The Dunwich Horror (2009 Movie)
I just saw the most hilariously-bad adaptation of a really-good Lovecraft story imaginable. I mean it's almost up there with Manos, the Hands of Fate for sheer idiocy.
Basically, imagine The Dunwich Horror set in modern Louisiana. Now imagine that the whole point of the story is given away in the first five minutes of the movie. Now imagine that three investigators, named after but acting nothing like Amitage, Morgan and Rice from the original story, wander around aimlessly at the dictates of the plot looking for the page of the Necronomicon needed to send the Horror back to whence it came (See? I know how to avoid Spoilers, though I suspect everyone's read the original by now!)
I felt a spectral presence -- as of one man and two small robots, sitting beside me and watching the movie alongside me. I felt like crying "We've got Movie Sign!" every time a commercial ended. And I MSTed in tongues. Well, mostly English. Give me time.
The movie begins with Lavinia Whateley giving birth to her famous twins. Wilbur's Brother erupts in tentacle pornish fury from her ... well, let's just say that aside from the nature of the children this was a normal birth.
Of course, by having this happen on camera this stage they've just revealed what in the original story was the crowning horror. Hey, Mr. Scriptwriter, ever occur to you that Lovecraft put that revelation at the end of the story for a reason? Such as maybe he knew how to write?
Lavinia screams and cackles, which is good because she's played by the best damned actress in the movie. Not that she's any great shakes as an actress -- it's just that she's the best damned actress in the movie.
Which should tell you how bad the rest of the acting gets. In fact, practically everyone in this movie either hams it up (which is at least amusing) or has an utterly flat affect. Amusingly, the actors who play evil or mad cultists are much more enjoyable to watch than are those who play the good guys, creating an interesting Reverse Aesop about Lovecraft's world -- you have to be an evil maniac to be any fun.
We cut to intrepid occult investigators Drs. Armitage and Rice, who are attempting to exorcise a demon from a teenaged girl. Dr. Armitage is played by an older man who manages to sound utterly uninterested in anything he's doing, even when he's in a dangerous situation. Rice in this version is a slightly attractive woman, who seems a bit more enthusiastic even though she's almost as bad an actress as he's an actor.
They exorcise Ybb-Tstll (a Great Old One just thrown in from another story entirely, I think a Derleth or Lumley one, for the sake of being there) from the girl, but not before she grows batwings and tosses the protagonists around the room a bit. Ybb-Tstll tells them that soon the Gate will be open and the Great Old Ones will conquer the Earth and have access to all the good shopping. Or something of the sort. Then she's exorcised and returns to normal. Yay.
This worries Armitage and Rice so they recruit Morgan, who is the dullest man in the entire world, and who was for six years the lover of Rice (something that I guarantee you was not true in the original story, where all the protagonists were male). This actually isn't a bad idea, and it might have been done well if the actors were good enough to convince us that they were ever in love, or even sort of liked one another.
Morgan is a Hollywood Atheist, which made me groan because it was obvious that he was going to come to believe in God at some point in the movie for inadequate reason. Or even remotely adequate reason. When the reason finally came it was even stupider than I imagined, which is saying a lot. Oh, and did I mention that he's also a skeptic about the Mythos, and that his general inability to have faith was why Rice apparently couldn't stay with him (though if she took six years to figure this out, I guess they really must have at least liked one another).
They consult their local Necronomicon and discover that the spell they need to close the Gate is on the missing page 751 (an idea they took directly from the original story, and hence one of the actual good ideas in the movie). So their quest is obviously to locate page 751, which only exists (in the movie) in the original copy of the book (presumably the Arabic one, but what's a language or two between scholars?).
So Morgan and Rice set off on the search for page 751. This would be a terrific concept for a romantic / buddy movie, if this were a movie with good writing, acting ... or anything, really. Lovecraft couldn't help them hear, because the Old Gent from Providence didn't do romantic comedy, and no amount of Sinister Alien Chanting could turn him into Jane Austen or P. G. Wodehouse.
Meanwhile, Wizard Whateley (the father of Lavinia) sends Wilbur off on exactly the same quest. Ah, movie, now I can bring up two more reasons why I hated you.
