By Brian M. Sammons
The Resurrected (1991). Director: Dan O’Bannon. Cast: John Terry, Jane Sibbett, Chris Sarandon.
Welcome back, my fellow cinecephalophiles. It’s good to see you once again. Yes, I’m watching you. I always watch you. When you’re asleep, in the shower, picking your orifices when you think no one is watching, you’re just going to have to learn to deal with it. In any event, today, we are going to take a look at a surprisingly-good cinematic adaptation of an H.P. Lovecraft tale. In this case, it’s one of his longest, and best, and it’s called, “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward”.
This film was directed by the late Dan O’Bannon, who also wrote the movie Alien (another great Lovecraftian-flavoured movie) and directed the awesome, but not-Lovecraftian-in-the-least, zombie gross-out comedy, The Return of the Living Dead. That latter movie introduced not only the idea of fast-moving zombies (Bet you thought it was 28 Days Later – wrong!) but their penchant for brain munching. Don’t believe me? Look it up. Anyway, while Mr. O’Bannon wrote many things, he only directed two films before his untimely death (on my birthday, no less). One was that genre-changing zombie flick, which is still one of my favourite films of all time, and the other was this highly-decent Lovecraft adaption. The funny thing is that this movie, The Resurrected, isn’t even how the director really wanted it to turn out and it’s still a good movie. But more on that in a bit. Let’s deal first with what we’ve got and not what might have been.
The Resurrected is pretty faithful to Lovecraft’s original “Charles Dexter Ward” tale, so as I’ve said many times before, I won’t be going into great detail about the aspects of the movie that are taken directly from the HPL story. If you want the whole story, for Cthulhu’s sake, read it, already.
Okay, where was I? Ah, yes, the movie. Well, a few minor changes have been made to modernize the tale and make it better fit a movie’s format, but unlike other Lovecraft adaptations, when you see this film, you can still get a sense of what Lovecraft was originally trying to convey. The entire core concept of the story remains in this film, unlike some other “adaptations” like The Unnamable, which is a great eighties slasher flick with a demon taking the place of the masked maniac, and I do love it so, but it only has the slightest traces of Lovecraft still within it.
The movie is told from the clichéd point of view of a tough private eye, but we can forgive the film that little indulgence. What are less forgivable are all the needless, Blade Runner-ish narrations that pop up over and over again. Whatever, the PI hero and his fellow investigators are hired by Ward’s wife because poor Charles is acting peculiar and she want to know what has happened to her hubby. After a suitably strange backstory, the investigators follow different lines of inquiry, gaining small bits of information along the way, including the ever-popular Strange Old Journal™. There’s the occasional discovery of a grisly corpse or a frightening nightmare to keep the characters on their toes and remind them that they are dealing with something odd. Finally, the group puts all the pieces together and plans their method of attack, but like so many Lovecraft protagonists, these doomed souls don’t really know the full story yet and when they go to implement their plan, they are woefully underequipped and unprepared for the horrors they will face. What follows is a dark, frightening, and gruesome journey of discovery in the tunnels beneath Ward’s ancestral home. When it is over, the investigators will have faced nameless horrors, unearthed unimaginable truths, had their grasp on reality shaken to the core, and some will have paid the ultimate price for fighting the forces of the Cthulhu Mythos.
As an aside, if you read the above and ever played the excellent role playing game, Call of Cthulhu, and you thought that this movie sounds just like a scenario from that game, then I would agree with you 110%. For a long time, I would suggest this movie to gamers looking to join in the CoC fun for the first time as a great example of how a mystery adventure should be handled in that game. This doesn’t make this film any better or worse for that, just a bit more interesting to my fellow game nerds out there who have yet to see this flick.
Okay, back to the show. The Resurrected is not a great film, but it is a good one. It is a fun movie to watch, something I would classify as a popcorn-muncher, and it’s ably written, directed, and acted, with Chris Sarandon, who to me will forever be the supersuave vampire neighbor in Fright Night, turning in a great performance as both Charles Ward and…well…someone else. Yet, as good as this movie is, it might have been even better if the producers would have just let Dan O’Bannon make the movie he really wanted to.
For years, there have been whispers and rumours of an unauthorized director’s cut of this film, renamed “The Ancestor“, floating about. Occasionally, you would hear a hopeful murmer that an O’Bannon-approved version of the movie was moving slowly closer to coming out in some fashion. Now that Dan O’Bannon is gone, I doubt that will ever happen. So, not only is the man’s passing tragic, but so is the fact that his re-cut, which seemed to have fixed many of the problems I did have with the original film, such as the narration and addressing some of the red herrings that went nowhere, will probably never see the light of day. Luckily, as said before, the movie we do have is fine, fun, and chock full o’ Lovecraftian goodness.
Final verdict: a faithful adaptation of a classic Lovecraft tale set in the modern day, with a few missteps, but overall, a great way to spend 108 minutes of your life.
Purchase The Resurrected from Amazon.com