Beyond the Dunwich Horror

I would consider myself a fan of H.P. Lovecraft. In general I enjoy his short stories, and love each reference I come across. However, I have yet to see a Lovecraft inspired film that is any good. Most either depart too far from the source material, or are just not very well made. Beyond the Dunwich Horror has got to be the worst film I have ever seen. Ever. That said let me give you some background so that should you ever watch this film you will have an idea of what the fuck is going on.

Beyond the Dunwich Horror is a modern continuation of the 1929 H.P. Lovecraft short story “The Dunwich Horror” set in the years up to 1928. In Lovecraft’s story several members of the Whateley family - namely an old man and Lavinia his albino misshapen daughter - manage to call into being through unspeakable rites a child of the elder beings. It’s all very fascinating and dark and complex. This child Wilbur Whateley (Lavinia’s hybrid monster child) is to act at the gateway in rites to be performed to bring forth these terrible elder beings , in particular Yog-Sothoth, who will scour the earth of all life, doom doom doom. Through old books and texts - chiefly the Necronomicon - Wilbur and his grandfather attempt to discover the proper rights - in the process coming in contact with a librarian and scholar Dr. Armitage who eventually discovers what it is they are after and must stop them. Anyway, that is really just the bare bones of it, it’s wonderfully odd pulp horror.

The movie picks up in present day. Kenneth Crawford must travel to the New England coastal island town of Dunwich to find his younger brother Andrew who he discovers is locked up in an insane asylum. The doctors are really creepy and non-helpful while Ken is being obnoxiously anti-authority and of course poor Andrew remains in the asylum, where it appears he belongs.

Ken then hangs around in bars with no well defined goal - I kind of got the impression that maybe he wanted to get his Hardy boys on and solve his brother’s case, but it didn’t really make sense and there didn’t appear to be anything to solve - where he is approached by a hooker named Marsha. Ok she’s not really a hooker, but she’s pretending to be one so that she can talk Ken into helping her get a news story - which I guess he‘s going to do after she tricks him and then refuses to have sex with him. Anyway this makes for some really bad dialogue revolving around him asking if she is a hooker, and then some awkwardness when he discovers the truth after her poorly disguised interrogation of him as they are driving to her house so they can not have sex. Much later in the story she asks him why he didn’t go for it at the one point where there was opportunity and his response was seriously “you’re like my sister”, and then she pouts. This was a really pointless relationship. It ended up feeling like the writer/director had written some dialogue that he thought was clever and then just squished it into a scene to justify it. Actually a lot of the movie felt like that. Scenes squeezed in to justify bad dialogue and one-liners.

Anyway it doesn’t seem like Ken and Marsha actually figure much out or get much done. Most of the story is told in flashbacks, which aren’t always very clear that it is a flashback - which of course makes for lots of confusion. So we as the audience are told Andrew’s story without any real help from Ken and Marsha who really are pointless and cheesy til the last half hour. Also Ken and Marsha apparently gain all the knowledge of the backstory as the movie progresses- but with no clear way of how they are finding it out. Maybe they just watched the flashbacks too! So much simpler now that I think of it.

So Andrew’s story is that he’s kind of lame and shy. And then one day decides to not be lame and shy and to approach this hot girl that he likes to sketch pictures of - including really laughable poorly done nude sketches. Hot girl is Nikki Hartwell, and everyone says she’s bad. Because you know, she hangs out at this creepy club and she likes sex, and she cuts herself. So Andrew and Nikki start dating and everything is really cool - there are some really awkward sex scenes - some really bad and uncomfortable dialogue and Andrew meets her crazy and creepifying parents who eat raw squid and other supposed to be disgusting things just to be creepifying. But pretty soon things don’t go so well for Andrew, because well Nikki is a bad girl. Otto - Nikki’s ex-boyfriend - soon shows up and is invited to join in on the awkward sexual fun. And poor Andrew, obviously uncomfortable with it, just goes along - because if you love a girl you can’t say no to being ass-raped by her creepy ex-boyfriend. Shower scene of shame, comic amounts of blood.