First of all, for no apparent reason, when we see any of the Whateleys on camera, the camera does all these weird jump cuts, like a Japanese vengeance spirit was trying to avenge itself upon the makers of this movie. I think the director was trying to imply some sort of weird extradimensional space-time discontinuity here, but since it was neither explained nor noticed by any of the characters, I had to assume that it was just the director pretending that he knew how to make a movie by cribbing bits from better ones.
Secondly, this movie's version of Wilbur Whateley is pathetic. No, not in the sinister-pathetic way that Lovecraft meant him to be, an uncouth half-human giant of rustic ways and bizarre erudition, who fit in neither on Earth nor in Yog-Sothoth's world, so that he could dream only of turning our world into something more like his father's home. I mean pathetic in the sense that they hired an unimposing actor of moderate height to play him, thus avoiding the need to make him look like someone with gigantism, and uinintentionally making him look silly.
The movie also ignored the fact that Wilbur was supposed to be monstrously intelligent, defeatable mainly because his alien nature sparked suspicion and fear in normal humans. Instead they make him childlike in the intellectual sense, which also makes him entirely unthreatening. This is bad, considering that he's meant to be a blasphemous version of John the Baptist, or of Jesus himself.
Morgan and Rice travel into the bayou where Olaius Wormius, a centuries (possibly millennia) old wizard is supposed to be living, and to be in possession of a copy with the missing page 751. Olaius is just another Mythos name from the original history of the Necronomicon Mr. Scriptwriter threw in to prove that he'd read Lovecraft once, quickly, and in inadequate lighting. He's supposed to be the guy who translated the Necronomicon from Greek into Latin, actually.
First they have a gratuitous encounter with a Magical Negro. Really, I can think of no other way to describe this utterly unnecessary character. He runs a boat rental, he's black, he's old, he's got cataracts to the point that he should be blind, but he can mysteriously see everything, and sense their thoughts. I half-expected him to start ranting about his "shining," and then see Halloran leap in and take him out with an axe to avenge Stephen King. All I can say is that at least when Stephen King does Magical Negroes, they're interesting characters -- Mr. Scriptwriter was simply adding King to the long list of better writers from which he was trying to crib.
Anyway, the Magical Negro rents them a boat and they proceed into the Creepy Bayou. There, in a very strange house, lives Olaius Wormius in a sort of Arabian Nights harem complete with dancing girls who, well, dance. Constantly, and annoyingly. The dancing girls welcome Morgan and Rice in, sit them on a couch, and offer them drinks.
Olaius Wormius demonstrates to them that he is an impossibly lazy imbecile -- excuse me, mighty wizard, by levitating himself over to them for no obvious reason, since all he does next is levitate himself onto a couch in order to talk to them. Olaius Wormius has ridiculously huge eyebrows which led me to riff on them for almost every moment he was on camera: "Beware the power of the eyebrows!" and "Only his eyebrows can defeat the Great Old Ones!"
Olaius Wormius then tells them that they must go to a strange house (no, it's neither high nor in the mist) owned by a man named Ward (who is taken for no obvious reason from The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, since Joseph Curwen has absolutely nothing to do with the plot), and that the complete Necronomicon can be found there. But, he warns them, this is no ordinary house. He can't be more specific, since the Power of the Eyebrows works in Mysterious Ways, I guess.
So, they apparently make their way back to the Magical Negro Dock and get back into their car and go driving off into the night. The scene where they are driving through the night is unintentionally funny because ... now remember that they are driving on a rural road at NIGHT ... Morgan (who is driving) repeatedly looks practically everywhere but at the road directly in front of him.
Speaking as someone with experience of late-night rural roads, I can affirm that you don't want to do this if you expect to stay on the road -- it is really dark at night in the country. I half-expected them to wind up going off the road and winding up with their car sinking into the swamp while they stood, soaked, by the roadside, sadly watching it go down glug glug -- but no such luck.
Morgan and Rice arrive at Ward's house and notice that the house is bigger inside than outside. They see Ward sitting in a chair but he vaporizes for no obvious reason. Then they are sucked into the Dreamworld, in order to make sure that no Lovecraftian idea remains unplundered, where they meet the spirit of Alhazred (he's an Arab, and he's obviously mad, which is literally how they recognize him) and see him writing a Necronomicon.
