H. P. Lovecraft Ghouls Tomb Horrorwood ... But Bonely Works For Scales, Dagon It!

H.P. LOVECRAFT
(August 20, 1890 – March 15, 1937)

by
The Keeper of the Pit

Ah, the lazy, hazy daze of late scummer, uh, summer. Hi (90’s), gang, the Keeper here, sipping a ghoul one & sitting on Miranda. Er, my veranda. Oh, for a gibbous moon of fall. These nights the monster & I can only KEEP cool by calling some slaymates over for a midnight playing of THE DUNWICH HORROR soundtrack. Hmm, maybe we should call that Kathy chick…then the monster & I could really get into some meateater Showers!

Butt, I digest. Spooking of gibbous moons, August heat or snow, today (August 20th) marks the birthday of 1 of America’s most enduring horror writers, the redoubtable H.P. Lovecraft. Spurned by serious critics, beloved of pro horror writers from Bloch to King, Lovecraft has yet to be filmed by Horrorweird, uh, Hollywood with the cosmic dread he so deserves. In fact, most of the sinematic product debased on H.P. (scum would say those initials stood for Heap Pulpy!) have either so far botched, or even ignored his scarefully constructed Cthulhu Mythos, that it can be safe to say without digging too deep that said sad movies surely have ole Howard Phillips revolting in his grave! Before I start with my Pnak o’ tic-king people off, let’s list the Horrorweird Lovecraft product chronologi-killy by coffin up some titles!


1963: Midway through his Poe cycle at AIP, director Roger Corman mixed Poe’s commercial pull with HPL’s The Case of Charles Dexter Ward & concocted an odd brew indead. Uh, deed. Heavy on fog & loaded with cheap-o mutant make-up, THE HAUNTED PALACE boasts a fine horror cast: Vincent Price Arkhams it up nicely, Lon Chaney, Jr. bloats about looking like Dan Blocker (the monster sez maybe Lon thought Corman was shooting HOSS OF USHER), & Debra Paget does some fancy dangling over an unspeakably foul Pit. Hey, even though Corman’s Elder beast looks pretty ghouled in THAT pit, ole Deb can come to this Pit anyslime, uh, time. Allow me to be her dangling particiPANT!

1965: Director Daniel Haller left the Corman/Poe set duties long enuff to turn HPL’s The Colour Out of Space into a ghouled-looking but empty vehicle of the crashing kind for AIP called DIE, MONSTER, DIE! Fellow Pencilneckgeekian, I mean, Pennsylvanian Nick Adams wants to plow Susan Farmer, but family Elder Boris Karloff doesn’t carrot all for the idea & wood rather he’d leaf. Something from one of dose meateater Showers is turning relatives into shambling kooks, & it’s only a matter of slime before we learn what lurks in the greenhouse is not that witch AIP wanted us at the time to believe: lamely, er, namely Boris Karloff in his first monster role in years. Karloff was appropriately too Elderly to do the catwalk stuntwork, & that’s putting it wheelchair-itably!


1966: Carol Lynley, Gig Young & Oliver Reed star in the nondescriPIT THE SHUDDERED ROOM, about which the less said the deader. Truly a SLUGgothic!


1970: Corman produced & Haller directed a goofy cast with THE DUNWICH HORROR, witch ALMOST makes it as Lovecraft. Sandra Dee spends a lot of time with the Necronomicon nestled in her lap, witch of curse cultist Dean Stockwell wants to view from a closer dangle. The elements of madness, unseen monstrosity & small-town closer-dangle-mindedness might have worked a bit better without kissing covens scenes witch come off hippy dippy. Then again, that was the youth market at the time, so what the Sebek, they throw in a rip-out from ROSEMARY’S BOO-BOO for witch later prints have no womb. All in all, though, particularly on the strength of the Les Baxter soundtrack witch the ole Keep can hum at the drop of the bat, this baby works better as Lovecraft than the rest of the stuff Hollywood tries to fetus!


1985: Fifteen years later seems like an eons-long gap, but Stuart Gordon’s RE-ANIMATOR remains the most graph-yecch Lovecraft horror flick, with the axe-scent on remains. Precious little Lovecraft, but it does give new meaning to giving head (and boy is Barb Crampton’s face AlhazRED!).


1986: Stuart Gordon remain-ed with Lovecraft’s material, however short, with FROM BEYOND. Again, hard on the graph-yecchs, & yet as far as conjuring bizarre Lovecraftian critters goes, this knocks all the udders to Witches Hollow (& to the goddess Barb Crampton the Keeper’s glands gladly pikneel!).


