
With its cheesy model shots, generally creaky dialogue and cast of unknown, not-very-good actors, The Unnamable immediately plants itself in the B-movie horror genre.
Its simple story sees a student (from Miskatonic University) disappear in an old abandoned house, then two jocks lure two freshmen there in an attempt to scare their way into the girls' pants and finally, our heroes - Randolph Carter (Mark Kiney Stephenson) and Howard Damon (Charles Klausmeyer) - enter the house looking for the first student.
Each party of explorers encounters the creature that lives in the house which, had it stayed in the shadows, might have been quite scary but in full-view is obviously a woman in a furry body-suit.
The film makes a half-decent stab at creating atmosphere and has some interesting moments, but is as much a victim of its time as the hairstyles of the Miskatonic students.
There's gore and gratuitous nudity (which we're all in favour of, although not really appropriate in a Lovecraft yarn), but the stand-out performance in the first movie comes from Mark Kiney Stephenson, who may well have been channeling HPL himself in the role of Randolph Carter, the slightly snobbish and superior bookworm who - while the others go off wandering the haunted house - stays in the library, leafing through the various dusty tomes of unknown lore (most of which are clearly full of blank pages!).
It is, of course, Randolph's brains that finally bring the creature down - leading to an almost surreal climax where the woman in the furry body suit is being driven back by a horde of unseen/off-camera stage hands waving tree branches.
The sequel, The Unnamable Returns, although filmed five years later, picks up the story from a point just before the end of The Unnamable, rewriting the original's "happy" ending of the two heroes - and one surviving girl - walking off into the woods.
While in the story mere hours have passed, for the students of Miskatonic University it's a whole different decade and where The Unnamable was a fashion victim of the 80s, The Unnamable Returns is set squarely in the 90s.
Carter joins forces with Professor Warren (John Rhys-Davies) to explore the tunnels under the Winthrop house and finds the "unnamble" creature - who does have a name, Alyda, and a backstory we explore some more in this film. Carter and Warren manage to separate Alyda (Maria Ford) from the creature possessing her... leaving Alyda as a long-haired, hot naked chick.
Carter is gloriously oblivious to Alyda's charms, but not to the fact that the monster is still out there and determined to reunite itself with Alyda.
I'm not sure what HP Lovecraft would have made of these films; although I'm sure he wouldn't have been happy with the enormous liberties taken with his finely honed prose.
But for the rest of us, these are wonderfully camp, crass B-movie shlock horrors that are perfect for a Halloween evening.