Unfortunately, both the Arab and his work vanish, and they are plunged into Plot Complications -- I mean perils -- which are oddly like unimaginative deathtraps. Morgan and Rice tell each other that they love each other. Then, sadly, they escape the Plot Complications in a manner which suggests that the whole house is a dream, or in the Dreamlands. Though it's neither high nor in a mist, really.
They find that the missing Necronomicon is actually ... oh, who cares. Let's just say that it strikes me as a particularly unreasonable way to store a book, evil, cursed or otherwise. They grab page 751 and are on their way.
Meanwhile, Wilbur Whateley reaches Henry Armitage and asks to see the Necronomicon. Armitage wins Whateley's trust by a ruse which wouldn't work on a bright child, let alone a Demonspawn from Beyond Space and Time (let's see him try it on Hellboy some time!) and Whateley leads him back to the Whateley House.
Wilbur's been gone for days, and his Brother is getting hungry. Now, to further show how stupid a movie this is, it apparently doesn't occur to the Whateleys that the Brother could be fed with livestock. No, for no obvious reason, Wilbur's been wandering around grabbing and feeding him people, a feat of which neither Wizard nor Lavinia are capable. So there's an obvious problem.
Lavinia feeds her father to Wilbur's Brother. Wilbur comes home and is annoyed at this turn of events. Lavinia kills Wilbur with a shotgun, not quite meaning to do so, and you briefly see his true form (in the original story, he always looked like that under his clothes) before he dissolves. Lavinia, devastated by her accidental murder of her son, apparently shoots herself with the remaining barrel of the shotgun.
So long, Lavinia. Your mad cackling was the best acting in the whole movie. The world of the movie will be poorer without you.
Armitage now shows up and sees Wilbur's Brother. The sight drives him mad, though for no obvious reason the Brother doesn't try to eat him.
Meanwhile, back with Morgan and Rice, the formerly demon-possessed teenage girl shows up for some reason (she never makes it entirely clear) and offers to help them. Morgan and Rice see absolutely no problem with taking her along with them to help destroy Wilbur's Brother.
Now, let's try applying normal limited tri-dimensional Earth logic, such as the world will be swept clean of if Mr. Scriptwriter has his way, to this situation. Either she is just some innocent teenage girl, in which case she knows very little of use to them and is someone they should be keeping well clear of human-eating Things That Should Not Be, or she is a Thing That Should Not Be, in which case she is the last person they want to be taking along on this mission.
But such reasoning is beyond the intrepid Morgan and Rice. Instead, they pile her into the car. Whee! It'll be fun!
At one point, Morgan asks her if she's "squeamish" and she says "Of course not! I've been possessed by a demon! I grew batwings! Though I don't remember any of it ..." and they all share a laugh.
Oh, exposing innocent underaged girls to mind, and body and soul-destroying Horrors From Beyond is jolly! Maybe we'll get a panty shot!
They all go to the Whateley House and find Armitage. At the Whateley House, all the Whateleys are now dead save the Brother, who is getting lonely, and wants to go walkies. He does go walkies, though he doesn't bust out and destroy the house, or any of the neighboring farms, because this was one of the parts that make the original story fun and we can't have "fun" in this movie.
It develops that the teenage girl remembers from her demonic possession how to draw a protective circle, which is useful if they want to avoid being eaten by the Brother while trying to dispel him. We get some highly confused attempts at Lovecraftian magic here (is the Gate being opened or closed by the Investigators?) and Armitage gets grabbed and killed in some vague fashion by the Brother.
Then, the teenage girl is grabbed by the Brother, is saved by Morgan and Rice, collapses unconscious for no obvious reason and gets briefly groped by one of the Brother's tentacles. (You knew that was going to happen when you put a tentacle monster and a teenage girl together in the same scene!) I think she survives, but she's never shown again awake, nor is she mentioned by any characters so I don't know. (Oh well, who cares about her? She's not even a scientist!).
