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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8332838" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 61: July 1991part 5/5Into The Dark: This time, James tackles movies very specifically based on or inspired by the works of H. P. Lovecraft. Popular guy for someone his fans think of as underground. Of course, the fact that his works are public domain, and anyone can build off them means there's no quality control at all on movie adaptions. Since cosmic horror is harder to do well than gore and jump scares in the first place, that means there's a lot of drek out there that misses the point. Let's see what he wants use to check out or avoid. Die, Monster, Die! gets a fairly mediocre review. Boris Karlof does the best with the material he's given, and the first half builds atmosphere decently, but when it comes to actually resolving it, it goes for the cheap schlocky scares, and then revealing the monsters aren't real at the end. Sounds a bit scooby-doo to be honest, which isn't what you want in your cosmic horror. The Dunwich Horror sees the unlikely pairing of Dean Stockwell & Sandra Dee try to mix lovecraftian themes with 60's psychedelia. It doesn't go very well, managing to be both shallow and boring, with cheap special effects. This isn't going very well so far, is it.The Unnamable manages to get an even lower rating. It's more faithful to the original story than the previous two, but that just makes it even worse on a cinematic level, padded out massively to reach film length, and once again with completely unconvincing rubber suit monster effects. Just leave it on the shelf where it belongs. Re-Animator is where things finally start getting interesting. The tale of Herbert West might be played for laughs, but there's still plenty of spectacular violence, perversion and gore to turn the stomachs of sensitive viewers. An excellent example of the kind of shock horror the home video boom of the 80's really encouraged, tempting people into the store with the prospect of things they'd never show on TV, at least uncut. From Beyond reunites the same director and lead actor a year later, and follows much the same formula. There's slight diminishing returns, and once again it's not remotely faithful to the source material, but it's entertaining watching, which is much more important. The kind of viscerality you just don't see much these days, due to overreliance on CGI over practical effects. Wolff & Byrd try to relax and have a party, but their work has an annoying tendency to follow them home. An issue that wasn't exactly bad, but was harder going to think of things to say about than most of them. They've got to the point where they've got a solid rotation of regular columns going, and the formulaicness got to me this time. It's still a long way to go until I finish this, and I'm not going to get there without a lot more work. Time to roll up my sleeves and chip away at the next issue.</blockquote>

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