Wil Wheaton's Creepy H.P. Lovecraft Adaptation Is A Hidden Horror Gem Streaming On Prime Video

In 1985, Stuart Gordon shook the horror genre out of its slasher stupor with his gleefully gory adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft's short story "Herbert West–Reanimator." Titled simply "Re-Animator," the tale of a brilliantly bonkers medical student who's created a reagent that can bring dead bodies back to life dispensed with the author's oppressive sense of dread and gave moviegoers a cat-smashing, head-severing, bone-sawing good time. "Re-Animator" was a cult hit that received shockingly enthusiastic reviews, so Gordon tried his Lovecraft luck again with "From Beyond," and, if nothing else, he delivered on the viscera. 50 years after his death, Lovecraft was one of the biggest names in horror movies.

This did not escape the notice of schlock merchant Ovidio G. Assonitis, a trend-chasing opportunist who'd scored modest successes with "The Exorcist"-inspired "Beyond the Door," "Piranha II: The Spawning" and the "Jaws" knock-off killer octopus epic "Tentacles." Assonitis had the creative advantage of not caring about the quality of the finished work. He just knew there was a marginal genre appetite for anything that had Lovecraft's name attached to it, so he did what any respectable producer would do and hired untested actor-turned-director David Keith to make an ultra-goopy, rural Tennessee-set riff on Lovecraft's masterful "The Colour Out of Space" starring a young Wil Wheaton. Keith proved to be a terrible director, but his ineptitude harmonized with the low-budget, amateur-hour aesthetic of the film. Sometimes you just want to watch a vile, discordant horror flick slapped together by a talentless director. If so, "The Curse" is your "La Strada." And it's now streaming on Prime Video. 

Lovecraft's "The Colour Out of Space" is a simple tale about a meteorite that crashes into a rural area of Massachusetts, and, with alarming alacrity, emits environmentally ruinous toxins that turn the area into an uninhabitable hellscape. The implications are, as always with Lovecraft, global. The apocalypse starts in Massachusetts, and explodes across the planet. We're all screwed.

The fun part of poking around in Lovecraftland and Nigel Kneale's adjacent Quatermass-ville, is watching how these gloomy writers concoct new ways to get us fearing the Biblically promised End of Days. When it invariably goes south, it's going to be an incomprehensible nightmare. No one got off on the multi-tentacled-wreckage of the Earth than Lovecraft, and it's weird how Stuart Gordon's movies didn't revel in that element of his work.

David Keith's "The Curse" doesn't skimp on bubbly, curdling, contaminated flesh, and you do get more Claude "Sheriff Lobo" Akins, as a fiery Bible-quoting farmer, than the law will allow. Wil Wheaton plays teen farm boy Zack Crane, while John "Bo Duke" Schneider turns up halfway through as an EPA investigator, which makes you feel like you're watching a redneck environmental diatribe. If anyone had the first thought as to what kind of movie they were making before they started shooting, they could've pulled off an unique Southern-fried Lovecraft adaptation. "The Curse" is a fun, trashy film on its own modest terms, but everyone cashed their paychecks and moved on to the next one. See for yourself: watch it on Prime Video.