Pacionsbo Absolutely Fantastic

Helllins It is both painfully honest and laugh-out-loud funny at the same time.

Darin One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

Scarlet The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Finfrosk86 You know what's not a good thing in a movie? When you have a cave with big, massive rocks, and an actor bumps into said rock, and the rock moves, because it's a prop rock and weighs nothing. This is the kind of thing that really annoys me. How hard is it to re-shoot that short little scene? Or to make the rock heavier, or to bolt it to the floor. Come on! Anyway, I can let this kind of thing pass, if the movie is good. But if the movie is mediocre, well, it sure as hell is ain't not gon' help!Alright. This is a chaotic, slightly confusing mess of a movie. Three parts, by three different directors. I found the last one to be the best one. And of course the wraparound starring Jeffrey Combs. He was basically the main reason why I checked this out, I god damn love Jeffrey Combs.The stories are, well, alright. I won't say more about each one than the first one I didn't care much for. The second one had a slightly interesting story, and some decent makeup/effects. The last one had some cool imagery. The movie is pretty wild, and has it's really disgusting moments. A certain "melting-scene" was a highlight for me. Jeffrey Combs, and parts of the last segment keeps this from a really low score for me.

Paul Andrews Necronomicon starts in 1932 as writer H.P. Lovecraft (Jeffrey Combs) as learned that an order of Ontraggi Monks guard a copy of the legendary occult book the Necronomicon, Lovecraft manages to locate the vault where the Necronomicon is hidden & begins the read it...First he reads about 'The Drowned' in which a man named Edward De Lapoer (Bruce Payne) inherits an old hotel that has been abandoned for sixty years after the suicide of his ancestor Jethro De Lapoer (Richard Lynch) managed to bring his dead wife & son back to life using spells from the Necronomicon...The next story 'The Cold' is about newspaper reporter Dale Porkel (Dennis Christopher) who investigates the murder of several people which leads him to a boarding house & a certain Dr. Madden (David Warner) who has managed to prolong his life but with dire consequences...Finally Lovecraft reads 'The Whispers' about a female cop named Sarah (Signy Coleman) descent under an old warehouse where she finds herself in an ancient temple full of Bat creatures who feast on human flesh & need human brains to breed...This French & American co-production is a three part horror anthology film based around three short stories by H.P. Lovecraft who also features in the fictional wraparound segment, the wraparound segment & the third story 'The Whispers' was directed by Brian Yuzna while the first story 'The Drowned' was directed by the French born Christophe Gans while the second story was directed by the Japanese born Shûsuke Kaneko. The script for Necronomicon uses various Lovecraft themes & ideas but the individual stories don't really represent their supposed source materials but I still found them all enjoyable in different ways. I think it's quite nice to watch a horror film that has no annoying teenagers in it, that isn't a remake of anything & isn't a typically predictable slasher & to that end I did enjoy this although it could have been better. Each of the stories has an air of the supernatural about it with the first in particular, each story features the Necronomicon somehow but I would say that 'The Cold' is maybe the best of the three with 'Whispers' not far behind it & while 'The Drowned' is far from bad it's probably the least of the three stories. There's certainly plenty of gore & monsters here & the effects men have a blast bringing all sorts of slimy monsters, people melting, severed limbs & splattery creations to life. At a little over 90 minutes each story lasts the 25 minute range & are all suitably different although I think the twist endings could have been a bitter & played more for dramatic impact.Although based on short stories by Lovecraft the adaptations retain little of their literally source, 'The Drowned' is an adaptation of The Rats in the Wall from 1924 only retains the De Lapoer name & something under a house (a city rather than a monster though), 'The Cold' is adapted from Cool Air published in 1931 & is the closest to the original story while 'Whispers' is adapted from The Whispers in Darkness from 1928 that deals with rumours of aliens hiding in the hills of Vermont rather than cops & old warehouses. Fans of other Yuzna produced Lovecraft adaptations such as Re-Animator (1985) & From Beyond (1986) will be happy to see the same sort of visual style & the same sort of gory special effects, from people melting to piles of severed limbs to people's faces being pulled off to people with the backs of their heads missing to some bat like alien monsters to a huge tentacled monster thing & more besides as the effects men throw plenty of blood & slime our way. The dark Gothic setting or 'The Drowned' is very nice & atmospheric while the more sedate setting of 'The Cold' works too but the somewhat surreal setting of 'Whispers' looks a little theatrical with it's bright neon lighting & smoke everywhere.With a supposed budget of about $4,000,000 this appears to have had some money spent on it & while the effects & sets probably cost a fair bit the stories do feel a little empty at times, Necronomicon feels like a showcase for the effects men rather than the talents of Lovecraft. The acting is pretty good, Jeffrey Combs, Bruce Payne, Richard Lynch & David Warner add a little marquee value for genre fans.Necronomicon is a good film, it's not a perfect film but at least it's something different from the teen slashers, remakes & giant Shark creature features that litter video shop shelves, I suppose it's an acquired taste & the stories might have been fleshed out more for dramatic purposes but it looks great, has lots of slime & gore & is well worth a watch.

