Dark Heritage

A group of campers is slaughtered whilst camping in a wooded area.Press reporter Clint Harrison decides to try to find out exactly what happened to those campers who died.He enlists two other men for help and goes to the woods where they reach an abandoned creepy looking mansion.Clint's team begins to die killed by some sort of bizarre creatures.What's going on in this derelict mansion?"Dark Heritage" by independent film-maker David McCormick is a watchable albeit quite slow-moving horror film inspired by short story written by H.P Lovecraft titled "Lurking Fear".The acting is amateurish and the dialogue is often terrible,but the monsters look creepy and the story is cool.6 Lovecrafts out of 10.

Independent film maker David McCormick was at his best when he ably directed his no-name cast and managed his motley crew to produce a film that keeps you wondering throughout the entire flick. Some might view the actors as stiff and slow, but this is the real secret of Dark Heritage; that is, a cast of characters who know next to nothing about acting are used by McCormick in ways that will make the hair on the back of your neck stand straight up. Shot on location in Louisiana, this film takes advantage of the swamps, plantations, and antebellum homes. In fact it's in one antebellum home that the bloodiest scenes of the movie take place. The director's camera techniques in the horrific dream sequence are done to make the viewer squirm in his seat. The sound track is moving and is timed to move the viewer along to discover the secrets of a mysterious family of man-eating creatures. And perhaps an even more important note than the music is the way the recording of the sound and sound effects throughout the entire movie enhanced and, in some cases, even made up for the few shortcomings of the actors. McCormick took some unknowns and created a thriller that incorporates the best of detective "who dunnits" with the probing ferocity of heroic journalists. Combined with blood and guts, drama and intensity, and sheer terror, this is a "must see" film on a Friday night with a group of your best buds (and maybe some 12 ounce ones too).

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.

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.

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.