Usually I don't like movies that have three stories with a wrapper around them but here it works fine. The first story is pretty good, the second is pretty dull and the last is awesome. The wraparound is one of the best in this type of movie. The first story was good with a great amount of creepy monster effects and scary moments. The second story left me cold. The third story was great with like demons and stuff. The wraparound would have been better as a separate story but it is very entertaining with a great ending (just like the first and third stories). Four stories in one film and three of them are great! This is a gritty classic.

Jeffrey Combs, Bruce Payne, Richard Lynch, David Warner, they all lend both weight and goofiness to the movies they play in. In this loosely Lovecraftian anthology, they don't disappoint. The stories have various degrees of quality in writing and acting, but the low budget high impact special effects and the overall atmosphere of the movie is quite satisfying.Written, directed and acted by different people, the three parts are basically different short films, wrapped around by a silly story of Lovecraft reading the Necronomicon in order to gain inspirations for his writing. Jeffrey Combs is playing Lovecraft. Just recently having seen another TV movie based on Lovecraft, it was fun to see him play another character in that one, as well, 16 years later.I recognized the second story as Cool Air, but it was kind of difficult to recognize The Rats in the Walls and The Whisperer in Darkness in the other two. While I deplore the low quality of the scripting, I applaud the attempt to adapt the material, rather than follow it exactly like it was written.Overall it will never be a great movie, but for a TV film inspired by Lovecraft, it is OK.

I've seen a couple of Lovecraft based movies, and, oddly, all of them were pretty good. I appreciate when a film crew manages to capture the spirit of the book being covered. And from that viewpoint, an HPL movie would hardly show any gore or monsters at all, but, instead, build our expectations through time. The plot would be intense, although not necessarily very dynamic. The final moment of the movie would unveil a grim truth, probably rendering the protagonists insane. So, having set the (in my humble opinion) optimal lovecraftian movie criteria, let's watch Necronomicon! 90% of the movie's budget was probably spent on monster fx - a waste of resources! The acting is not very bright, the characters barely believable. As for the stories, they're a desecration of all things Lovecraft. Unconnected scenes. Almost completely unrelated to any book, and devoid of sense, they made me cover my eyes in shame. Someone here's written in a comment that this movie is for Lovecraft fans only. Boy, were they wrong! If you're a Lovecraft fan, stay away from this movie! Run, like it's the Dunwich horror!. Else, if you're a classical gore flick fan, go ahead, you might like this mindless collage of scenes painted red.

Lovecraft's, and the other writers of the common mythos' work is SO difficult to translate to film. Attempts to illustrate the alluded-to but barely observed horror of most of the genre tend to fail because the substance is not generally visual. It is a state of mind. Lovecraft paints a picture of terrified paranoia where the haunted protagonist is alone in what he sees, trapped in the inability to communicate the reality of his dire predicament except by rambling about shunned this and forbidden that... It is rarely possible to get inside the head of the victim to see what he sees, because stripped of its "out of the corner of your eye" fleeting impression playing on your mind quality, it also tends to get stripped of its horror and become fairly standard Gothic, splatter or just camp. Reanimator is a fine case of camp. Dunwich Horror is Gothic..The only superlative translation, in my opinion, is Dagon, a fairly close following of The Shadow Over Innesmouth, as I recall. Strangely, something that captures the feel rather than any particular plot would be Carpenter's Mouth of Madness... a portrait of a state of mind rather than encounters.I think that Necronomicon - NOT "the book of the dead" but more properly "the book of dead names" or a similar near translation - is a film that attempts to look behind the veil rather than standing in a panic contemplating the veil itself. In doing this, it runs all sorts of risks and I believe that it largely succeeds. The stories have been discussed enough here, but the final buckets of blood and latex offering actually carries the idea with it of the utter alienness that is the horror that Lovecraft perceives. Unfortunately most viewers revulsion will be at the splatter and sticky redness, and barriers will go up at "yet another" bag of sinews chucked around the studio as the automatic filing system kicks in and the brain immediately categorises it with chainsaw massacres and cannibal holocausts and various other films showing interplanetary roadkill or hell-raised skin-tearing as the end point in audience manipulation.If we can bear with the direction a little, It's not the "Ickiness" that revolts us.. it's only a vehicle to carry the REAL horror of complete and utter "lostness" - the certainty of a destiny that is so awful that it's something that medieval visions of Hell can only vaguely hint at. Lovecraft was genuinely terrified by it and afraid to look at it head on because he believed that it would drive him completely mad... and if we try and do it for him we either miss the point or see smoke and mirrors. Film is not the best medium for this. Literature, and maybe music and drama tends to work better, but we demand films, and the best we get is interpretation that runs the risk of the viewer not "getting it." Usually, of course, the film maker doesn't "get it" either, which is why most Gothic horror becomes so camp, translated to screen, although this works rather well as entertainment in different ways.Thankyou, Hammer.)Necronomicon is a brave effort to translate Lovecraft's vision to the screen. It's not perfect by any means, but I'm still going to give it 9 for valour