Customer Reviews

HP Lovecraft: Unnamable [VHS]

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Prior to watching The Unnamable I had seen Two other Lovecraft Masterpieces (From Beyond, Re-Animator), while The Unnamable doesn't get under your skin as much as the other two it's well worth a look.

The setting is perfect as it takes place in an old big house which has supposedly been haunted for years by the most terrifying creature. The creature is so terrifying it doesn't even have a name, hence, The Unnamable. A few college students, from nearby Miskatonic University decide to go and explore the big, creepy house. They soon will find out that would be the biggest mistake of their lives. As with all Lovecraftian films there is some nice gorey scenes and some startling moments. Also The Unnamable is one of the most frightening creatures you'll ever see.

I feel, however, The Unnamable is lacking compared to the other Lovecraft movies I've seen (mentioned up above). The acting in The Unnamable is really pretty poor, the picture is very dark and is hard to see exactly what is going on in some places (I only saw the VHS version) , and we only get to see the creature for about the last 10-15 minutes of the movie. All and all The Unnamable is a good movie and if you're a fan of Lovecraft films I don't think you'll be disappointed.

This is one of my favorite Lovecraft adaptions of all time and I have all of them. A sorcerer turns his daughter into a hideous monster 300 years ago. In the present (er...80s) a group of college kids investigate the legend by going into the house of The Unnamable. Can the kids survive? Boobs, hot chicks, gore galore, a hideous monster and the Necronomicon make this a flick you will never forget. Though obviously not at the level of Reanimator or From Beyond, this is a worthwhile purchase for Lovecraft devotees.

This is classic Lovecraft...It has it all; Big dark spooky house, good characters, and one of the ugliest creatures I have ever seen. Guys, you don't want to make this woman mad. I thought it was scary in all the right places and definetly a keeper, especially for fans of ole' H.P. .

I have just bought the unnamable on dvd from Anchorbay.co.uk, the case has both the unnamable and unnamable 2 dvds and it was realy cheap so I thought what the heck I'll just buy it. Now I know the film was not a classic but it was pretty good and I enjoyed watching it. The story begins 300 years ago in the past when some old guy has kept his daughter locked up in his house, we soon find out that his daughter is some hideous creature or demon she breaks out and then kills her father by ripping his heart out (make sure that you get the unrated edition). The story soon takes place in the present when Randolph Carter who is a college student telling the story to his friends who don't believe him so one of his friends decides to spend the night all alone in the old house where the creature lives, yeah really smart guy. So others start to join the day after he disapears including two couples from the college, the creature itself wasn't scary but some of the death scenes were great like one of the guys having his skull bashed on the floor and his brain spilling out so the gore was great.

I SAW THIS MOVIE A FEW YEARS AGO,AND HAVE BEEN TRYING TO FIND IT EVER SINCE. IT"S A GREAT MOVIE. I HIGHLY RECOMMEND IT TO EVERYONE

Always on the prowl for some low budget horror, the brothers Sid stumbled across The Unnamable being new to the instant watch list. Oh yeah...it is good I think you will like it. Now sometime back, let's say last year..I don't know about the best, we wathced The Unnamable II having no clue what the movie was about. Thankfully we were ripped so the plot really didn't matter anyway since we had no clue what was going on. After reading the synopsis we figured why not? The homely creature's face slapped on the cover was certainly enough to take a chance. If it was lame we'd just shut it off and watch something else. If we didn't get the wings we still have that meat lovers pizza in the trunk.

The Unnamable starts off back in the 1800's on a stormy evening. Have to say the atmosphere was pretty creepy. In the house we learn of a family that had some monster child and decided to stash her upstairs in the attic far from the public. Over the years the kid was chained up and built quite a bit of resentment towards the parents. So like any monster child the natural thing to do is kill, and maybe eat your parents. Flash forward to 1988 with some frat boy college dudes, a couple of yuppies, and two chicks (1 of the smokin hot variety). They decided to spend a night in the old house where the legend of the "unnamble" took place. Obviously things don't work out too well, but there was enough tough time for the hot chick to get naked. Naughty naughty.