Morgan and Rice chant and the Brother is either forced back into Yog-Sothoth's dimension or destroyed, in some really badly rendered special effects, especially noticable because this is the 21st century and yet they apparently couldn't manage decent ones. The world is saved. Yay.
Denounement. Morgan announces to a class that he has found faith and now believes in a higher power. (God? Yog-Sothoth? The Pillsbury Doughboy? Who knows, who cares?) Later, Morgan and Rice flirt, and are obviously back together again. Their love is saved. Yay.
This is a textbook case of how to use all kinds of elements from a really interesting science fantasy world while draining it of everything that made it good. Compared to Mr. Scriptwriter, August Derleth was freaking Clark Ashton Smith, Jack Vance and Poul Anderson all combined into one super-writing package.
A good horror writer creates verisimilitude by first delineating a believable "normal" world -- whether our own or some other -- and then the horrific elements, building them up slowly and logically so that we share in their discovery, and thus believe in them. This is true whether the horror story is set in Arkham, or Derry, or New York City, or for that matter on Rigel X or the Dying Earth.
The way you do this with an obviously fantastic world, incidentally, is to first develop the most "normal" part of the world and then the more fantastic and horrific parts. We learn all about the Shire before we see Rivendell or Mordor. We see the crew of the Nostromo and their mundane grimy space freighter before we see the ruined alien derelict and meet its terrible survivor.
You don't introduce a horror story by giving away all its secrets in the prologue. You don't have the audience meet the inbred insane family of cultists before they meet the sane rational investigators. Notably, in the original version of "The Dunwich Horror," Lovecraft shows us what can be seen of the Whateleys from the point of view of the NORMAL rural New Englanders before we learn their terrible true story.
Why? Because part of the thrill of fantasy or horror is discovery. The protagonists attempt to fathom the fantastic or horrible mysteries they have encountered, and we learn the truth as they learn the truth. This makes the truth more believable.
Ah well. Maybe someday someone will do a good film adaptation of a Lovecraft story. I've heard good things about the recent At the Mountains of Madness, but haven't gotten to see it yet.
The Dunwich Horror -- a good adaptation, it is not. At least I don't think it was supposed to leave me dissolving in hysterical laughter. I don't believe that was my reaction the first time I read the original story, anyway :)
Basically, imagine The Dunwich Horror set in modern Louisiana. Now imagine that the whole point of the story is given away in the first five minutes of the movie. Now imagine that three investigators, named after but acting nothing like Amitage, Morgan and Rice from the original story, wander around aimlessly at the dictates of the plot looking for the page of the Necronomicon needed to send the Horror back to whence it came (See? I know how to avoid Spoilers, though I suspect everyone's read the original by now!)
I felt a spectral presence -- as of one man and two small robots, sitting beside me and watching the movie alongside me. I felt like crying "We've got Movie Sign!" every time a commercial ended. And I MSTed in tongues. Well, mostly English. Give me time.
The movie begins with Lavinia Whateley giving birth to her famous twins. Wilbur's Brother erupts in tentacle pornish fury from her ... well, let's just say that aside from the nature of the children this was a normal birth.
Of course, by having this happen on camera this stage they've just revealed what in the original story was the crowning horror. Hey, Mr. Scriptwriter, ever occur to you that Lovecraft put that revelation at the end of the story for a reason? Such as maybe he knew how to write?
Lavinia screams and cackles, which is good because she's played by the best damned actress in the movie. Not that she's any great shakes as an actress -- it's just that she's the best damned actress in the movie.
Which should tell you how bad the rest of the acting gets. In fact, practically everyone in this movie either hams it up (which is at least amusing) or has an utterly flat affect. Amusingly, the actors who play evil or mad cultists are much more enjoyable to watch than are those who play the good guys, creating an interesting Reverse Aesop about Lovecraft's world -- you have to be an evil maniac to be any fun.
We cut to intrepid occult investigators Drs. Armitage and Rice, who are attempting to exorcise a demon from a teenaged girl. Dr. Armitage is played by an older man who manages to sound utterly uninterested in anything he's doing, even when he's in a dangerous situation. Rice in this version is a slightly attractive woman, who seems a bit more enthusiastic even though she's almost as bad an actress as he's an actor.
