• Written and directed by C. Courtney Joyner, based on the story by H.P. Lovecraft
• Starring
  • John Finch
  • Blake Bailey
  • Ashley Lauren (aka Ashley Laurence)
  • Jeffrey Combs
  • Allison Mackie
• Produced by Vlad and Oana Paunescu
• Executive produced by Charles Band

Were I still able to be stunned by irony (instead of the jaded and calloused reviewer that I have become), such sentiments might be aroused by this fact: That of the three movies based on or inspired by H.P. Lovecraft’s story “The Lurking Fear,” the one which advertises that fact in its title is the least faithful to the story or themes of the original. In fact, outside of the title and the surname “Martense,” the casual viewer would be unable to discover any connection between the short story and the movie beyond the very general plot device of hostile subterranean humanoids, an idea which is scarcely unique to Lovecraft. Whether he realized the tenuous literary connection or not, said casual viewer would be very aware that, whatever its genesis, this movie sucks like an Electrolux.

The opening scene sets the stage in more ways than one: It’s night, lightning flashes over the Lefferts Corner graveyard, and in a nearby house, Cathryn (Ashley Laurence, credited here as “Ashley Lauren”), dressed in dowdy reserve, and her sister Leigh (Ilinca Goia — guess which actress was dubbed in post-production?) are arguing over… something. Leigh wants to protect her baby against an Ominous Evil which they both know about and thus don’t need to explain to each other, and insists that they each carry handguns. But she flatly opposes any of Cathryn’s suggestions that they just up and leave. Why? Because she is a puppet creature to the Great God PLOT, and will thus behave senselessly and arbitrarily for the good of the contrived story machinations. Get used to it; every character in this movie will sooner or later make obeisance to the Great God PLOT.

It isn’t just heroes that get to crawl through spacious air ducts.

Anyway, in the middle of the night, something inside the wall with white, clawed hands pushes off the boards covering the heater vent and uses a twelve-foot hoat hanger to wheel the baby’s crib closer to it. The women burst in just in time, and Cathryn manages to save the baby, but Leigh is dragged bloodily into the hole in the wall.

Fast-forward an intermittent length of time, to the day when young John Martense (Blake Bailey) gets out of prison. Yes, he has differently-colored eyes. Enjoy it; this is exactly the only reference which will be made anywhere in this movie to the “punchline” of Lovecraft’s original. John, as the intermittent and heavy-handed voiceover informs us, has just finished five years for a crime he didn’t commit, although his dead father was a career criminal, and everyone he knows is on the wrong side of the law. His first stop after leaving prison is the funeral home run by Knaggs (Vincent Schiavelli!), an old friend of his father’s who’s been holding something for him: A map. Or half a map, rather. To a graveyard where Dad stowed the ill-gotten gains from his last heist. A graveyard in Lefferts Corner.

Now, it just so happens that they day that John Martense gets out of jail and goes seeking his inheritance is the very day that Cathryn is ready to take revenge on the whatsits that killed her sister. (And whatever happened to the baby? Dunno. It’s never alluded to again.) Since that night in the pre-credits scene, Cathryn has gone from Little House on the Prairie to The A-Team; her hair is shorter, she’s traded in her long gingham dress for tight black commando leotards, and acts completel badass. Even wears dogtags to complete the ensemble; she’s a One-Woman Army! Her accomplice is Dr. Haggis (Jeffrey Combs with a full beard), the chain-smoking general practitioner with a broken spirit and a weakness for the booze. And their plan tonight is to use four cases of old dynamite to blow up the cemetery and the ground around it, once the evening thunderstorm brings them closer to the surface.

“I swear, this is completely sanitary. Trust me.”

It boggles my mind that Lefferts Corner has a doctor of its own, even one who practices in an abandoned building with boarded-up windows, as he and Cathryn seem to a large fraction of the total population. In addition to those two, we also meet a young pregnant woman in Haggis’ care; there’s also Father Poole (Paul Mantee), who presides over the small church in the middle of the cemetary which is far, FAR too Eastern Orthodox to be the chapel of a small New England town, and a male and female pair of locals with claw marks down their faces. We also see a single little boy wearing an odd mask on the streets of whatever abandoned Romanian town stood in for Lefferts Corner. And as far as we ever discover, that’s it. Maybe all of the other standoffish residents simply make as habit of barricading themselves inside whenever occasion permits. Or possibly, the six remaining citizens are those who were lucky enough not to be killed yet, but too stupid to leave.

