Lurking Fear (1994)

With "Lurking Fear", I hope to god I have arrived at the bottom floor of Full Moon Picture's out-put. This is one of those horror movies where it feels like nothing happens in the movie. It's an unnecessarily complicated set-up, then nothing, then a long overdue pay-off. You know you're in trouble in a monster movie when Vincent Schiavelli is the most interesting thing on screen. The creatures, when they FINALLY appear, can't hold a candle to that great man.Which brings me to another point: "Lurking Fear" has a surprisingly strong cast. Aside from Schiavelli, there's Mr Shakespeare, Jon Finch, and Mr Lovecraft, Jeffrey Combs. They don't do anything, or add anything to the movie at all.The plot: An improbably handsome man is released from prison for a crime he didn't commit. He has a map to find buried treasure in a cemetery, butt there's a bunch of other people who are also after the treasure, including some criminals. They have a stand-off in a church where apparently creatures live under the ground.About 90% of the movie is all the above named characters hanging around the church pointing guns at each other. None of the characters make any impression and it is hard to tell them apart. Presumably some are good guys and some are bad guys but the movie doesn't make this point strongly enough... or at all.The creatures are not unimpressive, but the movie never gives you a good look at them, and there are some scant moments of gore that could have been impressive.I think what we have here are all the ingredients to make a passable or even better than passable movie, and a writer-director with no clue how to use any of them. It's a waste of time for everyone concerned.

This is a film brought to us by Full Moon Studios, a studio that was constantly creating low budget horror back in the day. They made some good films and some bad ones; however, during the time this film was made, they were mainly doing horror comedies all the time and this one tries to be that too. I am kind of baffled by the score here on IMDb as I thought this film was quite bad, even for one of their movies because it just had too many flaws. A promising opening scene and a rather good premise were completely undone by where they took it and so many unnecessary plot points. I read the H.P. Lovecraft short story this one is based on and they had the makings of actually doing something with it, but just clogged the film down with so many things that just did not fit in with the premise. The deaths were also pretty much unmemorable, the acting horrid with the exception of the only two actors one would tend to recognize (Combs and Schiavelli) and the film has a complete lack of tension due to the fact that through the majority of the film it looks like there is only one creature when they keep suggesting there are several...enough to take out a town apparently. The film is short though, so the pain of watching it did not take too long.The story has two sisters or something at the beginning arguing about stuff. Something tries to take the baby and the sister that seems to know how to fight is killed. This is also the best kill in the film. Not sure if this was the past or what. I could not tell as the editing was not all that good. All I know is a guy is getting out of prison and a guy working at a funeral home gives him part of a map that will show the location of a cemetery by a church where a lot of money is buried. He goes there and some bad guys follow and get mixed up in a mess as citizens of a town are taking a stand against creatures that have been terrorizing them for 20 years because apparently no one wants to exert the effort to leave town.The monsters when on screen look rather good; unfortunately, they are not in the movie all that much. As I said, you never really get a sense that there is really all that much danger as you only see more than two monsters on the screen like once. Too often in this one the focus of the film is on this guy wanting his money back which begins to get absurd. Things are going badly, the guy is clearly rich so I am rather sure he could have left without collecting what was probably 100,000 dollars tops. I was getting sick of the stupid girl he had with him and wanted her to die slowly, but I did not get that satisfaction. We have monsters in tunnels that are supposed to be overrunning things and the subplots overran them! So this Full Moon film was incredibly bad and I felt there were very few things of redeeming nature in it. It had decent looking monsters and a nice opening scene, but that was it! No good deaths beyond the opening scene, no nudity, no sense to be made with the plot! Seriously, why the heck did the townspeople not leave!?! Monsters are feasting on them and they just stay around, why? Because the property taxes are cheap, perhaps? This monsters were also incredibly slow killers, how anyone got snuffed by them is a testament to what poor survival skills these people must of had! I guess that should be surprising seeing as how the monster only strike when it rains and at night so the people in town only had like plenty of time to leave over the 20 year reign of terror! Just too much stuff wrong with it to say it was anything, but bad in my opinion; however, like most Full Moon Studio films, at least I can say it was really short.

...Wait until you see this movie. At least the Rutger Hauer version of this movie called "Bleeders", from 1997, was still at parts entertaining and watchable.This is a really poorly made movie. You just know that everyone involved with this movie is never going to make it in the world of movies. This includes both main cast and crew. It features some extremely bad dubbing and sound effects. Especially listen in the beginning of the movie when the woman hits the 'monster' with a gun. It sounds like a cartoon! This unfortunately is not the only example. Also the editing is really off and the movie uses too often silly slow-motion sequences, that are just nothing more than laughable. This obviously was a cheap movie to make. The monsters are not too bad looking and it deserved to be in a better movie.The story is extremely bad and simple written, as if they put no real effort into it. It's very silly and just never seems to get of the ground. The movie also never becomes tense or scary to watch, although its fairly good with its gore.Also the actors didn't made the movie any better. It's not just their fault, since their characters are also extremely flat and boring in the story. Still it has Jefffrey Combs and Vincent Schiavelli in it, so there are some redeeming qualities.I see no point into why anyone should ever watch this movie.2/10http://bobafett1138.blogspot.com/

~Spoiler~ When I first watched Lurking Fear, I agreed with the other Lovecraft purists and thought it was terrible. The second time around, I'm not looking at it as a H. P. Lovecraft story and just as a horror flick. It's still not that good. It had potential to be a fairly involving, claustrophobic flick. That's all ruined in the way too cheesy explosion and mud-wrestling near the end. I was able to take it seriously until that took place. Up until then, it's a good B movie with a few creative moments and some nice creature effects. Imagine an entire clan of Castle Freaks running around under the cemetery and that's what you've got here. The acting is a higher caliber than I'm used to seeing in Full Moon movies as well. There are a number of familiar horror faces in Lurking Fear. Hellraiser's Ashley Laurence, From Beyond's Jeffrey Combs, and even Vincent Schiavelli are all featured in this flick and add a lot to it. Now, if only the production values would have been a little higher and a few scenes had been cut, this could have been a worthwhile genre effort.