The Dunwich Horror

    I’m so sorry, ‘The Devil’s Rain,’ I didn’t know what we had.

    Okay, lots to unpack in this one, so let’s address the elephant in the room first: American International Pictures. Created in 1954 by James H. Nicholson and Samuel Z. Arkoff, active through the 70’s, it was a company based on producing/securing and releasing low-budget genre movies, often in the form of double-features. They worked directly with theater owners, who as an industry were much more independent then and not part of larger chains, often shaping scripts and movies around what owners would tell them were popular in their theaters. They focused mainly on the teenage crowd so as those tastes changed so did the movies. What started out in the 50’s as Westerns and monster movies gave way in the 60’s to straight horror and cheap foreign films, mainly Italian knockoffs of more popular movies, to counterculture movies as the 60’s gave way to the 70’s, to then helping to form and riding the Blaxpoitation wave before facing diminishing returns as the larger studios and tv rendered their business model obsolete. They were effectively dead by the early 80’s.

    Roger Corman got a lot of his early breaks through AIP, as did Francis Ford Coppola, Brian de Palma, and Peter Bogdonivich. They also released later efforts by Fritz Lang, Jacques Tourneur, and Sidney Lumet. Notable films they released include Corman’s trilogy of movies based on Edgar Allen Poe stories starring Vincent Price, ‘Beach Blanket Bingo,’ ‘What’s Up, Tiger Lily?,’ ‘Foxy Brown,’ and ‘The Amityville Horror,’ as well as the US releases of a number of Godzilla movies and even ‘Mad Max.’

    Also tons and tons and tons of low-grade schlock by ham-fisted directors like Bert I. Gordon, Larry Buchanan, and Edward L. Cahn. Movies with titles like ‘The Astounding She-Monster’ and ‘White Slave Ship.’ If you watch any four random MST3K episodes there is a very good chance that an AIP picture will be at least one of them. Their gimmick was to whip up a couple of killer movie posters with eye-catching titles first and use those posters plus the double-feature format to book theaters in advance of actually making the movies, often producing them two at a time and pushing most of the budget into the first one so if they walked out of the second one who cared, they already had their money. This was the same kind of venture run by such notables as Herschell Gordon Lewis and William Castle, a way to get butts in seats that bypassed the studio system by working as their own producers and distributors and cutting deals directly with the theaters. A lot of terrible cinema was made this way but way more often than you’d think it turned out some really interesting movies.

Honestly, the main title theme rocks a bit.

    ‘The Dunwich Horror’ was released in 1970 and owes much of its structure, soundtrack, and design to the 1960’s. It was directed by Daniel Haller, who would go on to have a strong showing as a tv director in the 70’s, and written at least in part by Curtis Hanson, the writer/director behind ‘L.A. Confidential.’ It starred a mustachioed Dean Stockwell and a late-period Sandra Dee, as well as containing incidental roles for such notables as a pre-’Rocky’ Talia Shire and a post-Jr. Ed Begley. An adaptation of a short story, it was not reviewed well by critics and fared middlingly at the box office.

    It’s also ludicrously straightforward. Dean Stockwell plays Wilber Whateley, a scion of a troubled family long involved in worshiping ‘the old ones.’ He travels to a nearby university and asks to take a look at their copy of a book called ‘The Necronomicon.’ During this he somehow charms the character of a professor’s assistant, Nancy Wagner, played by Sandra Dee. She somehow finds him intriguing, and although it’s later implied he has magic hypnosis powers (and certainly does have drugged-tea date rape powers) it never really makes sense why she’s into him at all. She gives him a ride home after he misses his bus and over the course of a single weekend he slowly but very clearly explains he intends to sacrifice her at a ritual to summon ‘the old ones’ to conquer the earth.

Ladies ....

    Over the course of 88 minutes that’s exactly what happens. There are some noodling around the edges, like Wilber constantly drugging Nancy’s tea to make her more suggestible, her professor and friend showing up at Wilber’s house to get her to leave, which is foiled by her simply telling them ‘no,’ some backstory involving his family, a very small amount of small-town bigotry, and it ends at said ceremony as Wilber and the professor shout at each other for a few minutes and then Wilber dies in the fireball, the end.

Enjoy your freaky climax.

    It sounds like I must be leaving out a whole lot but I’m really not. There are other scenes, of course, like Nancy having crazy hippie dreams, or Wilber and Nancy lounging riverside and talking about the dreams, or the town doctor talking about Wilber’s birth and the supposedly stillborn twin baby that’s actually the monster in a room upstairs at Wilber’s house (you think skipping a monster would be a big deal but the movie uses it for about ten minutes of off-screen time total before showing it in all it’s non-glory at the very end as a kind of hand-amalgam thing that dies along with Wilber). A mob shows up at a cemetery, there’s a couple of scenes in a mental hospital, none of it add anything other than time. ‘The Devil’s Rain’ was boring as well with long sections of nothing but at least there I wasn’t told what was going to be the plot of the entire movie 33 minutes in.

    Dean Stockwell is the only actor who isn’t ... terrible is too strong a word, how about not completely boring. He’s completely miscast (not as badly as Sandra Dee, mind you) but he’s at least doing some interesting things. He’s never charming but he’s at least a normal asshole for the first fifteen minutes. After he gets Nancy back to his creepy house he’s throwing up red flags every other sentence but he’s at least trying to meet the material half way, treating summoning a race of alien conquerors as pretty much the obvious right call. Ed Begley is in a different movie that would’ve been shot in black and white, his acting consisting of basically just existing in scenes until its his turn to talk. Nancy’s friend Elizabeth is clearly supposed to be the voice of reason but she’s so unlikable I was hoping Nancy would just wander out of frame and never come back leaving all these characters to deal with each other. Sandra Dee herself is left stranded by the movie, wandering from line to line of dialogue as the plot requires and having no discernible wants or needs of her own. She supposedly took the role after a hiatus of several years because she was so impressed with the script, which frankly raises an entire host of questions about her and what she thought her role in the movie was. The shots are stodgy, the art design is rather embarrassingly cheap, and the script makes me want to have that ‘L.A. Confidential’ Oscar taken back.  

    The only real bright spot I can recall is the soundtrack, which is generally just as boring as the rest of the movie but if you speed up by 20% or so kind of turns into a decently rocking psychedelic score. The composer was Les Baxter who apparently was something of a name in the 40’s and 50’s jazz scene. Allmusic.com’s review of his first album, 1948’s ‘Music Out of the Moon,’ contains the lines “The granddaddy of the outer space exotica boom” and “the best selling theremin record of all time,” which is enough to add that musical genre to the list. At the very least it’s more interesting than anything else in this production.