Cathardincu Surprisingly incoherent and boring

Titreenp SERIOUSLY. This is what the crap Hollywood still puts out?

BoardChiri Bad Acting and worse Bad Screenplay

Edwin The storyline feels a little thin and moth-eaten in parts but this sequel is plenty of fun.

KDCarson ***Spoilers***Why can't Hollywood or the Syfy Channel just read what Lovecraft wrote and do some good anthology movies of his short stories?? Trying to take one of his novella's or short stories and stretch it into an hour and one half movie is a hard task to do except for those film makers who truly love Lovecraft's writings. Dean Stockwell shows up again, not doing quite as good a job as the first time. The plot is very far away from the original written classic. Acting and special effects okay, but they should have stayed much closer to the original story. A cute girl was added for eye candy effect, also not a character found in the original story. And a rather wooden excuse for a primary hero in the college professor. Alas, poor Lovecraft!! I pray a well funded famous director will do you justice one day!!

dutchchocolatecake Pros - Good props, good scenery, good music; and a cast that included people of color. Cons - everything else.This movie will appeal to pop culture Lovecraft "fans" that read a few things on the Internet (maybe even saw a couple comics and thought, "yeah, that's cool!") and like the idea of Lovecraft's work without actually downloading .txt's or cracking the spine of a book to find out more. There's a lot I can look past in a low budget movie. I'm not an FX snob. I understand that there is so much you can do to "wow" the audience visually. But there's no excuse for lack of substance and intellectually stunted scriptwriting. If the plot is coherent, the characters complex and relatable, and the theme pays respectful homage to Lovecraft's works; you can count my vote in. However, like many of "Lovecraft" adaptations, I cannot throw my lot in with this one; mostly because of the abysmal portrayal of women.Women in this movie are either possessed, barefoot and pregnant, naked and/or sexualized in some other way, or just plain ornamental tag-alongs that have no identity outside the men they are accompanying at any given time. Not only are the men in this movie condescending, smug, and quick to put women in their "place" in this movie (or at least what the screenwriter believes is a "woman's place"); there's also a helping of ritualized rape, domestic battery, and allusions to incest. And then there's Jeffrey Combs. An ongoing legend in Lovecraft films. Yet he's cast into a minor, annoying role that any community college drama student could have filled. Such a disappointment.Wow what a waste. Could have been salvageable in a few respects - one, actually respecting the spirit of Lovecraft's work and two, not relying on cheap plot devices that alienate the female half of the audience. This is what happens when immature egotism gathers enough money and sycophants to attempt to rewrite a science fiction tradition that is almost a hundred years strong. Thanks for nothing.

Robert J. Maxwell It opens with a childbirth at home. The light is eerie. We see a woman in bed screaming horribly while she stares at her swollen belly. The attendants goggle as parturition proceeds. The camera pans around, never holding still. The cuts are instantaneous. A glistening black snake crawls up an attendant's arm.The rest of the movie -- as much of it as I was able to bear before an attack of restless legs syndrome set in -- follows the same template. There is hardly a pause for ordinary conversation. One shocking horror follows another, accompanied by loud music and diverse grotesqueries.There's a rural family involved. They all have bizarre appearances. The family head sits there cackling while skinning some kind of black-furred animal, maybe a cat or a skunk. A whirligig of a woman is bald except for a long fringe of blond hair.Dean Stockwell looks normal enough as the chief investigator of that "portal" that opened up during the childbirth. Stockwell was the chief investigator of a previous version of "The Dunwich Horror", filmed some thirty or forty years earlier. His assistant, Sarah Lieving, is pretty and thoroughly glamorized. I imagine she'll wind up strapped to a table in some dank cellar. There is a snooty expert on the mysterious Necromicon, a book that contains the spell that opens and closes "portals." He's pretty normal too, although he is, as I say, kind of disdainful and snooty. I hope he gets sacrificed.I've sometimes puzzled over H. P. Lovecraft, who wrote this tale, along with other stories of horror, fantasy, and science fiction. Edgar Allan Poe had a theory of literature -- throw everything else out the window and go for the effect. Logic counts for nothing. Imagine Poe and Alfred Hitchcock chatting about this. But H. P. Lovecraft seems to have taken this theory to its extreme. In one of his stories, nothing happens except that a guy wakes up in some underground chamber and finds his way to the surface. It's spooky but there is no substance to it.This movie stinks, a pointless exercise in ominousness and computer-generated effects. Any successful horror story begins in more or less placid normality and works its way into the abnormal. Look at "The Exorcist" or "Rosemary's Baby" or "The Shining" for good examples. Well, I'll mention Val Lewton's work at RKO in passing. This one begins with junk and, I expect, ends the same way.Recommended for self-haters, the guilt-ridden, those recently emerged from an eremetic existence, the irretrievably mad, and toddlers who have never seen a movie before.

JoeB131 Some of the cast choices gave me hope. Dean Stockwell was in the 1970 adaptation of the Lovecraft classic, and there has been some law passed that Jeffrey Combs has to be in every Lovecraft adaptation made after 1980, I think. Sadly, the two guys who you might have heard of are barely extended cameos. Then again, so is much of Lovecraft's story, which only takes up about 14 of the 1:45 running time of this turkey.Fans of Lovecraft know this story. A human woman mates with the elder God, Yog-Sothoth, having a pair of twins, a human looking Wilbur who ages dramatically in ten years, and a hideous monster that eats people. Sadly, they are only in the movie for a brief period, and Combs isn't nearly trying his best. (Imagine him saying. "Hey, I've been on Star Trek! I don't need to do this Lovecraft garbage anymore!") Most of the rest of this film is our star-crossed lovers searching for the missing page of the Necromonicon, a lot of name-dropping from other Lovecraft stories. Ugh. A romance in a Lovecraft story? No, in a Lovecraft story, everyone usually goes insane and is sent to an asylum.Combs is probably closer to the way Lovecraft wrote Wilbur Whatley in the original story, but so what? It seems they realized they had to stretch a 44 page story into a hour and half feature on the skiffy channel.Also, nothing in the story really emphasizes the horror of this situation. There are a bunch of alien Gods waiting to get back into our universe and kill everyone... Except for one line, there's no discussion of the philosophical implications of it.