What a beautiful movie!

How sad is this?

This is a tender, generous movie that likes its characters and presents them as real people, full of flaws and strengths.

There's a more than satisfactory amount of boom-boom in the movie's trim running time.

I can imagine the frustration of Hollywood producers trying to transmute a rich and reputed mythos into money by using the same old recipes that work for any other concept and failing miserably in the case of Lovecraft. But they have to try.Such an attempt is this adaptation of the short story with the same name. They start with the wise and nutty professor and his sexy assistant, join forces with an unbeliever and proceed through bad CGI to make him believe before he can use the knowledge that he already had to defeat the monster that had no chance to win in the first place. Yeah, the script is a mess, especially considering that The Dunwich Horror is one of the more classically good vs evil Lovecraft stories.However, that doesn't mean the film cannot be entertaining. As a nod to the 1970 version, Dean Stockwell plays again for the good team, while Jeffrey Combs is a really convincing Wilbur. The horror of the possible opening of the portal to the Old Ones is rendered well, yet everything else is cheesy in a "let's make some money" way that disgusts me. Yog-Sothoth take all money grabbing Hollywood people! I hated the entire useless romantic liaison added, as well as the "team" aspect that never existed in the original material and was put here only to standardize the story to something the public is used to.Bottom line: in the end, the Lovecraft aspect of the film is minimal, even if they kept the general plot of the story. It is the soul that they couldn't grasp. And it is strange, too, as Lovecraft is usually tending to the needs of the superego, distressed by "unnatural" events or beings; it should be easy to put that into a movie. I just don't think they get it! You need to make your viewers feel dirty inside for watching the film. That's the actual point of Lovecraft stuff!

***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!!

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.

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.