Lurking Fear, the serial novella by H.P. Lovecraft, is the story of the famliy Martense, whose history of cannibalism and unspeakable debaucheries led to their devolution into a race of mutant troglodytes.

Lurking Fear, the motion picture by Full Moon Entertainment, is about robbers looking for buried money in a cemetary and waiving guns at poor Jeffrey Combs.

When viewing a Full Moon production you might get a fun B horror movie full of freaky shit and outrageous characters, or you might get this. You'll also get the trademark Full Moon Videozone, forerunner of today's fancy DVD extras. I shall now paraphrase the interview with the director from that feature: "I didn't like the Lovecraft story so I just borrowed the words 'Lurking Fear' and 'Martense' from it and then wrote a bunch of crap myself for the movie".

So we have the dreaded horror crime drama. You know, where crooks on a heist or on the lam are chasing/being chased by goodguys and they get trapped together by some horror device and take turns pointing guns at each other.

The deal is generally: robbers hold and threaten protagonists at gunpoint until hero guy
(there are two kinds of male lead in motion pictures: cutesy Gap model and rugged Gap model; today's is a rugged) punches one out and takes his gun, then THEY have the drop and who's talking so tough now? Until a crook cuts his rope with a knife up his sleeve and holds it to a girl's throat, thus reclaiming the guns and once again the good guys are tied and subjected to threats and gloating, until one tricks the dumb henchman crook by playing on his greed or pretending to have to go to the bathroom and HIYA! Karate kick to the gun hand. But fickle is the balance of power, as the femme fatale crook uses her sexual wiles to turn the tables once more or something. This goes on for centuries until the primers in the ammunition corrode rendering the guns useless, and everybody wanders away confused.

Naw actually just until Full Moon runs through the can of cheap film Charles Band ponied up for, which generally takes seventy or eighty minutes. At that time a brief scrimmage with the Martenses and a costly looking explosion put an end to the game of hostage, and there you go, proof that sometimes packing a movie with character actors isn't quite enough.

I'd just like to say to all the budding bank robbers and kidnappers and Bond villain employees out there, the gun is not a melee weapon. When holding captives at gunpoint you don't have to actually touch them with the barrel. In fact doing so kind of forfeits the gun's chief advantage over the knife.