Dark Heritage

The girls might be prettier if you're their accompanist or a $#!+-faced onlooker. What I'm sayin' is that it'll take special circumstances for a non-whince reaction to this effort. The delivery of many lines appears to be distractingly unnatural for some actors. Lighting seems to be a problem, too, although failing eyesight may have accounted for my frequent squinting. And if you view this film, be open-minded enough to accept elements that no zoo or circus would reject: They are the above and below-ground creatures who feasted on dozens of campers near an empty Louisiana mansion. That's the discovery of a trio who is dispatched from their printed media to investigate the deaths. Then, two of THEM disappear, and the survivor is part of another threesome who take up the hunt. Eureka! I just realized what one of those aforementioned "special circumstances" would be - unconsciousness.

Let's get the bad out of the way: This is a regional horror film, with non-actors and no budget. However, what surprised me about this film was that it actually managed to generate some sort of atmosphere, and even more surprising is that I didn't fall asleep.

A journalist with bad hair gets sent to research a story with a guy about as wooden as the back yard of B&Q. There's a house in Louisiana where there's a doings a transpirin' and it's up to the journalist and his two buddies to find out what's going' down. His buddies disappear, so the journalist does what people never do in horror films: he actually runs away! That was refreshing for starters.

Although he does go back with two other guys. Despite the legion of handicaps this film has, it still manages to keep going at a good pace, and by the time the creatures appear I was forgiving the film for it's faults. Don't go in expecting a classic, or even a normal film, and you should have a good time.

It can never be a good sign when a film's credits don't list any name as "writer". Sure, everybody knows the plot is inspired by H.P Lovecraft's "The Lurking Fear", but even the legendary horror author remains uncredited, and nobody else is mentioned for the adaptation, neither. "The Lurking Fear" is a fantastically horrifying tale, but it has yet to receive a good film version, and this clearly wasn't going to be it. "Dark Heritage" truly is a laughably incompetent late-80s horror dud, but at the same time I must admit it's also tremendously entertaining! Three guys head down to Louisiana to investigate a mass murder that took place at camping ground near a reputedly haunted mansion. Sure, I know they look like drunken perverts on a fishing trip, but they are actually reporters of a newspaper. They spend the night at the mansion, but one thunderstorm and a bit of blurry camera footage later, two of them have vanished and the survivor is blamed for murder. But our hero, Clint, quickly finds two new buddies (two 40-year-old college students) to further investigate the origin of the hideous demons crawling around the Dansen estate.

Now, I know Lovecraft's tale "The Lurking Fear" rather well, and what I honestly can't figure out is why the name and nationality of the spooky immigrant family changed for this version? It always was the Martense family and they came from Holland. Now suddenly, they are the Dansen family from Norway? Lots of the things happening in "Dark Heritage" are dumb and don't make the slightest bit of sense, the dialogues appear to be written by a 4-year-old, and the acting performances are beyond insufferable. On the other hand, the make-up effects are surprisingly gross (the bloke with the half-eaten face is terrific) and the "underground dwellers" look effectively creepy. I enjoyed it, and wouldn't hesitate to recommend it to tolerant fans of cheap and cheesy 80s horror flicks. Still, the film could have used a couple of females in the cast, and the finale is a total letdown, so I really can't give it a rating higher than 4.

I watched this because it was supposedly adapted from Lovecraft's Lurking Fear, and indeed it is.

The main house in it, I thought to myself, resembled the house Fletch inherited in Fletch Lives (1989). In fact, it is!: the Ashland-Belle Helene Plantation, Geismer, Louisiana, USA. I think it's unlikely they were both shooting there the same year. Dark Heritage seems like it could be several years older than its copyright date.

A reporter is sent to do a story on some campers that have been killed (we only see that two are attacked, but evidently more were). The newspaper's owner has the manager offer the reporter to stay in a nearby house about which he is also curious. The manager thinks it's a really bad idea, but the reporter agrees and has two other guys willing to join him.

Something happens during the night, and the two other guys are killed; the reporter flees. No evidence is found afterward, but a videotape they'd made shows up in the reporter's car mysteriously. He researches the house and the area in a library, where he meets two parapsychologists who are also interested in the house.

The new team of three goes back, and they discover strange holes in the ground around the house...

I don't think there will be any big surprises for anyone who has read Lovecraft's story, or the two other movie adaptations of it (Lurking Fear, and Bleeders AKA Hemoglobin). However, it is a good amateur effort.

I just finished up this unofficial adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft's "The Lurking Fear" that was shot in Louisiana. Outside of a few changes (names, setting), this follows the short story point by point for the first 70 minutes but then tries to inject its own "twist" ending that you could see coming from a mile away. Either way, it is a much better adaptation than Full Moon's THE LURKING FEAR. Too bad it is a terrible film. Director David McCormick shoots the thing with all the flair of an industrial short. I swear I counted maybe two camera movements. The creature design is cheap (we're talking store bought masks here) but shot in a dark manner (intentional or not) where they are somewhat creepy. The most impressive thing in the picture is the abandoned mansion but McCormick fails to exploit that as well. File this one under good adaptation, poor execution.