Masters Of Horror: Stuart Gordon: Dreams In The Witch House

Director Stuart Gordon picked an H.P. Lovecraft story for his installment of Showtime's Masters of Horror series. So what did you expect? This filmmaker gained his horror-movie spurs with his wild and wonderful Lovecraft flicks Re-Animator and From Beyond (following up years later with another H.P. tale, the fishy Dagon), so nothing could be more super-natural. For his hour-long episode, Gordon chose Dreams in the Witch House, which follows a student (Ezra Godden) at Miskatonic University (that's Lovecraft's frequently-mentioned fictional school) as he moves into a suspiciously cheap boarding house. When he has intense nightmares about a rat with a human face, it should be a warning sign, but the student is mightily attracted to a single mom at the house, played by the mighty attractive Chelah Horsdal. Some acceptable mood-setting comes courtesy of Godden's elderly downstairs neighbor, and the half-dozen shocks are just fine. Somehow the straight-line story disappoints, as the ultimate outcome of it all seems fairly obvious from the opening scenes, and there's nothing much to complicate the slide into evil. Still, this episode merits a passing grade by the strict standards of Miskatonic U. --Robert Horton