The Dunwich Horror (1970)

Film: The Dunwich Horror (1970)

Stars: Sandra Dee, Dean Stockwell, Ed Begley

Director: Daniel Haller

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2024 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the women who were once crowned as "America's Sweethearts" and the careers that inspired that title (and what happened when they eventually lost it to a new generation).  This month, our focus is on Sandra Dee: click here to learn more about Ms. Dee (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

By the mid-to-late 1960's, Sandra Dee's teen idol days were coming to an end, and sadly, so was her career.  Like Annette Funicello before her, Dee couldn't make the transition into proper adult roles, and Universal dropped her around the same time her tabloid-friendly marriage to Bobby Darin fizzled.  She made a few pictures at the end of the 1960's, including the successful Doctor, You've Got to Be Kidding! with George Hamilton, but by-and-large, Dee was done with the film industry.  Her one foray into a proper adult role came in 1970, in the independent film The Dunwich Horror, which put Gidget herself opposite Oscar winner Ed Begley in a picture about satanic, sex-crazed netherworld demons.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie takes place over multiple time frames, first opening with a ritual sacrifice of a young woman, and then flashing forward to "today" (which is actually the late 60's), where Nancy (Dee) is guarding a copy of The Necronomicon (which, inexplicably, the original copy of it is just in some random university library behind nothing more than a glass case).  Despite the warnings of her professor Henry Armitage (Begley), Nancy is smitten with a creepy, glass-eyed guy named Wilbur (Stockwell).  Wilbur is obsessed with creatures from another world, "higher forms" as he calls them, and think the book will help him to learn more about them (he doesn't tell Nancy that he's preparing her as a sacrifice to bring them back).  As the film progresses, we learn that while Wilbur was born of his human mother, his twin in utero was a demon monster who is kept locked in their attic.  When he is let out, he goes on a murderous rampage, including attacking Wilbur just before he is about to murder Nancy to bring back the other creatures.  This seemingly ends the tale, though Nancy is pregnant with Wilbur's baby (which we find out in the film's final shot, where a camera zooms in on Dee's barely concealed vagina), so there's room for a sequel in a pre-Roe America.

The film is stupid, let's be perfectly clear about that.  The plot rarely makes sense, and Begley (in his penultimate film role-he would die just a few months after the film's release from a heart attack) doesn't help much.  Stockwell seems to understand that this is maybe supposed to be funny, as his zoned-out goth student act is hard not to giggle over (I also both get and am confused by people claiming he's a total stud in the film, as he's definitely cute but not in a Robert Redford sort of way).  But the film doesn't work, and honestly, Sandra Dee doesn't get much to do in the picture.  She's once again playing the virgin, albeit this time she actually gets laid (in a wanton, demonic sex ritual...which still sounds better than some guys I hooked up with in college), and doesn't get more to do than that.  Dee has stated this was one of the films she was most proud of, perhaps because it's one of the only films where the subject matter gets beyond her playing a pretty young woman, but...it's not a good movie.

More than any actress we'll profile this year, Dee felt crushed under the weight of both being and then losing the title of America's Sweetheart.  After Darin, she would never marry again, and would rarely work in movies in the years that followed.  She would eventually come to terms with the sexual abuse her stepfather had put her through (accusing her mother of knowing that it had happened), and bad health plagued her in the 1980's, when she would suffer from alcoholism and anorexia.  The effects of that alcoholism would eventually cost her her life (even though she would eventually quit), dying from kidney failure in 2005 at the age of just 62.  At that point, once one of the world's most famous women, Dee had basically had become a recluse for over twenty years.

Next month, we're going to talk about a woman who took the title of America's Sweetheart and made it her own not through movies, but largely through television, enjoying critical success with it.  We're going to talk about that television career, as well as the surprisingly diverse film career she managed to pull off as a side hustle throughout the month of September.