By Brian M. Sammons
The Unnamable. Director: Jean-Paul Ouellette. Stars: Charles Klausmeyer, Mark Kinsey Stephenson. Additional cast: Alexandra Durrell, Laura Albert.
The Unnamable 2: The Statement of Randolph Carter. Director: Jean-Paul Ouellette. Stars: Charles Klausmeyer, Mark Kinsey Stephenson. Additional cast: Maria Ford, John Rhys-Davies.
Hello, once again, my fellow cinecephalophiles. I thought I’d do a double feature today. No need to thank me. Okay, if you really want to, you can. Cash is always appreciated. But seriously, I’m offering the two for one special today because both of these films are a bit on the thin side and if I tackled either of them alone, I could do so in a paragraph or two at the most. So, in the spirit of togetherness, here are two films that share names, cast, director, and origins, yet they couldn’t be more different. But first, a brief pause for some HPL history.
I said these movies were thin, and they are, but then, so was Lovecraft’s original story, “The Unnamable”, so I guess we can’t lay the blame at the moviemakers’ feet this time. While I won’t give away the ending of the story, essentially, it’s just two guys sitting in the graveyard, one of whom is Randolph Carter. For those not familiar with Carter, he’s an author of weird tales, an avid dreamer, and the alter ego of one H. P. Lovecraft. So, Carter is telling his friend a spooky story about an unnamable monster living in an abandoned house. The friend pooh-poohs the story and asks that if the house were so infamously haunted, why hasn’t he ever seen it? But Carter plays the trump card and says, “Oh you have. In fact, it’s right behind you” and he points at the old house in the same graveyard the pair is sitting in. But the friend calls Carter’s bluff and says he’s going to go into the house to prove that he’s full of it. Well, since this is a Lovecraft story, you know he’s going to find something and that it will, in fact, be unnamable. And that’s it. The tale is only a couple of pages long and a good chunk of that is backstory. There’re two characters, one setting and a monster we never see. So, while an okay story, it’s not one of Lovecraft’s best. Also there’s just not a whole lot there to base a feature film on. So, how did the moviemakers do it? One word: padding. Lots and lots of padding.
The Unnamable starts off just like the HPL story. Well, not really. We get to see an old-timey wizard trying to keep his pet monster locked away in the attic while the creature is freaking out during a thunderstorm. One ripped-out heart later, the wizard is chucked into the ground and the house left empty and shunned. Jump to the modern day. Carter and two friends are in the graveyard in front of the house and everything pretty much plays out like the Lovecraft story, with a few notable exceptions. First, one friend goes to explore the house and Carter and his buddy Howard (wink, wink) go back to Miskatonic University. Too bad for the one brave friend that he runs into the Unnamable thing. Too bad that in this movie, for some odd reason, it is pretty damn namable. Let’s see: it has cloven hooves, bat-like wings sticking out of its back, horns on its head, not to mention fangs and claws. Gee, I’m no occult expert, but I would call that your stereotypical demon if there ever was one. The only thing she (Yes, the Unnamable is a she and she’s got the rack to prove it) was missing to complete the picture was a pitchfork. I guess doing the typical demon makeup is far easier than trying to create a unique, mind-blowing, sanity-blasting, truly-unnamable monster, but then, why keep the name for the movie?
If that weren’t an insult enough to almost everything that made Lovecraft so cool, the movie is basically an 80s slasher flick, with the she demon taking the place of a maniac in a mask. After Carter’s doubting friend gets hacked up, a group of four stupid college kids go into the house for some sexy fun time and one by one, they are stalked and slashed by the monster. However, remember that padding I told you about? Well, it’s all here as the four students wander around the house, and wander around the house, and then, just to spice things up, they wander around the house some more. There is no character development, no exposition given, no forwarding of the plot. Nope, just about twenty minutes and sleep-inducing tedium. Then, at the end of this glacier-paced stalk-and-kill, Carter and Howard return to save the day. Howard finds a love interest and Carter finds a copy of the Necronomicon. A bit of silly tree-magic later and the demon, I mean “Unnamable”, is pulled out the window and the day is saved. Yay!
Because the first movie was surprisingly well-received, in 1993, the sequel came out and it picks up literally right after the first one, despite five years in the real world having passed. The cops are at the Unnamable house. Howard’s girlfriend is conveniently written out of the movie, since I guess the actress didn’t want to return, but both leads from the first movie are back for more, as is the director. Joining them this time are John Rhys-Davies and genre favorite David Warner, although Warner is only in the movie for about five minutes.
Carter and Howard enlist the aid of an occult-minded professor (Rhys-Davies) and return to the tunnels underneath the cemetery where the Unnamable house sits. There they hope to find proof of the magical mayhem the students just went through. Carter and the Professor go below, leaving Howard outside with a radio to keep in contact. As such, this sequel plays as a pretty faithful allusion to Lovecraft’s “The Statement of Randolph Carter” but without the payoff ending. While down below, the she-demon is found, still alive and bound by the roots of the magic trees that took care of it at the climax of Part One. Using spells from the Necronomicon, the Professor and Carter free the young lady, the daughter of the old wizard in the first film, from the grips of the demon. Now fully human, and fully nude (yay), the girl named Alyda gets a huge crush on Carter. Alas, not everything is roses and romance because not only is the girl free of the demon and fully human, but the demon is also free and now fully demonic. Soon, the Unnamable demon starts wandering the halls of Miskatonic University, looking for Alyda and killing anyone that gets in its way.
Despite the sequel being written and directed by the same guy who made the original, the tone and feel of this film are completely different from the one before. The first Unnamable was very much a child of the slasher flicks that ruled the 80s. This one is a bit more faithful to the Lovecraftian style. Granted, the titular creature still looks like a beastie out of the Bible rather than anything Lovecraft ever dreamt up, but the movie is better-paced and not as concerned with racking up a typical stalk n’ slash body count. Oh, there are killings, and some red stuff splashed about, but the slayings don’t seem as rote as they did in the first movie. Also, a bit more of HPL’s cosmology is discussed and there are name-drops aplenty for the fans. Actually, while I watched the movie, it reminded me a lot of playing a middle-of-the-road adventure in the Call of Cthulhu role playing game. As a big fan of the Call of Cthulhu RPG, I liked that a lot. Oh, and it doesn’t hurt that a good-looking woman goes completely naked for a good chunk of this film. Hey, I’m only human.
Final verdict: The Unnamable is a fun slice of 80’s fright fare. Sure, it drags at times, and is only sort of faithful to Lovecraft’s tale, but it has found a lukewarm spot in my otherwise cold, dead heart to live in. The Unnamable 2 is a better-paced, polished and directed film. It also has stronger ties to HPL and his works. Considering “The Unnamable” isn’t one of Lovecraft’s best tales, these movies do them justice, or as much as you could expect from such a simple premise. Both films put a smile on my face when I recently watched them for the first time in years and when showing them to friends for their first time ever, everyone had a great time. Therefore, I give both The Unnamable movies two tentacles (or would that be four?) up.
Bio: Brian Sammons is an author and critic of dark things and an all-around troublemaker. Sadly, you can’t follow him on Twitter because he abhors Twitter.
The Unnamable and The Unnamable 2: The Statement of Randolph Carter are available form Amazon.com.