1987: Lovecraft’s remains revolted from the late Empire for a Transworld trip with THE CURSE. Shot by Italo horrormeisters & director David Keith downhome South in the ghouled ole U.S.A., this meateateric descent flick is everything AIP’s virgin version of The Colour Out of Space should have been. There’s axe-ually development of fear with loathing here as a farm family watches first their crops, then their loved ones turn into alien sludge. Timely, cornsidering the drought witch hit rural America this year of 1988. Slimely, in that rather than getting browner and drier, things got sheenier and greenier. Mudder of fact, this whole movie looks green from frame one. Even the tomatoes look green (Ah, but stink how they taste once they get Innsmouth!).


1988: Like every HPL-debased product here, why should the direek-to-video THE UNNAMEABLE rate with more than a schlock paragraph? Answer: it shouldn’t. No reekcognizable names (at this point in slime, anyway) in this one, & yet one can’t help but pun-der, can these guys take an 8-page HPL story witch amounted to little more than a gust of wind from devoid & make a more faithful to the source (or even a more horrific) PITure than did big names like Haller, Corman & Gordon? Of curse they can’t, but they give it the old college try, & I do mean college. After breezing through those 8 pages, our boys at Miskatonic U. engage in some drippy patter with the loco-eds, bet who can stay in the loco haunted Hoss, uh, house the longest, & instead tread the waters of space and time furiously and as fast as they Zann. Hey, college kids in horror flicks always get into sects and violins.". There IS gore, there IS a decent (of typical Lovecraft relatives) monster, but most of this film seems to do its beast not killing monsters, jest space and time. The dePITion of Miskatonic U. is even more Yuggoth the mark than Corman’s, & about 80 descent, uh, % of this meateater mess is jest FRIDAY THE 13TH-type hung, er, young guys hunging out with campuss cuties wading through the grade sheets to see if they HACK it. Then again, Heap Pulpy Lovecraft knew the value of hacking THINGS out, too, so who knows? Perhaps, were HPL working this year of 1988 as a Horrorweird writer of tombs he too might be filling hideous voids of time, slime & space with scum, uh, comely co-eds who want to Marsh into Obed, & who say things like “No R’lyeh! Yer jest Tcho-Tcho much!”


So there ya have it, the scumplete HPLovecraft filmography, hex-cluding various episodes of NIGHT GALLERY & the cartoon GHOSTBUSTERS. As far as true grue Lovecraftian glop “from beyond” ghouls, uh, goes, it’s sleazy to smell without spooking too far that Horrorweird has yet to nail down anyTHING much of Lovecraft but the barest of bones. So, until the ole Keep finishes his casting call for THE DUMB WITCH HORROR, surely to, Ry'leh, be shockin' schlock full of mystery and tear-her (blouse off), this is it for HPL PITure product as yet unleashed. Hope Yuggoth off on it!

Whoa, the monster’s Wright! Whatever his farm's worth, the monster hopes none of dose meateater showers falls (gibbous moon, gibbous moon!) down on him. Time to ghoul inside, listen to scum rock & ghoul. Letch see, what the Sebek would be ex-Poe-riate?

Well, of curse, it’s the last Page of this review! Of curse, what deader, er, better choice to play HPL revolting in his grave than to give this a spin. We didn’t Plant it this way, but here it is, make no Jones about it! The one, the bonely “Dead Zeppelin” and one of their gravest hits!

Da dumb da dumb dumb dumbdumbdawitch da dumb-dumb dumb dumb dadadadumbdumb!

“Got Cthulhu Lotta Love!”

(Originally published in Temple of Schlock #11, September 1988)

From Beyond to the Cutting-Room: The Unrated Director's Cut of FROM BEYOND

by Paul DeCirce

In 1986, Charles Band and his Empire Films were squarely in the middle of the resurgent horror film industry. Churning out a long string of b-graders meant to cash in on the new VHS home video market, Band was on the look out for anything that could interest his audience. His bigger successes included THE DUNGEONMASTER, GHOULIES, TRANCERS and Stuart Gordon's RE-ANIMATOR. Based loosely on H.P Lovecraft's short-story "Herbert West: Re-Animator," RE-ANIMATOR scored big with home video viewers for its over the top, tongue-in-cheek mixture of gore and sleaze. It also severely bunched the panties of the MPAA, who never saw the film to rate it. Even unrated, the film did big business for Band and Gordon's sudden future as a horror filmmaker.

A three-picture deal was made between Empire and Gordon; FROM BEYOND went on to become the first of them. Again based on a short story by Lovecraft ("It Came From Beyond"), FROM BEYOND has developed a solid cult following as top-notch in the '80s ilk of genre horror, mostly on the legs of Stuart Gordon's flexible direction. His stylish usage of low-budget contraints and his history in theatre, mixed with the right amount of situational humor, lewd sexuality and realistic grue has set a bench-mark of what '80s horror is renowned for. His other films, including DOLLS (87), CASTLE FREAK (95), KING OF THE ANTS (03) and the excellent DAGON (01), as well as a respectable non-genre career in THE WONDERFUL ICE CREAM SUIT (98) and the recent EDMOND (05) as well as writing HONEY I SHRUNK THE KIDS have won him many fans and much respect in the indie-film industry. He's also set to direct HOUSE OF RE-ANIMATOR with William H. Macy for 2010.