They exorcise Ybb-Tstll (a Great Old One just thrown in from another story entirely, I think a Derleth or Lumley one, for the sake of being there) from the girl, but not before she grows batwings and tosses the protagonists around the room a bit. Ybb-Tstll tells them that soon the Gate will be open and the Great Old Ones will conquer the Earth and have access to all the good shopping. Or something of the sort. Then she's exorcised and returns to normal. Yay.
This worries Armitage and Rice so they recruit Morgan, who is the dullest man in the entire world, and who was for six years the lover of Rice (something that I guarantee you was not true in the original story, where all the protagonists were male). This actually isn't a bad idea, and it might have been done well if the actors were good enough to convince us that they were ever in love, or even sort of liked one another.
Morgan is a Hollywood Atheist, which made me groan because it was obvious that he was going to come to believe in God at some point in the movie for inadequate reason. Or even remotely adequate reason. When the reason finally came it was even stupider than I imagined, which is saying a lot. Oh, and did I mention that he's also a skeptic about the Mythos, and that his general inability to have faith was why Rice apparently couldn't stay with him (though if she took six years to figure this out, I guess they really must have at least liked one another).
They consult their local Necronomicon and discover that the spell they need to close the Gate is on the missing page 751 (an idea they took directly from the original story, and hence one of the actual good ideas in the movie). So their quest is obviously to locate page 751, which only exists (in the movie) in the original copy of the book (presumably the Arabic one, but what's a language or two between scholars?).
So Morgan and Rice set off on the search for page 751. This would be a terrific concept for a romantic / buddy movie, if this were a movie with good writing, acting ... or anything, really. Lovecraft couldn't help them hear, because the Old Gent from Providence didn't do romantic comedy, and no amount of Sinister Alien Chanting could turn him into Jane Austen or P. G. Wodehouse.
Meanwhile, Wizard Whateley (the father of Lavinia) sends Wilbur off on exactly the same quest. Ah, movie, now I can bring up two more reasons why I hated you.
First of all, for no apparent reason, when we see any of the Whateleys on camera, the camera does all these weird jump cuts, like a Japanese vengeance spirit was trying to avenge itself upon the makers of this movie. I think the director was trying to imply some sort of weird extradimensional space-time discontinuity here, but since it was neither explained nor noticed by any of the characters, I had to assume that it was just the director pretending that he knew how to make a movie by cribbing bits from better ones.
Secondly, this movie's version of Wilbur Whateley is pathetic. No, not in the sinister-pathetic way that Lovecraft meant him to be, an uncouth half-human giant of rustic ways and bizarre erudition, who fit in neither on Earth nor in Yog-Sothoth's world, so that he could dream only of turning our world into something more like his father's home. I mean pathetic in the sense that they hired an unimposing actor of moderate height to play him, thus avoiding the need to make him look like someone with gigantism, and uinintentionally making him look silly.
The movie also ignored the fact that Wilbur was supposed to be monstrously intelligent, defeatable mainly because his alien nature sparked suspicion and fear in normal humans. Instead they make him childlike in the intellectual sense, which also makes him entirely unthreatening. This is bad, considering that he's meant to be a blasphemous version of John the Baptist, or of Jesus himself.
Morgan and Rice travel into the bayou where Olaius Wormius, a centuries (possibly millennia) old wizard is supposed to be living, and to be in possession of a copy with the missing page 751. Olaius is just another Mythos name from the original history of the Necronomicon Mr. Scriptwriter threw in to prove that he'd read Lovecraft once, quickly, and in inadequate lighting. He's supposed to be the guy who translated the Necronomicon from Greek into Latin, actually.
First they have a gratuitous encounter with a Magical Negro. Really, I can think of no other way to describe this utterly unnecessary character. He runs a boat rental, he's black, he's old, he's got cataracts to the point that he should be blind, but he can mysteriously see everything, and sense their thoughts. I half-expected him to start ranting about his "shining," and then see Halloran leap in and take him out with an axe to avenge Stephen King. All I can say is that at least when Stephen King does Magical Negroes, they're interesting characters -- Mr. Scriptwriter was simply adding King to the long list of better writers from which he was trying to crib.
