thunderstorm rages overhead, they meet… a something. A white-haired, blue-skinned something that is wisely kept barely seen (though not as barely seen as the characters let on). And as it backs away from them in the narrow tunnel, a lightning strike directly above them breaks the tunnel inward, and they have to crawl out to avoid being buried in the rain-driven mud. And once they see the mound left over where a tunnel breaks out, they realize that the small mounds of earth which they had taken to be “badger holes” all over the campground and forest are all signs of miles and miles of tunnelling all over.

Greg, displaying his pearly whites.

Since they are now in the middle of the woods on a rainy night, they find a spot under a tree for shelter, and in the morning go about presaging The Blair Witch Project, right down to crossing a stream instead of following it. Finally, by late in the day, they find a familiar landmark: The Dansen mansion. Shucks, might as well go in, especially because they’ve come to suspect that the tunnel system somehow converges on the mansion. And it’s here, finally, that we get a little bit of information that comes awfully late in the game, when they walk in and see the old painting of one of the Dansens still hanging on the wall. Jack points out the dissimilarly-colored eyes, which were a Dansen family trait. Um, could someone have thought of a way to introduce this tidbit sometime earlier than right before it’s supposed to lead to a shocking revelation?

That withheld fact is the reason that I’ve my plot description going to this point, which is about twenty minutes from the end of the movie. Although despite the general faithfulness to the original story displayed thus far, the ending of the movie is not the ending from the story. “The Lurking Fear” is, as I’ve said, one of Lovecraft’s better tales, and much more tempting to adapt (repeatedly) to the big screen. But it still relies on one of Lovecraft’s favorite literary tricks: Revealing some withheld detail in the final paragraph, the last piece of the Big Picture, even though the narrator or protagonist is technically aware of it earlier. That’s a lot harder to do in a movie, where we see largely what the characters see and do, and so some other climax needed to be devised here, one which involves adding a whole other branch to the Dansen family and having our “crack investigative reporter” be completely unobservant to his surroundings. I don’t want to spell it out further, not because of any respect for spoiling a hard-to-find movie that you’ll probably never see, but because they payoff in the end simply isn’t worth the effort to get there.

**“Boooooooooooo-gah.”**

While not intensely horrible, every element in this movie seems as if it’s trying to hang back from appearing any better than any other element. The acting is uniformly wooden and unskilled, as if “Because the director told me to” were the primary motivation for every character in every scene. The omission of any credited screenwriter is doubly counterintuitive, because this movie is far from ad-libbed; it’s very, very scripted, using diction and speech patterns which few people would ever let come from their mouths naturally. The cinematography is unimaginative and murky, and the editing seems to have forgotten how to get from A to B.

In other words, it’s a movie entirely made by well-meaning amateurs, who wanted to draw from and dramatize “The Lurking Fear” but had no idea how to do it well.