In the interest of keeping things festive I checked out Full
Moon’s 1994 joint Lurking Fear that just happens to take place during
Christmas.
When a recently released convict (Blake Adams) attempts to recover money buried in a cemetery, he runs afoul of the evil creatures living underground.
I’d never seen this one as it was released after I left my
video store and lost touch with the admittedly diminishing returns of the Full
Moon machine. However, on resident Laser Blaster Justin Decloux’s
recommendation, I decided this was as good as time as any to give it a watch.
It turns out that C. Courtney Joyner’s Lurking Fear was not
half bad. Full Moon’s formula for decades has been create a hook or creature
and then build your movie around it, but surprisingly that wasn’t the case in
Lurking Fear. While it’s true there were creatures, they really didn’t come into
play until the third act so what the bulk of it was a crime film more
akin to From Dusk Till Dawn, or 1992’s Trespass. I’m not saying this was
anywhere near that caliber, but I appreciated the break from tradition.
And while the script was fairly anemic, the actors all brought
a lot of personality that kept it from
falling in on itself. In addition to genre favourites Jeffrey Combs (who drinks
from a king-sized flask like a champ) and Ashley Laurence (inexplicably credited
as Ashley Lauren, as perhaps Charles Band was too cheap to spring for the last
two letters of her name), you also have the delightful Vincent Schiavelli as a
shady undertaker. In the starring role was Adams whom I recall thinking
“now that’s the face of a B-movie leading man” when he first came onscreen.
Ashley Laurence & Jeffrey Combs in Lurking Fear. |
At a brisk seventy-five minutes, Lurking Fear gets in,
gets out and leaves a good looking corpse. It doesn’t serve the H.P.
Lovecraft source material as well as some of Band’s previous endeavours, but it was still an entertaining yarn.
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