But if people thought RE-ANIMATOR was too much...forget FROM BEYOND. For some reason, Gordon had to deliver an R rating for this film, and it was rejected three times. When it finally did get its rating, a number of intense and key scenes of gore, sexuality and depravity were missing, making the theatrical release a little tame and clumsy, though fans of the genre recognized it as an achievement. Little did us trolls know it would be twenty years before we'd see the film in its intended form.

And what a form it is. The missing footage has been lovingly replaced almost seamlessly and now the true power of this low-budget gem is fully in place. As Gordon himself said, "the film got its balls back." The story opens with Jeffrey Combs and Ted Sorel playing scientists making advances on the pineal gland, or sixth sense, the un-excercised muscle located in the center of the forehead. With wild tones of science fiction insanity, Sorel absorbs too much frequency from their attic-fashioned 'resonator' machine, causing his head to explode. That's in the first three minutes, folks.

Combs' character is ultimately placed in the care of psychiatrist Barbara Crampton (who is rather young and unconvincing as a doctor), who decides it best to re-create the horrific situation to discover what they'd been fooling with all along. She is soon turned seriously on by the stimulation as it reverberates to her, ahem, nether region and begins revisiting the dangerous space of the 'resonator,' until finally, Sorel returns -- apparently unharmed -- and from there the machine begins working on its own, drawing Combs, Crampton and a police officer (played by Ken Foree of DAWN OF THE DEAD) into a twisted path of addiction and destruction.

While the story seems a bit played by today's standards -- and it's an amicable job from the actors -- it's truly the special effects and tense action scenes that give this movie its legs. The disfigured creature Sorel becomes, apparently from over-stimulation of the pineal gland, is a special-effects hallmark, utilizing film-layering, puppetry, clay-mation, make-up, slime and good old-fashioned camera placement. At one point Sorel's face appears to have grown into a long worm like gland, and Gordon's usage of varying long and close-up shots completely convinces the audience there's a face at the end of this long, penis-like appendage.

After a number of close calls, Combs' pineal gland bursts forth from his forehead in grotesque fashion, like a limp little worm wriggling curiously while his eyeballs loll in his head. This leads to Combs' returning to the hospital where the film really picks up the pace and careens into a crash and burn climax of gore, explosions and insanity that ranks among the most memorable for its time.

The film, now fully restored, features a high count of gross-out scenes of perversity and gore. The sixth-dimension Sorel rudely exposes Crampton's pert breasts and rubs slimy elongated fingers all over them before dipping below screen for an inferred invasion. Combs' character does a lot more truly disgusting brain eating than the theatrical cut had, including an entire shot of him sucking the brains out of a doctors eyeball, after spitting said appendage rudely onto the floor. There's also a lengthy televised long shot of some rough S&M, featuring more breasts and violence. It's fair to say this uncut edition is pretty much packed with horrific A-level gore and slime and sleaze.

Gordon makes effective use of low-budget scenery by using a lot of purples, violets and velvety colors, skewed camera close-ups and in other places, brightly lit exposure of gore. Lee Percy, the editor, keeps the film moving at an excellent and interesting pace, and Richard Band's score uses strings and funky synth to good impact, if not a bit dated.

The complete picture draws certain comparisons to like-minded films of scientific experimentation, most accurately as a poor-man's comparison to Cronenberg's THE FLY, curiously released the same year. As an examination of the connectedness of our deeper urges of pleasure addiction with what might be right and wrong, the film succeeds in its lurid frankness. Void of morals, forgiveness or apology for its pseudo-scientific madness, the uncut FROM BEYOND successfully replaces a sense of rhythm and gut-punching that had indeed been castrated for its theatrical release.

Band has continued to be a major figure in the now booming DVD industry, most notably with his PUPPET MASTER films. While many of today's equivalent ilk lack the creativity and usage of technique and inventiveness of the '80s kind, it seems as though the B-Grade home viewing industry still remains hungry for the kind of sleaze that FROM BEYOND benchmarked. Stuart Gordon's career has veered into more diversity and he seems on the upsurge, with excellent additions to the Masters of Horror TV series, as well as highly rated features, such as KING OF THE ANTS and his most recent full-length, STUCK.

While the MPAA questioned Gordon's motivation at crafting such a disgusting and dirty-feeling film, now that it's restored, it's better to enjoy the ride and marvel at how the film manages to repulse while at the same time ask the viewer to admit the truth: they love it and they want more. Indeed a far cry from the philosophical questions raised by Lovecraft's fascination with the potential of the human mind, but by no means beyond the realm of the horrific framework his fiction created. Indeed it came FROM BEYOND, and twenty years later, it has finally arrived.