If you frequent the same b-movie review sites that I do (Bleeding Skull, Critical Condition, The Cinema Snob, etc.) some titles keep popping up with little context or explanation. Horror is a fly-by-night genre, attracting unexperienced filmmakers with the promise of profiting from low-budget productions and just as easily letting them slip back into their day jobs. The ease with which these movies can be made makes sure the market is always fresh with cheap, unknown movies that seemingly come out of nowhere, and not all of them have attracted any kind of cult fandom. This makes them a mixed bag in terms of renting - some of them could be unsung masterpieces (like Lindsey Vickers's The Appointment), and some of them could be completely worthless (like The Amityville Curse, which can't even be saved by its decent theme music). Dark Heritage is a movie that I'd heard about a few times, each time comparing it to the works of H. P. Lovecraft, a Pavlov Bell for a whole race of horror fans. Adapting Lovecraft's byzantine cosmic horror universe to film has proven difficult, and while two excellent movies come to mind - John Carpenter's In the Mouth of Madness and the 45-minute neo-silent The Call of Cthulhu - those are few and far between, and the Carpenter movie isn't even an adaptation, but more like an homage. Fans sometimes resort to praising mediocre movies to make up for the lack of good ones, like Stuart Gordon's swing-an'-a-miss Dagon, and the decent reviews I saw for Dark Heritage made me suspect another case of fandelusion. You've got to admit - that's a pretty cool cover. I have a bias towards the thing because its drawing style and content is heavily reminiscent of the wonderful young adult novel The House with a Clock in its Walls by John Bellairs, and I've been wishing for a movie adaptation of the book for YEARS. Alas, no dice are in sight, but it did get me to drop $0.01 (plus shipping) on the suspicious-looking DVD. What I got was surprisingly solid - certainly a bit amateurish and cheap, but well-conceived and endowed with some nice touches.
A couple is hanging out in a small trailer when they are mysteriously attacked by people, or beings, with black rubber monster hands during a thunderstorm. A reporter is assigned to investigate an old house nearby to the campgrounds the trailer was parked on, as the head of the paper thinks there's a link to the murders and a local legend of murders connected to the house stretching back a hundred years. The house is abandoned, but the reporter insists on videotaping the team while they sleep - not that that saves the guy on watch from getting butchered. The police suspect the reporter and he gets booted off the case, and while doing research at the local college he meets a pair of parapsychologists (naturally). They discover in records that the house was owned by the mysterious Dansen family, who came to America in the 1790's and seemingly vanished after rumors of odd rituals and flashing lights in the house. As they investigate, one of their team is attacked and shockingly mutated (you gotta see it to believe it) by an unknown figure, the reporter has strange dreams of the dead coming back to life, and they find a tunnel system while unearthing a grave of a Dansen member, suspecting that there are many tunnels all converging at the Dansen house. All of it points to a conspiracy of otherworldly creatures and dealings with dark forces, as well as cut-rate Creatures from the Lovecraft Lagoon.
OK, so this is far from perfect - it was clearly a homebrew production and none of the actors had ever been in a movie, nor would they go on to anything else. Oddly enough, the director, David McCormick, went on to be an editor for a lot of Aardman Animation stuff, including the Creature Comforts TV series and The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, but what really gets me is that he was an editor on Zastrozzi: A Romance, the Channel 4 mini-series produced by Lindsey Vickers, the maker of The Appointment. While this factoid made my head explode, this doesn't mean that McCormick has Vickers's eye and ear for direction and storytelling. The film doesn't look or sound terribly distinctive, just like a decent direct-to-video flick, which is exactly what it is. The story is what's great in Dark Heritage, and it appears to have been lifted from Lovecraft's "The Lurking Fear", though there's no credit for Lovecraft in front of or behind the movie. The history and deepening conspiratorial mystery of the Dansen clan is quite original and the movie does a good job of drawing the audience into the plot without spoiling any important details too soon. The actors are really trying despite their lack of experience, and what special effects are present are pulled off pretty well for a low-budget movie. The results of the aforementioned attack/mutation are frightening by conception alone, and a dream the main character has in the middle of the movie has a seriously creepy, Carnival of Souls vibe. It doesn't use much, but what is present is unsettling in an impressive way, a reminder that small details can be more creepy than big, thundering horror tropes. The house is a grand setting, full of dark corners and trashed decor like a good abandoned mansion should. The music is a slowly pulsating electronic score much like in a host of excellent 80's horror movies, giving the film a dream-like quality that sparks the nostalgia of watching a horror VHS after midnight and falling into a Casio hypnagogic state. The ending is a little disappointing, though, but what can you do? I might be giving the movie more of a pass than I should considering how unprofessional it looks compared to a Hollywood production, but you have no idea how awful some of these movies can be.
However, the real elephant in the room is the DVD release from Peacock Films, which is now officially the chintziest, most slapped-together DVD I own. The sound balance is so bad that the music and sound effects frequently blow out the balance, and the levels were so high to begin with that it's probably the loudest DVD I own, too. The menu system is a complete joke, and on one screen they actually misspelled the title, parking me at the play option for some movie called Drak Heritage. HOW IN THE WHOMP DO YOU MISSPELL "DARK"? I should have known from the box, which advertises "Interactive Menus" as a special feature despite being released in 2003, and also features this gem:
That's the sign of a truly cheap DVD company - they can't even afford to use the real DVD logo. In researching this movie I heard that the company didn't pay the filmmakers a dime to distribute the thing, and I discovered something even more chilling - I know these people. The worst DVD I ever purchased was the Miracle Pictures release of British z-movie director Michael Murphy's Invitation to Hell, a baffling, but very entertaining, 50-minute mess of a Satanic horror flick. The DVD was unwatchable, featuring blaring, incomprehensible sound and pixels the size of golf balls. I thankfully only got it at a thrift store and got rid of it soon after, but I never forgot the company logo animation that came before the menu, with the name in bland block letters on a CGI rock island. That very same animation is used here for some company called Passion Productions, and I'll be damned if they're not the same guys behind the Invitation to Hell DVD.
If you're not in the demographic for low-buck horror movies you'll probably not think much of Dark Heritage, but for weirdos like me it's a good night's rental with real heart and soul behind it. You'll be fine as long as you don't make a big point of tracking it down, though if you do try go for the original VHS release. The Peacock Films release is pretty awful and it reeks of seedy corrupt-dollar-store distribution practices; I only bought it because it was for sale from an unrelated third party seller for a penny. The only reason I can imagine you wanting to own it is for bragging rights, or if the full YouTube upload I've included below is taken down by its uploader or the filmmakers. I doubt it though, because the YouTube account is owned by people who are making a prequel to Dark Heritage called Night of the Darkness, and the fact that somebody is making a prequel to a movie this obscure is pretty astonishing. Maybe that factoid is enough to get you to give Dark Heritage a shot, and anything I can to do catalyze curiosity is A-OK.
~PNK
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