Lurking Fear (1994)

I actually saw the poster for Lurking Fear in a video store back in '94 and was desperately curious. I never did get a chance to see it. I wish it had remained that way. Lurking Fear is a bad movie. It's not an amusingly bad movie. It's a frustratingly bad movie. It insults your intelligence and doesn't deliver much on the fun.

A handsome, muscular man gets out of prison and goes looking for his criminal father's stash of money. It's in a cemetery in some town where, we learn, the population has been steadily shrinking due to some monster's living underground. Why don't the people just evacuate the stupid town? The only people who seem to be left are Jeffrey Combs, Kirsty from Hellraiser (Ashley Laurence), a priest, and a pregnant woman. Enter Mr. Beefcake, trailed by some caricature mob goons who want the money. All of these thoroughly unpleasant characters bicker, play tough-guy, mouth-off to each other, point guns at each other, take guns from each other, while the monsters occasionally reach a hand up from below.

One hopes and prays the monsters will consume these miserable pieces of human refuse. Only Jeffrey Combs is really likeable--because he's Jeffrey Combs. The rest are just annoying. Ashley Laurence is the most annoying of them all. The tough guy act just never stops with her. If you thought Wolverine from X-Men was annoying, hoo boy, she's got him beat. Speaking of which, Beefcake resembles Hugh Jackman as Wolverine. He also finds an excuse to go shirtless, which had me thinking, "Ah, so this is how women must feel when there is gratuitous T&A."

Long story short: the characters are heinous and poorly written, the monsters are boring and largely ineffectual, the plot is incoherent to put it lightly, and at 76 minutes it still runs too long. Most people here know I like nearly everything I watch. Lurking Fear beat me. It is bad and insulting. Stuart Gordon had actually been set to direct this. I think had Charles Band let Gordon write and direct, Lurking Fear may have been good. Perhaps what makes me hate the movie so much is just that the raw material is good; it's the execution that is repugnantly bad.