Lurking Fear

From Full Moon Pictures and released in 1994, featuring Jeffrey Combs, this appears to be an attempt to capitalise on the run of low budget Lovecraft adaptations that were semi-popularised with Re-Animator (hinted at just slightly by the return of Combs).  It was directed by C. Courtney Joyner (who?) and also featured the gorgeous Ashley Laurence (from Hellraiser of course, here credited on screen as Ashley Lauren).  It might be expected that this film bears only a very loose passing resemblance to the H.P. Lovecraft story of the same name, primarily retaining the underground creatures that tunnel around beneath a graveyard and up to a nearby building.  They're described as monkey-like in the story, some liberty again taken with this description for the onscreen version (although they do admittedly look quite good).

Obviously the timezone is quite different in Lurking Fear - brought into what was then the blissfully mobile phone-free modern day, it eschews the investigator of the story to bring in a bunch of crooks looking for some buried money in the aforementioned graveyard.  These guys (and woman) clash with a clan of people already battling the lurkers, and together they find themselves effectively trapped in the building while one half wants the money and the other just to bump off the creatures.  Gone is the lovely backstory of how the creatures came about, here only loosely connected to the main ex-con in terms of bloodline (and name).  The atmosphere of the story, a staple of many Lovecraft shorts, is largely lost.  I've never been sure why Lovecraft is not more often and better adapted for film, there is such a wealth of wonderful material available, and Lurking Fear is not nearly at the top of the pile.

88 Films brought a Full Moon equivalent Blu-ray to the UK market, featuring a reasonable 1.78:1 hi-def image with audio as good as you might expect from a low-budget mid-nineties production.  There are some soundless deleted scenes (odd that they were willing to excise anything given the relatively brief running time of the feature), one of those Videozone short making-of featurettes, a commentary and plenty of trailers.  The cover is reversible, providing you with the welcome option of displaying the sleeve without the intrusive BBFC logo, a persisting motif for a long outdated organisation that hangs on to its existence by overcharging struggling boutique labels for the right to sell their movies to a small British audience.  Lurking Fear has a few moments of interest, the presence of Laurence and Combs being the main selling points, but overall I would say viewing this will not set your evening on fire in the same way that, for example, Re-Animator or From Beyond would, but then you probably knew that.