SPOILER ALERT
the Dunwich Horror: (1970. dir: Daniel Haller) Trippy, '60s interpretation of the great Lovecraft story, one which is probably unfilmable as written, but catches so strong a hold on the imagination that it is, I trust, destined to be re-interpreted by moviemakers for all of eternity.
This time, the plot is dumbed down to include a ridiculously passive virgin-for-the-altar character (pity poor Sandra Dee), and the gargantuan and goatlike Wilbur Whateley is shrunken and humanized into a man who looks very much like a hipster version of Dean Stockwell. It has been re-set in 1970, relegating the "I look like Sandra Dee, I'm 27 and still lousy with virginity" idea to the slop-bucket of the utterly absurd. That said, there is still evidence of the true story squirming beneath the mountainous blasphemy of updates and rewrites, like the inclusion of that raucous flock of whippoorwills who hunker and wait to catch the souls of the dying as they leave their bodies.
In any case, the revelation for me was that psychedelia was a nice, low-budget way of expressing a Lovecraftian monster in those pre-CGI days. When the brave redshirt girl marches up and opens the fearsome, locked attic-chamber to release the beast, -- and, no, you won't find this scene in the Lovecraft story,-- she is overwhelmed by psychedelia. Consider the description of this monster in the original prose:
'Bigger'n a barn... all made o' squirmin' ropes... hull thing sort o' shaped like a hen's egg bigger'n anything with dozens o' legs like hogs-heads that haff shut up when they step... nothin' solid abaout it - all like jelly, an' made o' sep'rit wrigglin' ropes pushed clost together... great bulgin' eyes all over it... ten or twenty maouths or trunks a-stickin' aout all along the sides, big as stove-pipes an all a-tossin' an openin' an' shuttin'... all grey, with kinder blue or purple rings... an' Gawd in Heaven - that haff face on top..."
YOU try and film that without help from a computer.
Anyway, it's not a success, not by any standards, but it's an interesting failure, like a time-capsule from the Altamont era.
SPOILER ALERT
Triangle: (2009. dir: Christopher Smith) Ambitious Gewissengeist(*) horror outing by the director of Black Death, a man whose Christopher Nolan-ish, David Twohy-ish boldness in story and attention to detail attract me utterly. Flawed as it was, Black Death won me with its intrepid audacity (did I just say the same thing twice? consider it an attempt to emphasize the compliment). Triangle is more problematic, but equally bold, using both Time Vortex and Ghost Ship tropes, and using them rather well.
(The less you know about this film, the better, so stop reading now if you haven't seen it yet.)
A Time Vortex is a tricky thing, turning on a dime from suspense to Keystones Kops once you have more than a couple of versions of the same characters inhabiting the same space. Also, because it's plot-driven with an emphasis on action, an admirable attempt, the full dimensions of the characters have been sacrificed to favor pace and forward movement. Smith has made a crafty attempt to circumvent this flaw by casting extraordinarily well (would that all directors were so crafty), but the result is still not entirely effective. The other extremity of that particular stick is that once you know the ending, the "heroine's" maladroit and sometimes downright crazy-assed decisions become less inscrutable, but by that time certain skeptics in the audience may already have turned the channel.
*Gewissengeist: Conscience-Ghost
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