Not the best H. P. Lovecraft adaptation but also not the worst, The Dunwich Horror stars Dean Stockwell (Quantum Leap) as Wilbur Whatley, Sandra Dee (Gidget) as Nancy Wagner, and Ed Begley (12 Angry Men) as Dr. Armitage. Wilbur Whatley is trying to bring the Old Ones through to this dimension and he can only do that with the help of Nancy Wagner (as she is a virgin!) Now let's be honest here. Lovecraft never had a love interest in the story The Dunwich Horror, but hey, this is a 1970 Roger Corman AIP picture! If with all of these story book flaws, I still love this movie. It helps that I am a Sandra Dee film (just ask my wife!)If you haven't given this HPL film a shot, it's better than some but not as good as others. One of these days someone is going to come along a make a H.P. Lovecraft film that everyone is going to be blown away by. Of course of Mr. Lovecraft was alive today he'd probably detest it, I mean, he didn't like Franenstein when he saw it in 1931! Frankenstein! That is just crazy.

You know why Lovecraft is so hard to film, other than the fact that most of the monsters are necessarily "indescribable" horrors? It's because he doesn't really write people at all. This is probably one of the more overtly "pulpy" of Lovecraft's tales. In its original form, it even has a hero, and a resolution that's not Pure Doom, or at least ends with the monster being vanquished. Theoretically, this makes "The Dunwich Horror" one of the easier Lovecraft tales to translate to the screen. But it still is told in this extremely detached, kind of faux-scholarly manner. There's no dialog, as such, and almost everything seems to come to the reader "second-hand". In practical terms then, screen-writers who want to tackle Lovecraft's stuff actually have to do a lot of work to make the stories function as film. I submit that, all things considered, this is actually one of the better ones.You have to put aside Lovecraft a bit here, and think of this as the kind of work that hundreds of writers have done since then in an effort to "humanise" the concepts in his stories, if not the stories themselves. If you are a Lovecraft "purist", maybe this bothers you. But I don't think it should. It's not like the stories aren't still available in all their glory for us to read.One thing that I have seen a few writers do, and which Lovecraft hints at himself in the original story (but only hints, mind you), is portray a certain amount of sympathy for Wilbur Whateley. I always thought the brief exerpt from Wilbur's diary was the most interesting part of the story, and I know I'm not alone in thinking it would have been interesting to see the whole story from *his* perspective.Now, this 1970 film doesn't totally do that. There are still "good guys", and yes, they're still kind of uninteresting. But the screen-writers were smart in making this more about Wilbur and his story. He wants to destroy the world, but you know he wants to do it because he's outcast, frustrated and a creature apart. The whole town shuns him. Their hypocrisy is transparent and I think it's supposed to make you angry. noo better is this illustrated when Wilbur and nancy pull up at the store to gas up her car. The guy is all delighted at the sight of a pretty young stranger, but then sees Wilbur and his entire demeanor changes to one of cold hostility. Wilbur just kind of shrugs and says, "that's the way it is. They all hate me."Apparently either Corman or the director wanted to get Vincent Price in for the Wilbur role. I love Vincent Price, but I submit that, having already done The Haunted Palace, this role wouldn't have been right for him. It may be controversial (judging from other comments I've seen and heard about this movie), but I think Dean Stockwell was perfect for this. he is slightly awkward, almost shy-seeming. He speaks in a low, buzzing voice. And he does what I like to call the "Trance of the Old Ones" (because it's a thing, you see), where he's reading something, or thinking aloud, and starts uttering words in an alien language in a kind of subdued, but reverent, monotone, really well. The main addition made by the screen-writers is the character of nancy, who isn't even hinted at in the original story. On the one hand, you can see that they just wanted a "damsel in distress" character, like in The Haunted Palace, and yes, that's kind of unfortunate. But, Sandra Dee acquits herself well, I think, even though she ends up acting kind of drugged for most of the film. The story of her falling under the unlikely influence of Wilbur, who is after all not much of a charming or seductive type, is the most interesting thing about this rather cool film. It is too bad she wasn't given a chance to be more proactive, but given the time, audience, source material, etc, I can't really fault anything here. The only real fault is, as I mentioned before, that Armitage et al are not really as interesting. That's hardly unique to this film. I'd even say it's a rare thing to find overt "good guys" to be as interesting as the villains in these types of movies.Finally, the score by les Baxter, is freaking amazing. Seriously psychedelic, eeerie, and full of awesome percussive flourishes. The opening animated sequence is also extremely cool. This could definitely be considered a "psychotronic" kind of film. It's worth your time.

At a Massachusetts University, Wilbur Whateley (Dean Stockwell) searches out for the mysterious Necronomicon book. Dr. Henry Armitage (Ed Begley) is unwilling to lend it to him. Student Nancy Wagner (Sandra Dee) gives him a ride back to Dunwich. He lives with his grandfather Old Whateley (Sam Jaffe). He keeps her at the house through drug-induced hallucinatory visions. Armitage and her friend Elizabeth Hamilton come looking for her.This is a lower grade slow-moving B-horror. There is nothing scary. Stockwell does his best creep but there isn't much else. The hippie old visual effects saps any horror from the movie. This is based on a H.P. Lovecraft story but it really doesn't deserve the name. The snakes-headed figure is only in the film for a seconds and is a disappointing stiff static thing.

This was one of the first movies to mine H.P. Lovecraft's works for a plot, using the story of the same title, but radically changing the plot interactions and characters. (The story was a linear progression from the view of outsiders, while the movie was told from the perspective of Wilbur). It's keeps a lot of the ambiance of Lovecraft's tale, but is completely different in its take. It also includes a lot of 1960's occultism that would have embarrassed HPL.Dean Stockwell is creepy as Wilbur Whatley, the more human looking twin spawn of Yog-Sothoth. Where the movie falls down is in the actual monster twin,(the main focus of the story, but an afterthought here.) It looks like a guy in a costume, and no amount of filtered photography was going to take away from that.The selling point of this movie is Sandra Dee, who manages to be quite sexy as the intended sacrifice/receptacle for the Old Ones. The level of sex in this movie would have gotten an NC-17 today...