How wonderful it is to see this fine actress carry a film and carry it so beautifully.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

The film is as cheap and mediocre (leaning towards bad) as you can guess. Bad directing, bad effects (that's the least), a rather sloppy plot that doesn't really do any justice to the original material. The acting is better than I expected, but doesn't deserve praise either. The only real reason to watch the film is that there is such a shortage of Cthulhu Mythos based movies (and how few of them are actually good!) that a true fan will try anything. The house-searching scene was the only one that showed a little bit of inspiration, albeit poorly executed. Other than that you get a pointless background (really far in the background) romance, a rather silly version of Olaus Vormius and a momentary presence of Abdul Alhazred who kind of steals the show.

Pros - Good props, good scenery, good music; and a cast that included people of color. Cons - everything else.This movie will appeal to pop culture Lovecraft "fans" that read a few things on the Internet (maybe even saw a couple comics and thought, "yeah, that's cool!") and like the idea of Lovecraft's work without actually downloading .txt's or cracking the spine of a book to find out more. There's a lot I can look past in a low budget movie. I'm not an FX snob. I understand that there is so much you can do to "wow" the audience visually. But there's no excuse for lack of substance and intellectually stunted scriptwriting. If the plot is coherent, the characters complex and relatable, and the theme pays respectful homage to Lovecraft's works; you can count my vote in. However, like many of "Lovecraft" adaptations, I cannot throw my lot in with this one; mostly because of the abysmal portrayal of women.Women in this movie are either possessed, barefoot and pregnant, naked and/or sexualized in some other way, or just plain ornamental tag-alongs that have no identity outside the men they are accompanying at any given time. Not only are the men in this movie condescending, smug, and quick to put women in their "place" in this movie (or at least what the screenwriter believes is a "woman's place"); there's also a helping of ritualized rape, domestic battery, and allusions to incest. And then there's Jeffrey Combs. An ongoing legend in Lovecraft films. Yet he's cast into a minor, annoying role that any community college drama student could have filled. Such a disappointment.Wow what a waste. Could have been salvageable in a few respects - one, actually respecting the spirit of Lovecraft's work and two, not relying on cheap plot devices that alienate the female half of the audience. This is what happens when immature egotism gathers enough money and sycophants to attempt to rewrite a science fiction tradition that is almost a hundred years strong. Thanks for nothing.

It opens with a childbirth at home. The light is eerie. We see a woman in bed screaming horribly while she stares at her swollen belly. The attendants goggle as parturition proceeds. The camera pans around, never holding still. The cuts are instantaneous. A glistening black snake crawls up an attendant's arm.The rest of the movie -- as much of it as I was able to bear before an attack of restless legs syndrome set in -- follows the same template. There is hardly a pause for ordinary conversation. One shocking horror follows another, accompanied by loud music and diverse grotesqueries.There's a rural family involved. They all have bizarre appearances. The family head sits there cackling while skinning some kind of black-furred animal, maybe a cat or a skunk. A whirligig of a woman is bald except for a long fringe of blond hair.Dean Stockwell looks normal enough as the chief investigator of that "portal" that opened up during the childbirth. Stockwell was the chief investigator of a previous version of "The Dunwich Horror", filmed some thirty or forty years earlier. His assistant, Sarah Lieving, is pretty and thoroughly glamorized. I imagine she'll wind up strapped to a table in some dank cellar. There is a snooty expert on the mysterious Necromicon, a book that contains the spell that opens and closes "portals." He's pretty normal too, although he is, as I say, kind of disdainful and snooty. I hope he gets sacrificed.I've sometimes puzzled over H. P. Lovecraft, who wrote this tale, along with other stories of horror, fantasy, and science fiction. Edgar Allan Poe had a theory of literature -- throw everything else out the window and go for the effect. Logic counts for nothing. Imagine Poe and Alfred Hitchcock chatting about this. But H. P. Lovecraft seems to have taken this theory to its extreme. In one of his stories, nothing happens except that a guy wakes up in some underground chamber and finds his way to the surface. It's spooky but there is no substance to it.This movie stinks, a pointless exercise in ominousness and computer-generated effects. Any successful horror story begins in more or less placid normality and works its way into the abnormal. Look at "The Exorcist" or "Rosemary's Baby" or "The Shining" for good examples. Well, I'll mention Val Lewton's work at RKO in passing. This one begins with junk and, I expect, ends the same way.Recommended for self-haters, the guilt-ridden, those recently emerged from an eremetic existence, the irretrievably mad, and toddlers who have never seen a movie before.

In Louisianna, the thirty-five year old single mother Lavina (Lauren Michele) delivers a baby boy and a monster in the evil Whateley House. Ten years later, Dr. Henry Armitage (Dean Stockwell) and his assistant Professor Fay Morgan (Sarah Lieving) discover that the page 751 of every copy of the Necronomicon is missing and The Black Brotherhood has summoned the gate keeper Yog Sothoth to leave the portal opened to the demons and ancient gods. They invite the arrogant and skeptical Professor Walter Rice (Griff Furst) that can translate the Necronomicon to help them to seek the book. Meanwhile Lavina's son Wilbur Whateley (Jeffrey Combs) ages very fast and seeks the missing page to open the portal."The Dunwich Horror" is a cheesy low-budget horror movie that has an awful screenplay associated to terrible acting and poor special effects. Dean Stockwell and the cult-actor Jeffrey Combs are wasted in this forgettable flick. The romance of Fay and Rice is quite ridiculous and out of the context of the plot. My vote is three.Title (Brazil): "Bruxas" ("Witches")