'Lurking Fear' (1994) -  C. Courtney Joyner.

In 1994 Full Moon Entertainment unleashed another spectacularly grisly, H.P Lovecraft-inspired, gruesomely Gothic fear-fest, ‘Lurking Fear’. A smartly written, ably directed low budget gut-puncher by, C. Courtney Joyner. In the ill-fated Leffert’s Corners, this cursed, dilapidated ghost town is ignominiously dragged ever further into despond by the foul, subterranean machinations of grotesque, evil-seeded, corpse flesh coveting fiends below! Of the four misfits arriving in ill-fated Leffert's Corners, jailbird, John Mortense (Blake Adams)returns to stake his claim on the malign Mortense family’s buried fortune. Arriving with the same mercenary goal, duplicitous, gun-happy goons, led by erudite B-Movie hoodlum, Bennet (John Finch) aim to retrieve the Mortense filthy lucre by means nefarious!

 The escalating brutality of the repellent gargoyles gruesome attacks, and the hair-triggered villain’s increasingly asinine behaviour galvanize locals, Cathryn Farrell (Ashley Laurence) and slovenly booze hound, Dr. Haggis (Jeffrey Combs) to stand their devil-polluted ground against these earthly, and monstrously unearthly travails! And it is in this desperate melee, claustrophobically cloistered within the town’s mildewed church wherein the fulminating fear, far from lurking, surges bodily out of the stinking ferment to lace its icily gnarled fingers tightly around the viewers unsuspecting throat!

‘Lurking Fear’, for all its brevity is generously replete with sinisterly spine-skewering set pieces, a marvellously moody score by composer, Jim Manzie, and triumphantly ghoulish, luridly eye-popping practical FX by Alchemyfx (Wayne Toth et al.) The oppressively mouldering ambience of Milo's credibly age-dilapidated sets engenders a suitably moribund backdrop to these eldritch, flesh-feasting shenanigans! All of their creativity lending this grimly Gothic B-shocker a doomily nihilistic, morbidly misanthropic atmosphere that I’m sure author, H.P Lovecraft would strongly approve of!

‘As above so below...in misbegotten Leffert’s Corners there’s nowhere left to hide, as there are ceaselessly hungering ghouls lurking hatefully in the brackish earth below, and a glacial, soul-crippling fear paralyses the nightmarish, increasingly desolated world above!’ - Weirdlingwolf.