Apparently Stuart Gordon's success at adapting H.P. Lovecraft stories to film led to Dan O'Bannon taking a shot at it. Yes...the man behind Return of the Living Dead and a whole lot of Alien did, in fact, take a shot at Lovecraft with The Resurrected, loosely adapted from The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. I had picked this up recently from Vinegar Syndrome, and was all excited to enjoy what I thought was an unknown film to me. Right around the point where the stalwart team of investigators find themselves in the depths of Charles Ward's secret laboratory (which he inherited from Arthur Curwen), the really cool reanimated monster shows up and I was instantly, "Wait, I have seen this movie before. Twice."
So with this sudden realization, the question must be posed: is this actually a good movie if I had completely forgotten about it, twice? Well, assuming the issue is not the high quality 4K UHD copy I watched confusing me into not being a grainy SD release as I think it was the last two times I saw it, the real answer is: it's actually pretty good, but its also rather slow for the first 75% of the movie, in a manner which, while shockingly appropriate in is methodical pace for your average Call of Cthulhu game, and definitely in alignment with some of the source material, is nonetheless just not exciting enough to be very memorable. This holds true right up until you get to the point where the investigators (for they are the embodiment of your average CoC team) decide to go to the source of the evil, with explosives, though they cannot resist exploring to see what it is they need to blow up first. This leads to some truly inspired rubber monster special effects that are well worth seeing.
The plot is straight-forward: John March is a private investigator in Providence who is approached by Claire Ward, the worried wife of Charles Dexter Ward, who has been acting very strange lately. He's holed up on the old family property with a strange Asian guy, doing something that has her very worried. March takes the case, and proceeds to handle it in a remarkably staid and proper manner, with his allies doing research for him while he checks out what's going on. For much of the film this feels like a mellow police procedural, in which occasionally weird murders happen. When there are moments of weird gore its a reminder that there is, in fact, a horror story going on and not just a case of a strange husband shacking up with other strange men in a colonial house.
March eventually deduces that Ward's got some serious problems, with a lot of corpse theft and possibly a connection to murders in the area that look like wild animal attacks but may, in fact, be cannibalism. As the story deepens, more of Ward's true story and his obsession with his ancestors and their alchemical desire for immortality are revealed, until it all culminates in an explosive finale that reminded me of half the Call of Cthulhu games I've participated in over the decades.
The Resurrected was doomed not to compete with Stuart Gordon's films due to its almost painstaking effort to follow the pace of a slow, methodical investigative procedural, but when it does go off the rails it does so quite well. It really could have used a few more scenes early on that helped set the stage for the odd murders, for example, but I suppose there was only so much mileage to be had with the grotesque resurrected dead at the end, and introducing them earlier would have used up their impact too soon.
Overall, for fans of Lovecraft's appearances on film, this is worth a watch. If you like supernatural horror procedurals, you will find something to like. The soundtrack to this movie is great, though typical of the nineties with its orchestration, and a general fan of horror will enjoy the events at the end of the movie for sure. I would rank this a deserving C+ and I look forward to forgetting I saw it all over again in a few years.
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