Necronomicon: Book of Dead

A three-story anthology based on stories by H. P. Lovecraft. I had high hopes. Producer and segment director Brian Yuzna had worked on two of my favorite Lovecraft adaptations, Re-Animator and From Beyond. This doesn’t match those efforts, but I enjoyed the tantalizing wraparound sequence.

The first story sees Bruce Payne play a widower inheriting a crumbling seaside hotel. It borrows from “The Rats in the Walls” but sprinkles in elements of the tentacled Cthulhu mythos. I admired the intent, but Payne’s performance didn’t connect, rendering the finale a detached spectacle, despite proffering terrific practical effects.

The next story has David Warner playing a mysterious doctor occupying the top floor of a Boston apartment house. A new tenant, played by Bess Mayer, learns the doctor’s terrible secrets in this adaptation of Lovecraft’s “Cool Air.” I loved Warner in the role, but the story’s EC Comics-style twist underwhelmed.

The last story sees Signy Coleman play a police officer seeking to rescue her partner from a mysterious assailant known as “The Butcher”. Directed by Yuzna, this loose adaptation of “Whispers in the Dark” embraces a more gonzo tone than the prior entries and proved my favorite of the three.

That said, the film underwhelmed. While I loved the practical effects, I lamented the lack of existential dread. The compressed timelines didn’t help, but these tenuous adaptations proved tone deaf to the source material.

But about that wraparound sequence. Rather than adapt a Lovecraft story, it features Jeffrey Combs as Lovecraft himself, who travels to a monastery where he sneaks into the cellar and discovers a copy of the Necronomicon. While Combs looks nothing like Lovecraft, I loved his performance as a prudish author cursed with arcane knowledge. It was my favorite part of the film and had me longing for a horror-adventure film set in the 20s directed by Stuart Gordon with Combs as Lovecraft. That would have been something.