Beyond Re-Animator (2003)

Dr. Herbert West strikes again! Young Dr. Phillips (Jason Barry), a fan of West's after seeing his work first-hand as a kid, becomes the prison doctor where Dr. West is incarcerated and sets up a lab for him to continue his "experiments." Jeffery Combs is as great as ever with his stiff mad scientist's delivery of one-liners, "she isn't getting any fresher."

But, the performance award for this movie has to go to Elsa Pataky as investigative journalist, Laura Olney. She's hilarious as she jolts back to life in jerky pulses after West convinces Dr. Phillips to inject her with "the serum." A little later after Dr. West injects her with the "nanoplasm" of the sadistic Warden Brando (Simon Andreu) she suffers helplessly as his life forces courses through her body turning her into an out-of-control Jeckyll and Hyde type character as her personality swings between her own whimpering helpless self and that of the evil Brando. 

In the end, Dr. West escapes with his medical bag of re-animating serum to create another bloody, funny sequel.

Night Gallery (1971): H. P. Lovecraft's Cool Air

Even sub-freezing temperatures and a strong will can't stop the inevitable decay of human flesh kept alive beyond its expiration date. Dr. Munoz was finally dragged to his death after existing longer than he should have. In Episode 12 of Season 2 of Rod Serling's Night Gallery as seen on Hulu Plus, Serling's teleplay adds a main character not found in H. P. Lovecraft's short story of the same name. Did Serling write the part especially for the talented and lovely Barbara Rush?

Lovecraft's story is told by a man with a heart problem who lives downstairs from the mysterious Dr. Munoz while Serling's narrator is the daughter of one of Dr. Munoz's former colleagues. Writing for television, Serling left out a lot of the gore and creepiness that Lovecraft so skillfully applied to the story. Serling also left out Lovecraft's unflattering description of the Spanish landlady and the other tenants of the boarding house.

It is cool to see and read about problems like keeping a room cold in the summer that we take for granted now. Lovecraft used a gas powered machine filled with ammonia to keep Dr. Munoz cool enough to prevent decomposition while we would simply turn up the AC. However, the failure of the machine and the rising temperature in his room could have occurred just as easily in our time with the AC breaking down. We probably could have a new one installed before the temperature rose to lethal level though depending on how far Dr. Munoz lived from a hardware store or Walmart. 

The episode ends with Barbara Rush screaming in the bathroom as she stands over the dried out corpse of Dr. Munoz in humorous contrast to Lovecraft's gory slimy trail that leads from the bathroom to the couch ending in a puddle of something indescribably horrible.

A Sad Heart in H. P Lovecraft's A Garden

After doing some yard work today, I thought the poem A Garden by H. P. Lovecraft would be a good and fitting read since I'm now too tired and sore for much else. I found it here http://freeread.com.au/@RGLibrary/HPLovecraft/Poetry-Essays/SelectedPoems.html#p13, a very nice website with a good selection of Lovecraft poems posted in a user friendly manner with some cute graphics as well.

This poem is a good example of Lovecraft's genius in its sweet descriptive language and its timely pace with a little twist at the end. It begins innocently as a little stroll outside but turns gray, gray becomes decay. Soon silence and the odor of death and the sense of being utterly alone bring on a feeling of familiarity from the past that he can't quite place until the last two lines of the sixteen line poem. The rotten withered garden is his heart.

It's such a powerful piece of art that brings feelings of familiarity, not only to the speaker, but to anyone at one point in life or another. That poem could have described myself not too long ago as I gazed upon and identified with my rotten and crumbling concrete steps:

                                    

I'm glad I was able to pull myself out of that funk! It happens to everyone now and then. The barren grayness of winter does eventually come to an end and hope returns once again. Lovecraft knew this when he couldn't place the source of the familiarity of the dead and rotting garden implying that it had evidently been quite some time since he knew such sadness. If we are in such a mood, all we can do is keep forcing ourselves to get up each day and one day the gloomy grayness will lift and sweet springtime will rise again.

The Dunwich Horror

Rated R? The rating system must have been much more strict in 1970. Reeger (Jack Pierce), one of the townsmen hunting down the evil Wilbur Whately (played by Dean Stockwell) at the Devil's Hopyard, said the word "damn" when he fell and jammed his rifle and they showed Nancy's (Sandra Dee) naked hip as she writhed and moaned as though enjoying sex with a ghost. Those were the raciest scenes that I recall. Maybe the Satanic worship contributed to the R rating, however, the movie was made while Dark Shadows was broadcast in the afternoons. It must have been the sexual moaning and there was a brief dream scene of topless painted people including a small set of bouncing boobs.

I need to read the book of the same name by H. P. Lovecraft to know the real original story. It was a pretty good movie even with the awful 70s movie music and low-tech camera tricks. Nancy's dream sequence was shown with what looked like a piece of gauze taped over the camera lens. As Wilbur's ritual was seeing some success allowing evil to enter our dimension and prey on the innocent, the picture would turn to negative and flash either red, blue or green as the evil attacked and ravaged it's victims and their belongings. Love it. 

On the other hand,  Wilbur's  family homestead was a Gothic staple, a cool old mansion with mysterious rooms, especially the locked room at the top of the house where the evil lurked. The stone altar where Wilbur presented Nancy, the necessary virgin for the evil to impregnate, stood at the edge of the woods in a place called The Devil's Hopyard on a cliff above jagged rocks and crashing waves.