We do get a few more warm bodies, though, in a trio of criminals who originally possessed the money that John’s dad stole: Bennett (Jon Finch) is a Brit crimelord, Pierce (Joseph Leavengood) is a moustachioed thug, and Ms. Marlowe (Allison Mackie) is a bizarro feministe fatale who does this weird love/hate thing with men. They kill Knaggs in his funeral parlor, then trail John out to Lefferts Corner. Because really, nothing says “eldritch horror” like mobsters. Right?

“You know, a single moment like this could color our whole relationship.”

So Cathryn’s planned destruction of the tunnels gets delayed because the mobsters come in with guns out and defuse the main switch, and their retrieval of the money is delayed by everyone’s ignorance as to which grave it’s buried in, and in between the arguing and swearing and waving of guns pretty much everyone hangs out in the nave of the small church, right around the boarded-over hole in the floor where the nasty things are known to come out.

Ah, the nasty things. I will readily admit, the makeup on the one or two subterranean dwellers who aren’t just done with full head masks is pretty decent, with their white “cave fish” eyes and inbred-to-nothing features. But no makeup job looks good when seen in a closeup distinct enough even on VHS to reveal the individual brush strokes of paint on latex and the dry plastic of the ping-pong ball eyes. And the white eyes both destroy the punchline of the Lovecraft original and render pointless John’s dissimilar eyes, established in his first scene. In fact, we later have invented for us a “Martense birthmark” (hereditary birhmarks? Whatever) to connect John to the tunnel-dwelling mutants.

Wait — if they’ve got those white cavedweller eyes, what’s with all the candles?

Because John’s one of them. Sort of. I mean, he’s a Martense and they’re Martenses, though how far back his normal lineage split off from the tunnel dwellers is never indicated; we see John’s father in flashback, and he’s certainly not a noseless albino with bulging eyes, so how John’s connection to the nasty creatures matters is left for us to sketch in. Heck, according to the locals, the underground clan has been terrorizing Lefferts Corner for “the last twenty years,” so how this is supposed to tie in to the idea of a bizarrely inbred clan living in tunnels beneath the cemetery for generations is also left unresolved.

All of which might have been at least potentially forgiveable if the main action of the story were engaging enough to distract us from the nonsensical backstory. But it’s not. People argue over guns, and each side has its turn in charge of the standoff, but mostly it seems that most of the scenes are stalling, simply dragging their feet until the final explosions and closing credits. It’s not a wise move to have several scenes near the end in which the characters themselves are sitting around waiting (for Cathryn to drive back the gasoline truck to torch the tunnels, which was part of the plan all along, so why she planned to wait until the last minute to go get the truck is beyond me), puffing their cheeks and fidgeting. When even the characters are showing their boredom, it’s a good bet that the audience is even less engaged.

“Nasssty hobbitsessss…”

It’s a movie so arbitrary and contrived in its story line that barely a scene goes by without demonstrating some kind of disconnect in the narrative. Setups and foreshadowing that never amount to anything (why does Cathryn point out at the beginning that their dynamite is leaking nitro if it’s never brought up again?), dialogue that seems more like two people talking past each other in a string of non sequiturs… Nowhere is there the horror that makes “The Lurking Fear” one of Lovecraft’s most effective stories. Nowhere is there any sign of the merits of the original which would have made a movie version worth filming.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 8
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 17
• ominous thunderstorms: 2
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 2
  • Jeffrey Combs (Frank Taggert) is a Star Trek mainstay, playing recurring characters “Weyoun” and “Brunt” on DS9, plus “Detective Mulcahey” in the episode “Far Beyond the Stars”; “Penk” on the Voyager episode “Tsunkatse”; and the recurring character “Commander Shran” on Enterprise
  • Vincent Schiavelli (Knaggs) played the holographic “Peddler” in the TNG episode “The Arsenal of Freedom”