Anyway, the Magical Negro rents them a boat and they proceed into the Creepy Bayou. There, in a very strange house, lives Olaius Wormius in a sort of Arabian Nights harem complete with dancing girls who, well, dance. Constantly, and annoyingly. The dancing girls welcome Morgan and Rice in, sit them on a couch, and offer them drinks.
Olaius Wormius demonstrates to them that he is an impossibly lazy imbecile -- excuse me, mighty wizard, by levitating himself over to them for no obvious reason, since all he does next is levitate himself onto a couch in order to talk to them. Olaius Wormius has ridiculously huge eyebrows which led me to riff on them for almost every moment he was on camera: "Beware the power of the eyebrows!" and "Only his eyebrows can defeat the Great Old Ones!"
Olaius Wormius then tells them that they must go to a strange house (no, it's neither high nor in the mist) owned by a man named Ward (who is taken for no obvious reason from The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, since Joseph Curwen has absolutely nothing to do with the plot), and that the complete Necronomicon can be found there. But, he warns them, this is no ordinary house. He can't be more specific, since the Power of the Eyebrows works in Mysterious Ways, I guess.
So, they apparently make their way back to the Magical Negro Dock and get back into their car and go driving off into the night. The scene where they are driving through the night is unintentionally funny because ... now remember that they are driving on a rural road at NIGHT ... Morgan (who is driving) repeatedly looks practically everywhere but at the road directly in front of him.
Speaking as someone with experience of late-night rural roads, I can affirm that you don't want to do this if you expect to stay on the road -- it is really dark at night in the country. I half-expected them to wind up going off the road and winding up with their car sinking into the swamp while they stood, soaked, by the roadside, sadly watching it go down glug glug -- but no such luck.
Morgan and Rice arrive at Ward's house and notice that the house is bigger inside than outside. They see Ward sitting in a chair but he vaporizes for no obvious reason. Then they are sucked into the Dreamworld, in order to make sure that no Lovecraftian idea remains unplundered, where they meet the spirit of Alhazred (he's an Arab, and he's obviously mad, which is literally how they recognize him) and see him writing a Necronomicon.
Unfortunately, both the Arab and his work vanish, and they are plunged into Plot Complications -- I mean perils -- which are oddly like unimaginative deathtraps. Morgan and Rice tell each other that they love each other. Then, sadly, they escape the Plot Complications in a manner which suggests that the whole house is a dream, or in the Dreamlands. Though it's neither high nor in a mist, really.
They find that the missing Necronomicon is actually ... oh, who cares. Let's just say that it strikes me as a particularly unreasonable way to store a book, evil, cursed or otherwise. They grab page 751 and are on their way.
Meanwhile, Wilbur Whateley reaches Henry Armitage and asks to see the Necronomicon. Armitage wins Whateley's trust by a ruse which wouldn't work on a bright child, let alone a Demonspawn from Beyond Space and Time (let's see him try it on Hellboy some time!) and Whateley leads him back to the Whateley House.
Wilbur's been gone for days, and his Brother is getting hungry. Now, to further show how stupid a movie this is, it apparently doesn't occur to the Whateleys that the Brother could be fed with livestock. No, for no obvious reason, Wilbur's been wandering around grabbing and feeding him people, a feat of which neither Wizard nor Lavinia are capable. So there's an obvious problem.
Lavinia feeds her father to Wilbur's Brother. Wilbur comes home and is annoyed at this turn of events. Lavinia kills Wilbur with a shotgun, not quite meaning to do so, and you briefly see his true form (in the original story, he always looked like that under his clothes) before he dissolves. Lavinia, devastated by her accidental murder of her son, apparently shoots herself with the remaining barrel of the shotgun.
So long, Lavinia. Your mad cackling was the best acting in the whole movie. The world of the movie will be poorer without you.
Armitage now shows up and sees Wilbur's Brother. The sight drives him mad, though for no obvious reason the Brother doesn't try to eat him.
Meanwhile, back with Morgan and Rice, the formerly demon-possessed teenage girl shows up for some reason (she never makes it entirely clear) and offers to help them. Morgan and Rice see absolutely no problem with taking her along with them to help destroy Wilbur's Brother.
