NECRONOMICON (1993)

Starring: Jeffrey Combs, Tony Azito, Juan Fernandez, Bruce Payne, Richard Lynch, Mari Ford, David Warner, Dennis Christopher. Written by Brent V. Friedman, Chrisophe Gans, Kazunori Ito, Brian Yuzna. Directed by Christophe Gans, Shusuke Kaneko, Brian Yuzna. USA. 96 minutes.

Necronomicon, the first horror anthology film to be based on the works of the legendary H.P. Lovecraft, was shot in 1994 but remained in legal limbo for four years. Would that it had remained there. Unfortunately, not a single one of the episodes is a straight adaptation of an HPL story! Not even in name! What's worse is that the stories are just plain LAME and often there are stories within the stories, making things rather disorienting at times (as opposed to Neil Jordan's The Company of Wolves, in which this gimmick worked to splendid effect).

The wrap-around story features the perpetually hammy Jeffrey Combs as none other than H.P. Lovecraft himself, who travells to a Persian-looking occult library to pilfer a copy of the "Mad Arab" abdul Alhazred's insanity-inducing tome that is kept under lock and key and close guard. Done up  in make-up to give him the Old Gentleman's classic "Easter Island" profile, Combs actually ends up looking more like Bruce Campbell and comes off more like a poor-man's Indiana Jones than the "walking bundle of contradictions" described in L. Sprague de Camp's superb biography on the man. The yarns themselves materialize before us as HPL feverishly scribbles them down on a notepad while pouring over the Necronomicon for literary inspiration.

The special effects are quite good and convincing for the most part (particularly the reptilian Deep One and tentacle-headed Lovecraftian nasty who appear in the first and best episode, "The Drowned"). But there's simply too  much gratuitous grue of the goopy/crunchy/squishy variety, the sort that puts my funky ass to sleep and fails to raise so much as a single goosebump. And you KNOW you're in trouble when there's a police car chase (followed by the inevitable police car crash) in a fucking Lovecraft movie. Toss this one into the HPL movie junk heap next to The Lurking Fear and The Unnamable.

* One Skull Full of Maggots Out of Four.

* Dead meat, ripe n' reeking.
** Moribund, but showing a slight flicker of life.
*** Good and healthy.
**** Brimming with vitality.