The Dunwich Horror (1970)

Young, hot Wilbur Whateley (young, hot Dean Stockwell – not necessarily something you get to write every day) comes to the Arkham University Library to borrow the Necronomicon. He’s got Nancy Wagner (Sandra Dee), one of the student assistants of the place, charmed/hypnotized right quick, but head librarian Dr. Armitage (Ed Begley) is particularly protective of that tome. Supposedly, it provides a way to ensure the return of the Old Ones, a superior race that ruled Earth long before mankind, and though Armitage doesn’t exactly believe in these things, he does think the book could be rather dangerous.

While Wilbur isn’t getting the book, he does manage to convince Nancy to drive him to his home in Dunwich, where he can better drug, hypnotize and talk her into becoming a sacrifice to the Old Ones. Or just the new mother of the inhuman race.

Lovecraft’s tales have always been seen as particularly difficult to adapt, but I’ve always thought that especially The Dunwich Horror, with its often decidedly pulpy tenor, would be one of the easier stories to adapt.

AIP must have thought the same, and most of the changes made by the script – by Curtis Hanson, Henry Rosenbaum and Ronald Silkosky – to Daniel Haller’s adaptation do make rather a lot of sense: sexing things up a little and putting proceedings firmly into the late 60s/early 70s are logical and sound decisions, at least.

However, the film then proceeds to shoot itself in the foot repeatedly. The acting is generally pretty bad, with Ed Begley (senior, that is) lacking the gravitas and conviction to make a proper counterpoint to Stockwell’s Whateley. Dee lacks any ability to project anything at all (or if she does, chooses not to show any of it), which, given that the script already has very little for her to do, turns Nancy into a complete absence where a person needed to be. Whereas Stockwell so overplays the camp of his role as written, he’s never believable as any kind of horror film villain.

Haller was a brilliant production designer and art director who was able to work wonders on a budget, but his directorial efforts all feel pedestrian, slow and lack any visual imagination, all things this film would have desperately needed to convince an audience to take any of this seriously. Instead of style, from time to time Vaseline or gauze is applied to a camera, and hippies dance, or the screen goes purple for some monster vision. Which simply isn’t enough.

Deep in the Darkness (2014)

Warning: spoilers ahead – though, frankly, the only surprise coming to you is how little thought the film puts into the little stuff like basic logic.

Dr. Michael Cayle (Sean Patrick Thomas), his wife Cristine (Kristen Bush) and their daughter Jessica (Athena Grant) are moving into one of these charming small towns US horror can’t live without. Not surprisingly, something is very wrong here. Not only isn’t cable TV allowed in town (though there’s internet and we never learn what these people think about satellite TV), the usual horror movie cell phone rules seem to apply and a curfew forbids one leaving one’s home after 8pm, there’s also the little thing with the cave-dwelling half-humans who have been controlling the town for centuries even though they’re clearly not very bright, number perhaps a couple dozens, and can’t even stand up to a former city doctor in a one-on-one fight. There’s also a bit of Innsmouth style “miscegenation” going on, it seems, but there doesn’t seem any immortality, riches or anything at all in it for the humans working with the stupidly named “isolates”, so I have no idea why anybody would put up with the monsters’ crap.

Anyway, exactly the stuff you’d expect after you’ve seen it in half a dozen other movies happens, there’s a twist ending that makes the motivations of one of the main characters absolutely inscrutable, and then an obvious invitation to a sequel that hopefully will never come.

So yeah, despite looking pretty good for its budget, decent acting, some minutes of Dean Stockwell, and a score that has ambitions to be in a much more lavish movie, Colin Theys’s Deep in the Darkness started to annoy me after a somewhat intriguing first twenty minutes or so. At that point, I was expecting the film to go somewhere interesting with its underground dwellers and the cult working for them, but it became increasingly clear nobody involved bothered to think anything about the plot through, or arguably, think at all. The poor cultists are so badly motivated, they don’t even have the old “they’re all crazy” excuse for what they do. Worse, the film never manages to establish the isolates as a credible threat. They’re mostly grubby, smallish people with silly glowing eyes who grunt a lot, and who have trouble winning physical confrontations with a doctor and his fists; Cthulhu knows what would happen to the poor bastards if somebody brought a gun or explosives.

Because the writing here is astonishingly lazy, there are no guns incoming, because our hero just happens to have some vials of ebola, bubonic plague and other viruses in his - completely unprotected from potential mass murderers and terrorists - office, and he’s so great at virology, he can cook up a ridiculously fast killing version of these in about five minutes. While we’re talking stupidity, this is also a film where having no car prevents you from fleeing crazy monster town even though said monsters only come out at night and the next town is supposed to be only two miles away. The script is full of this sort of nonsense, and barely a minute goes by where even someone like me who tends to be rather patient with this sort of thing can’t overlook the script’s complete unwillingness to make even a lick of sense.

And since Deep in the Darkness doesn’t have anything else to offer, there’s nothing to distract from its general dumbness nor any reason to put up with it.