Lurking Fear (1994)

 

Director: C. Courtney Joyner

Screenplay: C. Courtney Joyner

Based on the serialized short story by H.P. Lovecraft

Cast: Jon Finch as Bennett; Blake Adams as John Martense; Ashley Laurence as Cathryn Farrell; Jeffrey Combs as Dr. Haggis; Allison Mackie as Ms. Marlowe; Paul Mantee as Father Poole; Vincent Schiavelli as Knaggs; Joseph Leavengood as Pierce

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

He was nice to goldfish…

Two women, sisters, are locked in a building arming to protect them and the child of one from what is outside. Their concern is well heeded as there is an entity trying to get after the baby with horrible intentions…tragedy strikes when one of the women is pulled through the hole the abomination made, leading to a bloody mess.

This is the prologue; a set up to a Full Moon Production adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s serialized 1922 work of the same name. This is a very loose “adaptation” truthfully, Lovecraft’s tale of a local monster hunter obsessed with the macabre in a 1920s setting finding himself involved in a curious series of gristly massacres with monstrous results. Whilst also showing a hint of Lovecraft’s unfortunate racism, sadly to be expected alongside his very idiosyncratic use of description, it is however a macabre and compelling piece. Like the beautiful ring that is rigged with a fatal trap you can never disarm, most Lovecraft stories come with the issue that, a true one-off in talent, the man himself was as mortally flawed as you could get, which is almost ridiculous in this story’s case as it is casual racism off-the-cuff. The story itself in entirely the basic set up of a perverse family lineage that lead to troglodyte like figures who eat other humans, something timeless regardless of setting, something which has a befitting Americana morbidness to it and could be found as far forward Bone Tomahawk (2015), and is not an issue to see here if for budget reasons to set in the then-modern day.  

His tale is a different animal to Full Moon’s, which is fun but does open up how I have not really come to appreciate Full Moon truthfully. Only getting into their back catalogue long after my adolescence, their films are not opaque or complicated, not necessarily even weird, competent and frankly distancing for me in how they play their stories completely straight. This is a type of film, as I eventually came to enjoy the movie for what it is, entirely for its simple pleasures, not for reinventing the wheel. Lurking Fear is in the same scenario as the source, though this is thankfully a tale, around people trapped in one location, which brought in a few character actors too. A man imprisoned for four years, guided by Vincent Schiavelli for a brief cameo, inherits from his criminal father the other half of a map which takes him to Lefferts Corner, place of the original source material, and a cemetery where his father stashed away money in one of the graves. Criminals, led by Bennett (Jon Finch), are following behind him, but for those living in Lefferts Corner, they are a nuisance as they themselves are dealing with a band of baby eating, flesh devouring monstrosities living under the graves in caverns in the cemetery. It is here where the film is helped as, whilst basic for me, there is fun to be had with a solidly made horror tale with a crew of memorable figures.

Whilst it was only afterwards the film ended I recognized her, it was a delight to encounter Ashley Laurence again, famously the lead of Hellraiser (1987), a working actor as everyone else here who, with the figures Full Moon signed up to these films, had name recognition. Here as well you can also time stamp when the film was made as, playing the surviving sister who took the loss of the other badly, Laurence plays her character of Cathryn as a Sarah Conner. This is marking how Linda Hamilton, reprising the role of Sarah Conner for Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991), a huge blockbuster at the time, was playing a character who had transformed into a hardened figure capable in context having prepared for the robot apocalypse in firearms and survival skills, a feminist figure and also one as seen here that other films were happy to evoke. Jeffrey Combs is thankfully here too, playing a doctor helping Cathryn, grizzled from having to treat the wounds of those who managed to surviving lurking fear attacks with only face disfiguring scars from their claws. Whilst a stereotype, the context makes it completely understandable why the doctor who drinks here is an alcoholic from the nightmare he has survived so far.

Add a pregnant young woman and a priest, and Lurking Fear pretty much goes from A to B as a plot. Full Moon are sticklers for telling their plots, and neither are they like horror films from even lower budgets or non-professional groups where “quirks” can accidentally slip in. Lurking Fear was entertaining, undeniably, but the moments which shone here were when there were a few eccentricities allowed to slip in. Jon Finch by himself was one of them, playing the gangster boss, an English actor whose accent stood out among the cast and whose role ended up with some additional camp to the proceedings. His is a fascinating get for the production very later into his career. The lead of Roman Polanski’s Macbeth (1971), a Hammer Horror and Shakespearian alumni who wandered into this, who plays his small role with a glorious amount of ham only Combs is getting into. Combs is eventually breaking out the communion wine and asking God forgiveness for this act, but still manages to be more straight laced than Finch, who thankfully managed to get dialogue, despite being the callous villain of the piece, that allowed him to start throwing out pithy remarks. The premise is far closer to Key Largo (1948), the famous film noir of people trapped in a single location which has likely influenced so many horror films without many realizing, than the original Lovecraft text, but there is a considerable amount to this film where it became entirely as enjoyable as it was because of the actors involved. I am not wishing to forget Allison Mackie, the mirror of Ashley Laurence on the villains’ side of the cast, someone who I swear had a prominent role in something that immediately made her recognizable to me, but sadly seems to have had a career not as prolific as it should have been considering she gives it her all here. Even Blake Adams, sadly the male lead who is cursed, as most do, with being the least interesting figure among character actors and figures like Ashley Laurence getting a lot to chew on being tough, still gets to throw in with the sarcasm and is not bulletproof from the monstrosities onscreen. As a horror film too, this gets suitably macabre when the creatures, a family mutated by inbreeding as the source text had them, are living underground among the corpses in a necropolis hellhole of caverns, with all the fake but appropriately morbid corpse and bone props the production could get their hands on.

It is not a perfect film, which could be seen as the worse discredit one could get, neither super negative or positive, but considering that I have had a cold reservation for Full Moon films I have seen, this one was fun, which in itself was entirely what the company has built itself upon, and why they have such a diehard following as the decades have passed. Certainly with its eye towards crime storytelling as well, this feels different as well from something like Subspecies (1991), and this is where one of the coolest back-story details comes into play in regards to its director-writer C. Courtney Joyner. He is a figure whose career as a regular collaborator with Full Moon Productions shows the positivity the company has, in how Charles Band its figurehead has directors and figures producing films for them over decades in various roles, but he also has this enticing second career in terms of westerns. As a writer of western texts, both actual western stories but also documents on western films, including audio commentaries on westerns like Blue Underground’s 2013 release for Grand Duel (1972). Knowing this adds a nice flourish to Lurking Fear, as whilst this is not an exact adaptation of the original Lovecraft text, he clearly added touches that are crime based but could easily, with its isolated rural location, have explicitly Western frontier vibes in the modern day. Little details like this will make me come to appreciate a film like this, and I had already really enjoyed Lurking Fear as the film it was.