It's impossible to find any pictures of this film

Andrew is complaining to his friends - normal guy and confusing mismatch of blatant stereotypes guy - about what Otto did to him, one day at work in the graveyard. Yes he works at the graveyard. Doing what I don’t know. Well Nikki calls and has a task for him, something she needs him to get because Otto is in trouble. And with very little prompting Andrew agrees to go to some spooky pioneer graveyard, dig up a corpse and take this old book and to bring it to Nikki. But first he goes and visits his librarian friend Margo and asks her about this book, the Necronomicon, of which the library has a copy. Margo is horrified and tells him how evil it is, and about how years before in the 1920’s Wilbur Whateley had come looking for the book and had made copies out of it…basically a story which alludes to the events in Lovecraft’s “The Dunwich Horror”…and had killed the librarian who had showed it to him. So Andrew decides that it’s still a good idea and sets out after dark with his two friends. They get the book, one of them disappears and is of course horribly dead, the other starts growing moss all over his body because of some nebulous tomb curse, but they make it to Nikki with the book.
Nikki meanwhile has been seducing Otto’s henchmen and then eating the eyeballs out of their heads. She is a bad girl. Andrew shows up and is hurt and confused, his other friend is pretty well dead of moss. And then Otto and Nikki reveal that they are really the great descendants of the Whateleys and they are going to use the Necronimicon to do unspeakable evil. Oh and Andrew is really the descendant of Dr. Armitage (who had managed to stop their ancestors in their previous evil) and they need his blood or semen in their evil rights, his choice. Then they take Andrew by boat to the site of said evil rights. But clever Andrew jumps out of the boat and so ends up washed on shore and eventually ends up in the asylum.

The movie sort of stumbles through the story until most of the backstory has been revealed. At which point, Ken remembers that Andrew had a librarian friend named Margo and he and Marsha decide to go to the library. The librarians are creepy and non-helpful and then insulted when they ask for Margo. They are sent upstairs where they see this ginormous painting of Margo which, oh no! shows her birth and death date. She died in the 20’s. Oh my goodness she was a ghost, and guess what…all the other librarians are ghosts too!

Ken and Marsha flee the library and suddenly there are all sorts of people in robes with blindfolds on menacing them with pitchforks and torches. A young man in a hearse with aluminum foil covering all the windows speeds up and offers them a ride. Ken argues with him for a moment before being reassured that the young man is actually going to help them. They all drive away. The young man introduces himself as Upton Armitage and announces that they are all on the same quest and that his family has been guarding against the evil of the Whateleys since the original incident. Oh and Andrew is his baby brother too (I guess Andrew was adopted?). Upton has a plan - which ends up being both pointless and fruitless - and they eventually just go up to the asylum to break Andrew out. They fail miserably and Marsha is killed by Otto who had already absconded with Andrew and was just hanging around to kill people. So then Upton and Ken decide to go up to Sentinel hill where the evil rites will be performed and to disrupt them. It was really unclear what they were going to do, but I guess maybe they were going to steal Andrew back and all would be well.

They arrive and must fight with all the robed cultists, of whom a vast majority are missing their eyes - Nikki has been a very bad girl. They struggle and discover that many of the previous people they had met are under the robes. Ken is captured and put in a cage and taken down to the sea. I think the Whateleys and the cultists in robes won. I’m not really sure. If that is the case, then it should follow that the cultists have called Yog-Sothoth into the world and the earth will be scoured of life. But again I’m not really sure who won.

I have summarized the story quite linearly, but it was a complete mess. It took me hours to piece it all together in my head. So much information was given much too late in the story or had to be inferred after the fact, but not in an interesting plot twist kind of way, more like the info just got misplaced somewhere. There was also some really comic nudity. Comic in that it came across as if the director just really liked this girl so he wrote a nude scene for her. Several scenes. Several girls. There was a lot of eyeball gouging and eating throughout the whole movie, which was really disturbing and also really fascinating; I mostly was impressed by what an odd theme it was (and because this movie made me want to gouge out my own). The one really fun thing about this movie was the soundtrack - ‘80s synthesizer music, it was great. Actually the music was so cheesy and odd that it took me at least 45 minutes to decide whether this movie was meant to be bad or if it was meant to be serious and was just that bad. It was just that bad.

If you were going to watch this movie I would recommend that you do it with a group of friends and sort of Mystery Science Theatre the experience. That was really the only saving point for me, was all the laughter and comments that people were making in the theatre. I don’t think I’ve ever been in a theatre where people talked so much, and where I didn’t mind it at all. Share the misery on this one.