In addition to the usual reviews and comments you would find on a horror movie blog, this is also a document of the wonderfully vast horror movie section of the video store I worked at in my youth.

Friday, December 22, 2017

A Full Moon Christmas


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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