Welcome back to New Adventures in Netflix, where crossing the streams is a weekly tradition. Yeah, don’t think about that one too much. I’m not proud of it either. This week it turns out that Insidious is doing quite well at the box office – despite my protestations – so I thought I’d take a look at another mediocre ‘demon in a house’ movie, but one that doesn’t tick me off so much. Naturally, I refer to the low-budget nerd-fest The Unnamable, based on the story by horror legend H.P. Lovecraft.
Horror geeks often refer to H.P. Lovecraft as the greatest, or at least most influential horror writer of the 20th Century. Everyone else usually refers to him as, “Who’s H.P. Lovecraft.” We was a brilliant writer whose works tended to revolve around the inexplicable: concepts, visions and nightmares which are so ‘cosmic’ that they frequently break the brains of his protagonists, sending them off to asylums or to their own deaths by the end of their respective tales. As a result of this, Lovecraft’s stories don’t tend to translate well to the cinema. It also didn’t help that most of his stories were light in plot and character departments as well. His approach worked like gangbusters on the page, but filmmakers frequently find themselves having to make drastic additions and/or changes to his material just to fill a standard 90-minute running time. To date, the best (and most accurate) adaptation of his work is Re-Animator, based on an atypically plot-heavy Lovecraft story that he pretty much just did for the money, and was never very proud of.
The Unnamable isn’t one of the more shameful Lovecraft adapations (the anthology film Necronomicon: Book of the Dead is full of worse filmmaking), but it’s a stuffy little film with only a little bit of gore and at best an infrequent nipple to keep your attentions rooted. The bulk of the film takes place in a creepy, haunted house where a bunch of college kids are hunted by an ‘Unnamable’ demonic force. Unlike Sam Raimi, whose Evil Dead 2 told a similar story with the energy of a crackhead hooked up to a Red Bull drip, director Jean-Paul Ouellette directs his film with lazy afternoon Sunday kind of mentality. He wants to make this movie, but he’s in no particular hurry to get to the good stuff. The result is a film that isn’t quite boring but doesn’t do a whole heck of a lot to entertain, either. It’s a fun flick to watch with your friends, unless you’re a hardcore Lovecraft nut, in which case there is actually something to recommend here.
With one notable exception, the cast of The Unnamable is an unremarkable lot that will quickly reduce itself to character types or celebrity look-alikes in your head: the jock with a sweater around his neck, the girl who looks like Roseanna Arquette, the girl who looks and sounds like a young Arianna Huffington, etc. The exception, of course, is Randolph Carter, played by Mark Kinsey Stephenson. Carter was often a stand-in for H.P. Lovecraft in his own stories, and Stephenson plays up the role to fit Lovecraft’s famous eccentricities: a lack of interest in the opposite sex, a love for scholarly debate, and a generally nerdy demeanor make Carter a surprisingly fascinating hero in The Unnamable. He’s unlike anyone else in the cast, and indeed the cast of most other horror movies. He’s practical, refusing to be goaded into spending the night in a haunted house even to prove his own theories because, heck, what if he’s right? He spends half the film quietly reading in the living room while the rest of the cast gets picked up one-by-one, because the information in the books will save their lives. And he’s kind of a snot about it, too. It’s not a great performance but at least it was distinct enough to make bring the character back for the sequel, The Unnamable II.
Which brings us to that title: The Unnamable. Do you see the problem there?
From a tautological perspective The Unnamable doesn’t hold water. Maybe if The Unnamable wasn’t capitalized I could have let it slide, but you can’t just give something unnamable a name. It’s tacky. What’s worse is that as the movie concludes we discover that The Unnamable actually has a name. It’s ‘Alyda.’ Not a good name, perhaps, but somehow they managed to actually ascribe a title to the beast. A better title would have been, The Hard-to-Describe… or at the very least Irony is Ironic Sometimes.
The Unnamable is a dumb movie but it’s mostly harmless, and it's currently only available on Instant Streaming. Lovecraft aficionados probably already know about it and have some affection for Stephenson’s character, but may have written it off as a lesser Lovecraft adaptation. Then again, with rare exception they’re almost all lesser adaptations. It’s a good thing Guillermo Del Toro’s finally getting his version of At the Mountains of Madness made and…
Oh crap. Never mind.