The fight scene in the university library between the guard and Wilbur when Wilbur broke in to steal the Necromonicon was an entertaining scuffle reminiscent of the Star Trek fights and other late 60s, early 70s TV fights. Stuntmen with cheap wigs scuffling and rolling around on the floor as strategic camera angles hid their faces from the camera. Pretty funny!

As Wilbur performed the ritual necessary to open the gate and usher the Old Ones back into our dimension to destroy mankind as described in the Neconomicon, I realized how much of the Evil Dead was based on Lovecraft's inventions. The evil awakened by reading the book aloud was portrayed in the Evil Dead the same was it was portrayed in The Dunwich Horror. The evil was more of a spirit rushing like wind through the woods, blowing through tall grass and shifting the flow of bodies of water as it raced with supernatural speed toward the people it longed to destroy.

I've never seen Dean Stockwell so young! My only knowledge of him was as the crusty middle-aged guy in Quantum Leap. But after one quick Google search I learned that he was a child actor who found success as an adult actor as well. Pretty extraordinary. I think that's the only movie I've seen starring Sandra Dee, as far as I can remember anyway. I may have seen her as Gidget on old TV movie reruns, but I always picture Sally Field in that role. Dee was absolutely adorable as was Stockwell, providing icing on the cake of a really good movie!

H. P. Lovecraft's Poem, The Nightmare Lake

I think if I had had a nightmare like The Nightmare Lake I would have died in my sleep from fright. The imagery is so rich that each time I read the poem I find another detail that I seemed to have missed all the previous times. I love how the poem combines life and death:

A spirit dead and desolate;
A spirit ancient and unholy,
Heavy with fearsome melancholy,
Which from the waters dull and dense
Draws vapors cursed with pestilence.

A spirit that's "dead and desolate" yet is "heavy with fearsome melancholy" and "draws vapors cursed with pestilence." That is so scary! I wouldn't want to meet that spirit in a dark alley!

The lake and its shores are fatal to any living thing that goes near it that even vampires can't survive there. The only thing that seems able to survive are the narcophagi that feed on the rotting corpses of everything that comes into contact with the lake and its unbearable atmosphere. 

Then Lovecraft deliciously combines life and death and death and birth when describing the abandoned sunken town below the lake. The town is decayed and abandoned, nothing there but dancing shadows until the tombs fly open.

Till from the reeking, new-stript earth
Curl’d foetid fumes of noisome birth.
About the city, nigh uncover’d,
The monstrous dancing shadows hover’d,
When lo! there oped with sudden stir
The portal of each sepulchre!

It sends shivers down my spine! Lovecraft had such a command of words and language to be able to bring such horror and fear to life. 

H. P. Lovecraft's Gothic Christmas

I wish I had discovered this poem during the holidays! Lovecraft's "Yule Horror" might be the best Christmas poem ever. As I read the poem "Twas the Night Before Christmas" by Clement Clarke Moore came to mind because "Yule Horror" is the extreme opposite in sentiment. It's almost funny to compare the two poems noting the stark differences.Where "Twas the Night Before Christmas" is all warm and cozy, "Yule Horror" is cold and dark.

There's a great article on Wikipedia that describes the word yule and its origin and the pagan holiday it it originated from and eventually evolved into Christmas, as well as some of the Christmas activities and symbols derived from the old yule days that are still celebrated and recognized today. One such rite is sacrificing the yule animals and smearing the blood on the pedestals of the idols, the temple walls and the people. Right! That's the ritual we have discontinued since the rise of Christianity; however, it does state that we do still enjoy eating the Christmas ham and washing it down with ale. Much better!

When I finished reading the poem, the song "This is Halloween" from The Nightmare Before Christmas popped into my head probably because both the movie and "Yule Horror" are excellent combinations of the darkness of Halloween combined with the Christmas holiday season although the poem contains none of the Christmas spirit of hope found in the movie. No glimmer of hope can be found in the poem, only fear and dread. I'd love to stitch it in needlepoint and hang it over the Christmas village this year.

H. P Lovecraft's Beautiful "Despair"

In all the poetry courses I took in college, I was never assigned H. P Lovecraft. In fact, I hadn't read any of Lovecraft's work until recently. I guess he isn't part of the literary canon. It seems like every blog post or review that covers anything remotely gothic mentions Lovecraft as one of the original gothic writers and a great influence to many. I figured I had to familiarize myself with such a cool and respected guy. Finding that he has a huge body of work I randomly picked one of his poems and found the beautiful poem "Despair". From just reading that one piece I can understand why he's considered a great early gothic horror writer.

Just the first stanza can stand alone as a great piece of literary horror :

"In the night-wind madly flying,
Hellish forms with streaming hair;"

How many horror movies have we seen a scene just like that? Too many to count, probably and that's just two lines from the first stanza of the five stanza poem. Every line is packed with dark emotion and fear and the simple title describes it all. Not to mention the intense imagery:

"Ghastly shades of bygone gladness,
Clawing fiends of future sadness,
Mingle in a cloud of madness
Ever on the soul to lie."

Not only will you be sad throughout eternity, but you were happy once so you'll know what you're missing! I love his choice of adjectives, "ghastly" and "clawing", especially where ghastly describes "bygone gladness". You wouldn't think gladness would be ghastly, but gladness never to be experienced again could be a ghastly memory.  Cool!

I'll definitely be reading more Lovecraft.