I admit, I don't know much about H.P. Lovecraft. My first experience with his work was probably 1985's Re-Animator, which I loved, mostly for the nudity (hey, I was 15 when it came out). IMDB.com lists him as a writer who lived from 1890 to 1937, and has influenced such writers as Stephen King and some few other people I have read. Coincidentally, I have never read any of H. P. Lovecraft's actual works except "The Thing on the Doorstep," which I ran across on the internet one day and read in its entirety in the course of an afternoon.
The Thing On the Doorstep (2014) is a fairly faithful retelling of H. P. Lovecraft's original work, as far as I can recall. A guy named Daniel (and his wife, which is apparently an addition of this particular retelling) has a friend named Edward. Edward is a bit odd, a delver in the dark arts, who tends to go off on wild excursions at the whims of fancy. Edward runs into a woman named Asenath at a party, who seems to bewitch Edward to an extreme extent, and Daniel begins to worry about his friend's sanity, as well as his physical well-being. Those of you who follow H. P. Lovecraft's work will be glad to know that, in this story at least, all Hell does NOT break loose.
This particular movie had an extremely cheap budget, and the acting wasn't particularly great, but it wasn't too bad, either. Overuse of Lovecraft's original flowery language with a modren-day setting seemed odd. Especially confusing to me was the way the narrator of the tale, Daniel himself, was clacking away on an old typewriter in his retelling of the events that he had witnessed. It was especially confusing because they show him sitting in front of an actual computer earlier in the tale, and since he's apparently still with his wife and child, I'm not sure why he would be typing away on an old typewriter instead of his computer. Or, even where he might have foundan old typewriter to clack away on.
The original story is quite good. I mean, they don't call H. P. Lovecraft the father of modern horror for nothing. This retelling is marred by a lack of poor special effects, mediocre acting, and an abysmally low budget, but might be worth watching once if you've never read the original tale. No nudity, the actors are not very easy on the eyes, and the sets aren't very enticing or much to look at. There are a lot of references to Asenath's "inhumanity" and the "fishy" looks of her servants, but this movie didn't take any effort to display them as such. This movie is available for free on hulu.com, where I saw it, but I can't recommend watching it unless you haven't already read the original tale by H. P. Lovecraft. Interestingly, IMDB.com says there are a slew of movies still coming out based on H.P. Lovecraft's works, some 80 years after his death. If that doesn't tell you what a good horror writer he was, I'm not sure what would.
Keeping things short because I am still one horror movie review behind, and trying to catch up. :-)
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