The Dunwich Horror

Title: The Dunwich Horror
Release Date: August, 2009
Score: 2 out of 4

This is not a good film. This is a very poorly edited mess of footage, consisting mainly of either a very poorly executed flashback and/or apparition plotline and a contemporaneous present-day plotline, the main one we're supposed to be following, I guess -- they seem to merge -- or do they??? Wooouhouhhgh!

It follows the major plotline of the story by H.P. Lovecraft to more or less a fair bit, and the script is peppered with enough Cthulhuh mythos lore to keep avid Lovecraft fans fairly engaged.

That's really all I can say about it with any due diligence. The sets were atrocious, costuming, make-up -- the entire production seemed willfully careless towards any sense of verisimilitude. Almost all aspects of the film appeared as though a small high school drama team were required to furnish everything for a whole 90 minute film, yet the acting unfortunately did not aspire even to secondary education level heights.

The movie was heavily bogged down in a formulaic rhythm of terrible and garish melodrama, followed by staid academic potboiler, it seemed to go on for hours with little to no regard for standard or even any entertaining style of pacing.

The film is thoroughly lacking and yet it delivers too much of a bad thing: a cheapened and whorish docudrama-like rendering of the backstory of the tale, executed by z-grade actors in laughably bad performances.

I would give it a 1, but, unlike so many tangentially Lovecraft-related films of recent day, the screenplay is much more closely aligned with its source material, so it gets bonus points for not butchering a great story.

If you feel the need to suffer through every film someone makes based on a Lovecraft story, I suppose you'd better watch this. Otherwise, this is not a portal you need enter.

PS: I could not locate any poster art for this film.