Reel Terror: Lettuce Pray: How The Curse Blends Lovecraftian Dread with Italian Splatter

Well, I’m never eating fruits or vegetables again. Bring on the scurvy!

Why? Well, 1987’s ‘The Curse’, adapted from an H.P. Lovecraft story, directed by long-time character actor David Keith, and starring the Evil Wil Wheaton, manages to both gross out with practical effects (the aforementioned produce) and reasonably grounded performances. This will remind anyone of a number of other projects, including ‘Poltergeist’, ‘Evil Dead’, ‘Night of the Living Dead’, ‘The Exorcist’, and Lucio Fulci films, but in spite of some clunkiness, I think it works pretty well.

Wheaton plays Zack, whose mother remarried a decent, yet harsh fundamentalist farmer (Claude Akins). Zack has an awful stepbrother, a disagreeable stepdad, he’s trying to protect his sister, and then out of nowhere, the Strangest Meteorite of All Time (The Space Testicle) lands near the farm. After a couple of days and a cursory inspection of the fleshy fireball from space, ‘things’ start happening, and poor Zack bears the weight of handling it all. I imagine you could predict the rest of the film just from that brief synopsis. It’s not too challenging.

Aside from some top-notch goo and slime, the film’s strengths lie in witnessing this family’s swift descent from barely functioning in peace to all-out violence from whatever unexplained chaos the meteorite causes. There’s a particularly unnerving scene involving chickens that’ll make you enjoy your next trip to KFC. We also get Bo Duke (John Schneider) showing up in this small town as a water company agent looking to find good well sites. He’s solid in the role, and I recognized something in him I hadn’t considered- he gives off ‘Christopher Reeve’ vibes, if that makes sense, and I asked myself what may have held him back from higher recognition throughout his career. I’m probably overrating him, because anyone starring in the number of Christmas films he’s been in might not have been trying to aim high.

It’s worth noting that Italian directing legend Lucio Fulci backed the project as producer, and anyone familiar with his work will sense his influence, especially with tone and the musical score. I continue to be drawn to his projects as well as those from other ‘giallo’ horror directors from the Italian Peninsula. Their collective strengths are in presenting acute and sudden terrors to offsets clumsy, often dubbed dialogue. It surely makes sense that Fulci would bring a Lovecraft story to the screen- it’s visceral, gothic storytelling, or in this case, visceral ‘American Gothic’ storytelling. ‘The Curse’ is a fine exercise in mid-tier filmmaking that struggles with dialogue and edits, but excels at effects, dread, and causing audiences to never see lettuce the same way again.