"I never heard anything like that!"
The Dunwich Horror (1970) is a low-budget horror film directed by Daniel Haller, produced by Roger Corman, and loosely based on the short story of the same name by H.P. Lovecraft. After his last horrible attempt at directing a film, someone let him do another... and to surprising result! Also one interesting note: this film was at least partially written by Academy Award winning screenwriter Curtis Hanson who would go on to write L.A. Confidential (1997) and 8 Mile (2002).
The Dunwich Horror follows Nancy Wagner as she falls for the strange and mysterious Wilbur Whitley and fails to see he's got much more horrific plans in store for her.
The acting is this movie is either decently good or terrible. There's a huge divide. Ed Begley is great in his final preformance (wish they did more with him though...) and there's something I really dug about Dean Stockwell's version of Wilbur and even Sandra Dee as stranger bait Nancy was not bad either.
The Direction most of the time isn't bad at all. I liked how Haller interpreted the Monster's attack scenes and with nothing more than pure directorial skill, pulls off the effect he wants with next to no budget on the monster. It's pretty effective (in a 1970 kinda way). This is leaps and bounds better than his direction in his previous attempt at a Lovecraft film.
And over all most of this film is quite watchable. It's nothing profound, but it's actually successfully a very similar feeling to the Roger Corman-Poe epics. (I wonder if he studied them better this time, or just got more advice from Roger?)
Most of the dialogue is laughably bad (which as you know can be enjoyable in itself.)
And the rest of the acting is pretty freaking horrible, it actually seems like they picked non-actors right off the street for how bad some of these guys are. I must admit though, I did get kinda bummed when the grandfather dies because he's one of those actors that's so bad it's actually worthwhile every time he's on screen and after he died I knew the movie would be less funny after that!
As for the source material, once again this is pretty much very loosely based on the H.P. Lovecraft story. They took specific elements from the work and then basically made up their own story with those pieces. Unfortunately they removed a lot of my favorite scenes from the original story and in it's place they added a whole lot of stuff that doesn't make sense. (Yay!) And riddle me this, why would you put this story in a contemporary setting? This is a story about spells and demons what part of that makes you go, "oh hey this would work better in today's world..."? I'm torn between thinking it was a lost drunken bet of some kind or because they had no money for sets and costumes and just shot with stuff they had. All in all the stakes just aren't that high throughout the entire film. And looking back it's just another mixed up (and less good) Satanic horror (just summoning a slightly different dark evil entity!)
I also think this story could have been more interesting if Nancy didn't just blindly follow Wilbur... she initially asks questions about his intentions and stuff and he just literally replies with random answers and whatever he wants (most of it's B.S.) and she just like... okay! Stranger danger lady! Jeez! Stranger danger!
Oh and lastly I have to mention the godawful ending that doesn't make sense at all! This movie just races toward such an abrupt ending in the end, like they were running out of film to use or something!
The magnificent thing about this one is how much better it is than Die, Monster, Die! (1965) and in only 5 years too, that's one hell of an improvement!
2.5/5 Stars.
Happy watching!
My H.P. Lovecraft streak continues tomorrow on The 31 Nights of Macabre Movies as we jump a decade and move on to the 80s' classic, Re-Animator (1985).
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