The Unnamble was actually pretty difficult to rate due to the lack of creature action. The acting was super lame, but enjoyable from a B standpoint. The atmosphere was great and very creepy in an 80's way. It just could have been so much more. Any of the kills scenes was from the creatures point of view up until the last 15 minutes. So right there you're a little annoyed. Then sprinkle in the one main guy that keeps cracking jokes despite the creature tearing peoples throats out, and you're looking at an average flick. It's worth the watch, would have been better ripped, but overall could have been something more.

This is a great scary movie spoiled
by a weak musical score and a weak
ending.
The completely gratuitous nudity and
sex scene was also a spoiler for me.

The plot was simple, but good.
The house inhabited by and confining
the unnamable was great;
old, creaky, claustrophobic, dark,
moldy, cobwebby, dusty, dirty,
labyrinthine, etc.
The creature was great;
one of the best movie monsters ever;
a tortured-murderous-screeching
-incarnate(female)demon-human born
abomination-thingy.
The gore effects were first-rate.

The ending was so weak it appeared
to be an afterthought.
The nemcronomicon and other-worldly
Lovecrafty stuff was hinted at
and then fizzled out
and the tree-branch intervention
was ridiculous.

This is a mediocre movie with
a great movie wanting to come
forth from the stygian darkness
of a bottomless portal to other
dimensions wherein dwell
ancient powerful blasphemous beings.

As a longtime fan of the author, I suppose I'm harshly critical of film adaptations of his works. That being said, this movie still stands out in my mind as one of the worst, most generic horror movies ever made, regardless of how badly they butcher the original story. My review is broken down into two parts: the views of a Lovecraft fan, and a more general view.

The original story for "The Unnamable" is only 20 pages long or so, involves two characters, and only takes place in one scene. Hardly the stuff movies are made of. The original story deals with the notion of a creature so hideous and evil, that it cannot even be named...yet the maker of this film dared to physically portray him. Can't name him, but you can put a guy in a hairy rubber suit and call him "unnamable"! Lovecraft was a respected horror writer because he left things to the readers' imaginations, and attempts to make his works into movies are almost always the quests of fools.

As far as generic horror movies go, this one is exceptionally generic. A bunch of college students at "Arkham University" and bearing the names of characters from OTHER Lovecraft stories investigate a haunted house. The creature preying on them in the house is laughable, not scary. The students suffer a number of horror movie cliches, and most viewers can not only easily predict which students survive the ordeal, but also the order in which the others will be killed.

I consider this one to be one of the worst movies of recent decades, if not the worst. The monster is not scary, the characters aren't interesting, and the plot (nothing like the story it's "based on") is utterly unoriginal.

An old abandoned house has an urban legend attached to it. Legend says there is a creature in the house so horrifying there is no name to describe it. Local college kids hear the legend, decide to spend the night in the spooky old house. They are killed one by one by a hideous demon in the dark house.
How can you go wrong with kids spending the night in a haunted house? These types of films are great for rainy nights. They did a great make-up job on the demon. Although based on a Lovecraft story, this one does manage to set a creepy mood. Some people will say the sequel is better, in my opinion that is not true. The sequel is a cheesy, tongue in cheek, almost comedy like.

Writer-director Jean-Paul Ouelette, an Orson Welles protege, produced this pretty decent little direct-to-video shocker loosely based on H. P. Lovecraft's short-short story of the same name.

Mark Kinsey Stephenson and Charles King are Miskatonic College students interested in "the unnamable." Their lesser-aware student brethren are more interested in either scaring the two witless or getting some on Friday night, and one of them scopes out the local haunted house for both purposes, becoming the first of many meals for the thing that's lived there since the seventeenth century.

This is nothing you haven't seen before, but it's pretty well done. Ouelette improved the mix on the much better-produced sequel, which actually had something of a budget. The principals are good in their roles, but the script is pretty thin even for this kind of thing. Katrin Alexandre does an amazing job portraying the nasty demon-thing in the house, even if it doesn't fully reveal itself until the last gruesome ten minutes of the movie. It's got a good - if cheap and repetitive - music score, and is nicely photographed.

Hardly great, and not as good as its own sequel, but worth watching if you like this kind of thing.