THE RESURRECTED
I guess nobody dies forever

  I am torn between affection and indifference towards this movie, and in the end I guess indifference has to win out if I can't come up with a more enthusiastic recommendation than that.

This is widely considered one of the finer cinematic Lovecraft adaptations, though that may not be much of a compliment considering how bad so many of them are.  Based on "The Case Of Charles Dexter Ward", this film is...uh...faithful...I guess (I confess, it's been too long and I can't remember).  It doesn't start out well, using a title card to quote John 14:14, "If a man dies, shall he live again?"  The kind of rebirth looked at in this movie is not exactly germane to that passage, and if this is an attempt at irony, it's a pretty clumsy one.

John Terry, looking very much like he should be performing magic tricks, plays a private investigator who's approached by Claire Ward (Jane "Ross' lesbian ex-wife" Sibbett) to look into just what's going on with her husband Charles (Chris Sarandon).  He's holed up in a remote cabin with a Chinese tough guy and a mysterious scientist named Dr. Ash, and gets meat shipped there by the truckload.  And now he's talking with a really bad English accent!  Might his seclusion have something to do with research into defeating death?  Well, if the title tells you nothing else, it should be that.

The score is very much Alien-derived, though if you're gonna rip something off, I guess ripping off something that good isn't a bad idea.  Creature effects at the end are hokey, and Sarandon's performance is one of the worst of his career.  I know, he's SUPPOSED to be stilted and dead-eyed and lethargic; be that as it may, he's still never convincing for a moment and his dialogue and delivery just don't work at all.  And yet, it's hard not to work up a shine to this movie.

For one thing, I can't tell you how cool it is that much of it takes place in Providence, Rhode Island. (It was actually filmed in Vancouver, but there are some establishing aerial shots of Providence)  I can just imagine a producer somewhere along the line begging "PLEASE, if it has to be in New England, can't we put it in Boston?"  It's nice to see the movies giving the world a look at cities and places which haven't been filmed a zillion times before.

The climactic romp through pitch-black catacombs is intense as hell, despite some bad effects work.  The shooting in Vancouver (during typically Vancouverian conditions) makes for a lot of atmosphere, or maybe it's just that when I think of Vancouver, I think of unpleasantness.  Indoor lighting (such as the effect of total darkness cut into by a single match) is moody and eerie as well.  For that matter, most of the plot can be, if you want, disregarded if you just wanna soak in the atmosphere.

The  Resurrected was directed by Dan O'Bannon, who's been complaining ever since that this movie was butchered in the editing.  Also known as Shatterbrain, which must disappoint people who sit through this movie without seeing any brains shatter.

(irrelevant trivia: at one point in this movie, we see a grotesque painting of a big humanoid monster eating one of many smaller humanoids.  Later that day, I came across that same painting in the liner notes of a CD.  Coincidence, or subconscious guidance, hmmm?)

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