Witches, the Dunwich Horror - Movie Review

Witches, the Dunwich Horror (2009)

What is it about:
In Louisiana, the thirty-five year old single mother Lavina delivers a baby boy and a monster in the evil Whateley House. Ten years later, Dr. Henry Armitage and his assistant Professor Fay Morgan discover that the page 751 of every copy of the Necronomicon is missing and The Black Brotherhood has summoned the gate keeper Yog Sothoth to leave the portal opened to the demons and ancient gods. They invite the arrogant and skeptical Professor Walter Rice that can translate the Necronomicon to help them to seek the book. Meanwhile Lavina's son Wilbur Whateley ages very fast and seeks the missing page to open the portal.

What did I think about it:
I've seen many horror movies based on Lovecraftian mythology, so by now I know most of those have two ways they can turn out:
- Horribly bad in a good way
(A great example of this is the movie Dagon (2001) or Necronomicon (1993))
- Horribly bad in a bad way
Witches, the Dunwich Horror falls among the second category.
It was both boring and over the top, which is quite a feat, but not something I want from my horror movies. Lovecraft's mythology was butchered in such a way I felt violated by the end of the movie. Add some annoying lead characters to that and you got me wondering why I even bothered to watch it till the end. I must have really hoped it would still redeem itself, but alas. Luckily it was on sale, so I didn't spend too much money on it.

Why should you watch it:
If you want to play a drinking game, you can watch this movie and drink a shot every time there's a new reference to a story by Lovecraft. You'll get so drunk you won't notice how bad this movie is.

Locus Focus - R'lyeh

Locus Focus is a new meme hosted every Saturday by Enbrethiliel at Shredded Cheddar. "We all know of books that make their settings come alive, and this meme is a chance to write about them and share them with others." Visit her blog and link up!

My first Locus Focus is about H.P. Lovecraft's R'lyeh, the sunken city where the Great Old One Cthulhu sleeps. I chose this location as it sounds so mysterious, creepy and cool in the story 'The Call of Cthulhu'. It's this weird, twisted, alien place, something from another world and it has the biggest baddie of them all sleeping there: Cthulhu. Just seeing this huge, scary, squidlike creature drives you insane. Now if that isn't a cool place!

Some bits about R'lyeh taken from the story 'The Call of Cthulhu':

The nightmare corpse-city of R'lyeh... was built in measureless eons behind history by the vast, loathsome shapes that seeped down from the dark stars. There lay great Cthulhu and his hordes, hidden in green slimy vaults.

Without knowing what futurism is like, Johansen achieved something very close to it when he spoke of the city; for instead of describing any definite structure or building, he dwells only on broad impressions of vast angles and stone surfaces - surfaces too great to belong to anything right or proper for this earth, and impious with horrible images and hieroglyphs.

Johansen and his men landed at a sloping mud-bank on this monstrous Acropolis, and clambered slipperily up over titan oozy blocks which could have been no mortal staircase. The very sun of heaven seemed distorted when viewed through the polarising miasma welling out from this sea-soaked perversion, and twisted menace and suspense lurked leeringly in those crazily elusive angles of carven rock where a second glance shewed concavity after the first shewed convexity.

As Wilcox would have said, the geometry of the place was all wrong. One could not be sure that the sea and the ground were horizontal, hence the relative position of everything else seemed phantasmally variable.


And leaving you all with this picture of The Great Plush Cthulhu and his minions.