Edgar Soberon Torchia "Necronomicon" brought me good memories of two 1960s productions: Roger Corman's "Tales of Terror" (AIP, 1962), and Sidney Salkow's "Twice-Told Tales" (UA, 1963), based on stories by Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne, respectively. The old mansion by the sea was a location often seen in several AIP productions; and the first tale, "The Drowned", reminded me of "Morella", the first story in the Corman film. The next segment, "The Cold", seems like a version in modern times of "Rappaccini's Daughter", the second Hawthorne story in the UA release. Unfortunately, the third story (or fourth, strictly speaking), directed by Brian Yuzna, is too coarse, noisy, badly acted, filled with green sticky fluid, and too cheap visual effects, affecting the balance. Thankfully the film closes with the "wraparound" little story "The Library", slightly erasing the previous bad impression.

Ivan Bradley Lovecraft's, and the other writers of the common mythos' work is SO difficult to translate to film. Attempts to illustrate the alluded-to but barely observed horror of most of the genre tend to fail because the substance is not generally visual. It is a state of mind. Lovecraft paints a picture of terrified paranoia where the haunted protagonist is alone in what he sees, trapped in the inability to communicate the reality of his dire predicament except by rambling about shunned this and forbidden that... It is rarely possible to get inside the head of the victim to see what he sees, because stripped of its "out of the corner of your eye" fleeting impression playing on your mind quality, it also tends to get stripped of its horror and become fairly standard Gothic, splatter or just camp. Reanimator is a fine case of camp. Dunwich Horror is Gothic..The only superlative translation, in my opinion, is Dagon, a fairly close following of The Shadow Over Innesmouth, as I recall. Strangely, something that captures the feel rather than any particular plot would be Carpenter's Mouth of Madness... a portrait of a state of mind rather than encounters.I think that Necronomicon - NOT "the book of the dead" but more properly "the book of dead names" or a similar near translation - is a film that attempts to look behind the veil rather than standing in a panic contemplating the veil itself. In doing this, it runs all sorts of risks and I believe that it largely succeeds. The stories have been discussed enough here, but the final buckets of blood and latex offering actually carries the idea with it of the utter alienness that is the horror that Lovecraft perceives. Unfortunately most viewers revulsion will be at the splatter and sticky redness, and barriers will go up at "yet another" bag of sinews chucked around the studio as the automatic filing system kicks in and the brain immediately categorises it with chainsaw massacres and cannibal holocausts and various other films showing interplanetary roadkill or hell-raised skin-tearing as the end point in audience manipulation.If we can bear with the direction a little, It's not the "Ickiness" that revolts us.. it's only a vehicle to carry the REAL horror of complete and utter "lostness" - the certainty of a destiny that is so awful that it's something that medieval visions of Hell can only vaguely hint at. Lovecraft was genuinely terrified by it and afraid to look at it head on because he believed that it would drive him completely mad... and if we try and do it for him we either miss the point or see smoke and mirrors. Film is not the best medium for this. Literature, and maybe music and drama tends to work better, but we demand films, and the best we get is interpretation that runs the risk of the viewer not "getting it." Usually, of course, the film maker doesn't "get it" either, which is why most Gothic horror becomes so camp, translated to screen, although this works rather well as entertainment in different ways.Thankyou, Hammer.)Necronomicon is a brave effort to translate Lovecraft's vision to the screen. It's not perfect by any means, but I'm still going to give it 9 for valour