• Written and directed by Jean-Paul Ouellette, based on stories by H.P. Lovecraft
• Starring
  • Mark Kinsey Stephenson
  • Charles Klausmeyer
  • Maria Ford
  • John Rhys-Davies
  • Julie Strain

A review in a moment, but first a rant about the state of Lovecraft in the movies:

Adapting Lovecraft to the screen is an uphill battle for the best of talent (who rarely try their hand at it). Lovecraft eschewed characterization and had a tin ear for dialog, so neither show up in his stories; and the cosmic horror which he tried (and sometimes succeeded) in expressing just doesn’t portray well visually. (Both of the Unnamable films prove this well — anyone go insane from seeing the creature? I thought not.)

To fill all the spaces, then, Hollywood usually adds the standard b-movie stuff — horny college students, cops chasing the creature, etc. (Worst filler in a Lovecraft movie: mobsters in The Lurking Fear. Mobsters?!? “Yeah, that’s what’s always been missing from Lovecraft — organized crime.”) Most often, allusions and cues are loaded in — Arkham, the Necronomicon, Cthulhu and the other Old Ones are all referenced. It’s the rare director who can even discern some of the haunting subtext that Lovecraft was truly obsessed with: ancestral guilt, humanity’s tinyness on the scale of space and time, and the utter alienness of the world once our preconceived paradigms are stripped away.

In fact, the best (in my opinion) Lovecraft adaptation is not actually based on anything Lovecraft actually wrote, but synthesizes those factors which Lovecraft truly found frightening: Castle Freak.

Now, on to this movie. I had a glimmer of hope, because the subtitle (aside from making this the most ungainly title since Return of the Living Dead Part 2) referenced one of Lovecraft’s shorter and (to my mind) most effective stories — one in which allusion replaces explanation, where the unknown remains unknown.

Apparently, this movie picks up right where the first one leaves off: A bunch of Miskatonic University students have been exploring the old Winthrop house in Arkham and been attacked by an “unnamable” creature, actually Joseph Winthrop’s daughter, possessed by a demon for 300 years. As we open, the police are cleaning up the bodies and tossing evidence around with reckless abandon; the only two survivors are the uninjured Carter (Mark Kinsey Stephenson) and his injured friend Howard (who not only switched actors but full names between movies — Howard Damon in the first one becomes Eliot Damon Howard in this one).

As they cart Howard off to the hospital, Carter hides on his stretcher the big ol’ copy of the Necronomicon he found in the old house, and apparently Howard is an amazing amateur magician, because he kept the book undiscovered from the stretcher to the examination room to his hospital bed.

But Howard is visited by the spirit of Joseph Winthrop, who pleads with him to destroy the thing that once was his daughter Alyda.

Carter tracks down Professor Warren (John Rhys-Davies), the folklore expert, shows him the Necronomicon, convinces him to join the expedition, and together the three of them head out to explore the tunnels beneath the abandoned cemetery next to the Winthrop house. (This is of course the premise of the story “The Statement of Randolph Carter,” although you should notice that in the movie, it’s Carter and the professor who venture into the tunnels, leaving Howard aboveground with the intercom.)

Beneath the earth, in the well-lit fiberglass tunnels (has any set designer ever been in a tunnel? They’re missing a great opportunity to induce claustrophobia and panic; these and most other Hollywood tunnels are about as menacing as the average living room), Carter and the professor discover the creature, trapped by the treeroots that ended her rampage at the end of the previous movie. Through some hokey quantum physics explanations and the unlikely provenance of the professor having brought a small but high-powered microscope along, they determine that two creatures are occupying the same space: daughter Alyda and some demonic creature. To separate them (why?), the professor injects the critter with his handy-dandy insulin, causing the demon to flee as the body goes into shock. (Huh? That’s what I thought too.) Ta-dah! The resulting daughter is the ubiquitous Maria Ford, naked but covered by a brunette Lady Godiva wig. They release her from the roots by the Necronomicon and take her to the surface — but the demon is still around, and kills the professor; it seems it must be joined to Alyda to survive.

Now, the creature is a good six feet tall, and obviously female. Who do you think they got to play the role under a hefty latex suit? None other than everyone’s favorite amazon, Julie Strain! Talk about taking a break from seductress roles…

Anyway. The rest of the movie is an interminable chase as Carter and Howard get Alyda back to Miskatonic campus and try to find the missing pages from the Necronomicon somewhere in the library. The creature follows, and gives us the necessary body count; the cops show up, and vainly try to hunt it through the library; the sheriff does a bad imitation of Tim Thomerson (think about that a moment)…

No, I’m not going to tell you how it ends!

A couple of glaring technical mistakes: The styrofoam “stone” shudders all around the professor during his death throes; the seam of the gloves on the creature suit is about as apparent as a Frankenstein scar; and during one scene when the creature unfurls its wings and flies across the atrium of the library, the pulley assembly on the ceiling is clearly visible.

I HATE cars that don’t start for no reason. Hate ‘em.

In the final analysis, this movie is only Lovecraftian in its trappings — there’s no real sense of dread, cosmic or otherwise, in a 45-minute chase scene. And the missing pages of the Necronomicon (the movie’s McGuffin) don’t even figure into the final scene.

I’ve seen worse Lovecraft films (there are always worse), but I’ve also seen better.