The Dunwich Horror

The Dunwich Horror (1970)

[No]
Trash-o-rama

This sort of concludes my Lovecraft viewing spree of a few weeks ago, leaving it on an extremely low note.

About a young woman (Sandra Dee) who becomes mesmerized by this really weird guy (Dean Stockwell). This guy is obsessed with summoning some ancient beings, the act of which will trigger the destruction of humanity.

You kind of have to wonder why anyone would really want to do that. Also, if there is a book which can allow this to happen why the fuck would anybody want to preserve it and why the fuck would anybody ever let it get into the hands of somebody so clearly demented (the guy was also the great-grandson of the dude who tried to end the world many years before, and his grandfather attempted to do something like that at one point. You'd think that would be something of a clue)?

But anyway. That's but a minor logic problem. You kind of expect people to be logic impaired in these movies.

On top of that, the movie was really boring. And the music was really bad. But mostly it was just boring. And borderline pornographic. There was a lot of stuff with the scantily clad babe lying on an alter, presumably getting fucked by some invisible force (she ends up pregnant so, you know, you have to assume...), but I also vaguely remember some orgy footage or something spliced in there somewhere.

Other than that, though, the movie was such that Mr. Blue, Mr. Red and I spent the entire time making really stupid jokes about it. Don't you love it when you watch a boring movie with people and you end up having this running joke through the whole thing which you will then remember every other time you watch the movie? Well, this one shall forever remain in my mind as The Toilet Movie.

I'm not sure how it started, but for some reason there was almost constant discussion of toilets throughout. From us, that is. Toilets never get mentioned in the actual movie.

However, the really funny thing is that a lot of the time when people say "twilight" really fast and slurred I think they're saying "toilet" (can't help it, my mind always wanders to the scatological), so when people say "Have you seen the Twilight movie?" I find myself thinking 'wow, I didn't know so many people had seen Dunwich Horror'. It's odd.

Moving on... the movie is almost watchable for Dean Stockwell's hilariously bad performance. The climactic scene in which he is doing some sort of ritual or something and then fights it out with the old guy is so ridiculous you almost have to see it to believe it. But throughout the rest of the movie he's pretty funny too, looking almost as though he has no idea where he is, why he is there or even who he is.

Like I said, it's almost worth watching it for that. Unfortunately, that's the only interesting part, the rest is just tedious.

END

Directed by: Daniel Haller. Written by: Curtis Lee Hanson, Henry Rosenbaum, Ronald Silkosky. Starring: Dean Stockwell, Sandra Dee, Ed Begeley, Sam Jaffe, Lloyd Bochner, Donna Baccala, Joanna Moore Jordan, Talia Shire.