Now, let's try applying normal limited tri-dimensional Earth logic, such as the world will be swept clean of if Mr. Scriptwriter has his way, to this situation. Either she is just some innocent teenage girl, in which case she knows very little of use to them and is someone they should be keeping well clear of human-eating Things That Should Not Be, or she is a Thing That Should Not Be, in which case she is the last person they want to be taking along on this mission.
But such reasoning is beyond the intrepid Morgan and Rice. Instead, they pile her into the car. Whee! It'll be fun!
At one point, Morgan asks her if she's "squeamish" and she says "Of course not! I've been possessed by a demon! I grew batwings! Though I don't remember any of it ..." and they all share a laugh.
Oh, exposing innocent underaged girls to mind, and body and soul-destroying Horrors From Beyond is jolly! Maybe we'll get a panty shot!
They all go to the Whateley House and find Armitage. At the Whateley House, all the Whateleys are now dead save the Brother, who is getting lonely, and wants to go walkies. He does go walkies, though he doesn't bust out and destroy the house, or any of the neighboring farms, because this was one of the parts that make the original story fun and we can't have "fun" in this movie.
It develops that the teenage girl remembers from her demonic possession how to draw a protective circle, which is useful if they want to avoid being eaten by the Brother while trying to dispel him. We get some highly confused attempts at Lovecraftian magic here (is the Gate being opened or closed by the Investigators?) and Armitage gets grabbed and killed in some vague fashion by the Brother.
Then, the teenage girl is grabbed by the Brother, is saved by Morgan and Rice, collapses unconscious for no obvious reason and gets briefly groped by one of the Brother's tentacles. (You knew that was going to happen when you put a tentacle monster and a teenage girl together in the same scene!) I think she survives, but she's never shown again awake, nor is she mentioned by any characters so I don't know. (Oh well, who cares about her? She's not even a scientist!).
Morgan and Rice chant and the Brother is either forced back into Yog-Sothoth's dimension or destroyed, in some really badly rendered special effects, especially noticable because this is the 21st century and yet they apparently couldn't manage decent ones. The world is saved. Yay.
Denounement. Morgan announces to a class that he has found faith and now believes in a higher power. (God? Yog-Sothoth? The Pillsbury Doughboy? Who knows, who cares?) Later, Morgan and Rice flirt, and are obviously back together again. Their love is saved. Yay.
This is a textbook case of how to use all kinds of elements from a really interesting science fantasy world while draining it of everything that made it good. Compared to Mr. Scriptwriter, August Derleth was freaking Clark Ashton Smith, Jack Vance and Poul Anderson all combined into one super-writing package.
A good horror writer creates verisimilitude by first delineating a believable "normal" world -- whether our own or some other -- and then the horrific elements, building them up slowly and logically so that we share in their discovery, and thus believe in them. This is true whether the horror story is set in Arkham, or Derry, or New York City, or for that matter on Rigel X or the Dying Earth.
The way you do this with an obviously fantastic world, incidentally, is to first develop the most "normal" part of the world and then the more fantastic and horrific parts. We learn all about the Shire before we see Rivendell or Mordor. We see the crew of the Nostromo and their mundane grimy space freighter before we see the ruined alien derelict and meet its terrible survivor.
You don't introduce a horror story by giving away all its secrets in the prologue. You don't have the audience meet the inbred insane family of cultists before they meet the sane rational investigators. Notably, in the original version of "The Dunwich Horror," Lovecraft shows us what can be seen of the Whateleys from the point of view of the NORMAL rural New Englanders before we learn their terrible true story.
Why? Because part of the thrill of fantasy or horror is discovery. The protagonists attempt to fathom the fantastic or horrible mysteries they have encountered, and we learn the truth as they learn the truth. This makes the truth more believable.
Ah well. Maybe someday someone will do a good film adaptation of a Lovecraft story. I've heard good things about the recent At the Mountains of Madness, but haven't gotten to see it yet.
The Dunwich Horror -- a good adaptation, it is not. At least I don't think it was supposed to leave me dissolving in hysterical laughter. I don't believe that was my reaction the first time I read the original story, anyway :)