Some things are irresistible. For me, the prospect of watching The Dunwich Horror (1970), starring Sandra Dee and Dean Stockwell, is one of them. Gidget and “Quantum Leap’s” Al! What a way to spend a Saturday night! Based on an H.P. Lovecraft short story, the film is just as frightfully bad as one would expect, but has enough ridiculous dialogue and visuals to push it into unintentionally humorous territory.
Let’s start with the tagline: “A few years ago in Dunwich, a half-witted girl bore illegitimate twins. One of them was almost human!” Aside from the unnecessary and unnecessarily vague “a few years ago,” this tagline is definitely a keeper. We call Dean Stockwell’s Wilbur Whateley barely human and insult his mother all at once. It doesn’t divulge much of the plot, though. Essentially, Whateley and his now-decrepit grandfather are the Dunwich crazies, all thanks to Old Whateley’s occult escapades decades ago involving said half-witted girl and the summoning of demons via her womb.
Evidently heartened by the cold reception he gets around town, Wilbur is dead set on carrying on the family tradition. He consults the Necronomicon, an occult tome under the care of historian Dr. Henry Armitage (Ed Begley), and more or less kidnaps Armitage’s student, Nancy Wagner (Dee) – because all pagan rituals require a pretty blonde susceptible to hypnotic eyes. Nancy falls for his “missed the bus” excuse and gives him a ride to his tumbledown mansion and decides to join him in the parlor for spiked tea. It’s the last decision she makes that is remotely of her own free will.
While Armitage takes the scholarly route and researches the Whateley family history, Wilbur sets things in motion, raping Nancy on a stone altar so that she too will give birth to a demon baby, or maybe two. His ultimate goal to call on demons so that his in-no-way-human twin may finally take corporeal form; then the so-called Old Ones will return and hell-fire will reign down on Dunwich. Or something like that. As it is, Wilbur’s twin has been living in a closet in the Whateley mansion for two decades, occasionally rattling his chains, so to speak.
But the makers of Dunwich recognized that a phantom demon is no fun unless you can either see it or suffer an epileptic fit while the color-corrector tries his best to make you think you see something. This is 1970. This is low-budget horror. Naturally, Dunwich has a go with neon saturation. Wilbur’s twin, once released, can only be described as a Technicolor rape monster, completely invisible but capable of stripping and smothering young girls at the drop of a hat. Dunwich is a product of its time, a B-movie horror through and through, and that is what it’s mostly about. Whenever possible, Dee is splayed on an altar and the camera gives us disorienting shots of flesh at such close range that it’s impossible to tell exactly what you’re looking at. But it’s definitely intended to be sexy.
Overall, not that much happens in Dunwich. The movie mostly clocks time as Stockwell traces Dee’s body with incense sticks. The movie’s stereotypical depiction of the occult generates the most laughs. The final standoff between Whateley and Armitage is, to the uninitiated, not unlike a Pokémon battle: an incomprehensible back-and-forth of spell chanting and demon-calling with no discernible results other than random lightning. That is, until Whateley spontaneously burns to a crisp and is thrown off a cliff. Think of it like the all-powerful – and rapidly degenerative – powers of the Technicolor demon-souls of Raiders of the Lost Ark.