Dark Heritage

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.

First, seeing that this movie was a Lovecraft adaptation (somehow?) I picked up this priceless gem of horror-genre crap for about $2.50 at a flea market (though I think you can find people on Ebay who will pay you to take it). Upon sitting to watch this beauty, I noticed that there were three typographical errors on the back of the case. Planning to watch the worst piece of effluence to be made in a long time (Polish Vampire In Burbank not withstanding), I knew my wishes would be granted when the DVD title screen popped up: "Drak Heritage" I knew I had found a real winner. This movie went from bad to worse, and I actually believe they only gave the actors parts of the script at a time, so they never really knew how or where to develop their characters (as if the "story adapter" would have allowed characters to seem deeper than a blonde's brainwaves). The acting actually degenerated as the film progressed, or perhaps they shot it all in one day and the "actors" were getting tired. The actors they should have hired are the smooth-talkers who got this rancid pile of whale mucus produced and distributed, as they might have made more convincing characters, even if they were to simply spout gibberish (which might have made more sense plot-wise than the "carefully calculated dialogue" this film sports). But hey, they did great for a budget of $5.00, and seeing as I bought my copy for half that, they must've at least broken even somewhere, though the producers (a group of 12 year old rich boys with nothing better to do with daddy's money, who were undoubtedly promised a bit part in the credits) are probably kicking themselves very hard as far back as their knees will bend. All in all, dig around for $.50 in your couch, order it from some re-seller, and kick back to enjoy rotting your brain with something less entertaining than watching the grass grow. Great for insomniacs, because you will be snoozing in less than five minutes (which, oddly enough, is how long they took to edit this flick). On a scale of 1 - 10, I rate this a definite negative 9, as it reigns almost supreme among the refuse of the world (right below Neverending Story 3).

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.

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.