- Directed by Dan O’Bannon
- Written by H.P. Lovecraft, Brent Friedman
- Stars John Terry, Jane Sibbett, Chris Sarandon
- Run Time: 1 Hour, 48 Minutes
- Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzsEYPZt1Ts
- Get it: https://amzn.to/42XRuqO
Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone
It’s a detective story, with a bit of mystery, as a private investigator and his sidekicks put things together. We start out seeing the end, then get to see what led to that ending. The movie bogs down a bit in parts, but it’s got a good story and the conclusion is satisfying.
Spoilery Synopsis
Charles Ward escaped from the asylum, and the doctor isn’t happy about it. There’s an orderly in his room without a head, and it’s a real mess.
At the March Agency, John March, a P.I., dictates his story about Charles Dexter Ward. He flashes back a ways and talks about the city of Providence and the case…
Claire Ward comes to discuss a case. Her husband, Charles, was arrested for hiding some human remains. Since then, he’s been avoiding her. She tells a story about him abandoning a party to work in his laboratory in the carriage house. He had been working with Doctor Ash, who is creepy, but she wanted him to move his lab somewhere else, which he did. Not long after, Charles was arrested for having bodies in his possession. John agrees to check out Charles before he agrees to take the case.
John goes to a gas station and talks to a man cleaning up a dead dog. The gas man is weird and creepy, but John finds his way to the Ward house. He talks to Charles, and he’s evasive, but not excessively so, so John leaves. Later, he reads about “Vandalism at Cemetery” in the paper. His assistant Lonnie calls and reports that the police found eight bodies in Charles’s old lab. All the bodies were from dead occultists, wizards, and magical scholars.
John tells Claire what he’s learned so far, and she explains that he found old family papers and that sparked interest in Joseph Curwen, a reputed magician who lived in an old house in the country. They went to the house and found a painting of Curwen, who looks just like Charles. Right after that, Charles started working late nights in the lab and got weird.
Claire shows John the painting and the carriage house, which has old bloody IV bags and animal blood in the fridge.
Mr. Fenner, the man across the street from Charles’s new place, calls John, but when John arrives, the old man is dead. There’s not much left of the body, and the police think it was a wild animal attack. John has weird dreams that night.
Claire comes by in the morning with a cassette tape from Charles. He says he’s made a terrible mistake, and he’s afraid of her. “Keep away from Dr. Ash. Don’t even talk to him.” The two go out to the farmhouse again, and Charles has changed. He even talks differently now; he sounds British now.
Charles says he’ll show them what he’s been working on in six weeks. He’s very intense about it and uses antiquated language. John suggests that Charles has become convinced that he’s this Curwen character.
John and Lonnie do their detective work and learn a lot about Charles’s assistant Raymond. They can’t find out anything about Dr. Ash.
John goes back to Ward’s place with the police to have him committed briefly, and they arrest Raymond. When they get outside, Charles has a knife to Claire’s throat. John gets cut, but they get Charles into a straightjacket and into the ambulance.
At the mental hospital, the doctor examines Charles, who is still speaking old-time British and looks very sickly. He wants to eat raw, bloody meat. The doctor talks to Claire and John, explaining that Charles has homicidal and cannibalistic urges.
John finds the diary of Ezra Ward from 1771. He came to America and started a shipping business. He lived at the same time as Curwen, who stole Ezra’s girlfriend Eliza. He came to the conclusion that Curwen was practicing witchcraft on corpses. A hundred men stormed Curwen’s house, but Eliza admits that she’s carrying Curwen’s child. That’s the end of the book.
Claire wants to go back to the house and really go through what’s in the basement. They bring explosives, just in case. They find a passageway down under the basement, and it smells terrible. There’s a whole series of tunnels and doors down there, and they look around.
They find Charles’s notes, where Charles bragged that he’s beaten Death itself. The lab is full of interesting things. Including dead animals that aren’t really dead.
Suddenly, the light goes out, and the creatures pull Lonie down into the darkness and eat him. There are weird deformed, slimy, inhuman monsters all over the place, and they’re down to one single match. As they make their way out, John drops little explosives along the way. As they get in the car, he blows up everything.
John takes Claire to the hospital with a concussion and learns that she’s pregnant. John opens Charles’s suitcase and finds a disguise in there that looks like Dr. Ash. And there are human bones in there as well.
John goes to see Charles at the mental hospital. John knows that he’s been taken over by Curwen. The bones in the suitcase are what’s left of the real Charles Dexter Ward. Curwen explains everything. Charles raised Curwen from the dead, who put on a disguise and pretended to be Ash. After doing away with Charles, he’s been eating flesh to continue being immortal. He’s learned things he’s not supposed to know.
Curwen then rips off the straightjacket and kills the orderly, pulling his head off. John throws some of the super chemical on Charle’s bones and brings him back to life as an angry skeleton. The skeleton rips the skin off Curwen, and both disappear. John then arranges things to look like Charles simply escaped, walks out of the hospital, and goes back to his office to tell the story as we saw at the beginning.
Brian’s Commentary
This one is loosely based on H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.” There is a lot of slow meandering through the dungeon in this one, to the point of boredom. Despite the really slow middle, it had a good story, a good mystery, and a very cool conclusion.
Kevin’s Commentary
I enjoyed this the most of the Lovecraft movies we’ve seen lately, though it does have some slow points. Overall it was entertaining with a good script, creepy effects, and a strong cast.
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