Dagon
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Movie Reviews of Dagon
Movie Review: Come for the sand & sunny beaches---stay for the Gills!
Summary: 5 Stars
Director Stuart Gordon had a massive challenge: film H.P. Lovecraft's champagne and caviar classic "The Shadow over Innsmouth" on a beer and pretzels budget. With ghosties, ghoulies, long-legged beasties and squid waiting in the wings, what's a cash-strapped director to do?
Simple: Gordon packed up his team and headed off to Spain, where they could make the most of their shoestring budget and capitalize on some genuinely eerie locations. The result is one of the most faithful, ghoulish, hysterical, and genuinely unsettling adaptations of the Master's timeless and merciless mythos, and Gordon delivers the goods, making the most of his haunting Spanish locations, solid actors, and plenty of red sauce, tentacles, Elder Gods, and ghastly-gory goop.
Dot-com gazillionaire-to-be Paul (played to the bespectacled Lovecraftian hero-hilt by Ezra Godden), his pretty Spanish fiancee Barbara (played with conviction by Raquel Merono), his financier Howard (Brendan Price, for about 25 seconds), and Howard's snippy wife Vicki (Birgit Bofurull, who does snippy just as well as she does slack-jawed terror---nice job!) are all on a sailboat off the coast of Southern spain, celebrating riches to come, when a nasty squall rolls in.
Faster than you can shout "Gilligan!" the tiny boat is lost, wrecked on the Old Devil Reef, with Howard's snippy wife not so snippy anymore as her ravaged, trapped leg bleeds into the water. What, pray tell, might her blood attract?
Howard stays on the doomed boat with his wife while Paul and Barbara set off in a raft to get help in the eerily deserted fishing village they spied before the storm hit. They make landfall, meet the village---Imboca ("Innsmouth" in Spanish, get it?)---priest, split up, and the fun begins!
Gordon goes heavy on the atmosphere in "Dagon", to telling effect: this is a movie dedicated to that white, deformed face at the window, to shadowy and batrachian figures shuffling along rain-swept cobbled streets, to inexplicable thudding sounds coming from the room above you in the foul-smelling hotel room at 3 in the morning, to the dank, the wet, the forsaken, the inbred, the bizarre. Barbara's trip to the Hotel Del Mar through the shadow-haunted streets of Imboca gave me the crawls.
Gordon is masterful at taking Lovecraft's raw horror and ratcheting it up a knotch. The scene where a perfectly normal little boy wails over his fallen, leech-mouthed "Papa" gave me the chills; Lovecraft would doubtless shiver and approve.
The acting here is uniformly solid. Some might be put off by Ezra Godden's bespectacled nebbish hero, but true Lovecraft enthusiasts will be delighted with the most iconic Lovecraft protagonist since the Jeffrey Combs as Herbert West in "Re-Animator". Godden blends a fine arsenal of nervous tics and glasses-adjusting nerdiness with panicked courage under fire, and the result is hysterical and totally believable, making "Dagon"'s final revelation even more unnerving.
The fine Spanish veteran actor Francisco Rabal is also great; his soupy accent is a little tough to understand, but make the effort and you'll be rewarded with a superior performance. Rabal's nose is also something of a special effect in itself, nearly as terrifying as anything Imboca has to offer. Macarena Gomez is creepily gorgeous as Uxia, and the dream sequences in which she figures as a mermaid gave me nightmares---and a few pleasant dreams---for a week. Ferran Lahoz (Priest) and Jose Lifante (Hotel Del Mar Desk Clerk) gave me the crawls, and brought a huge dose of creepiness to the movie with their tiny and terrifying parts.
The real standout here aside from the deliciously Lovecraftian atmosphere is the special effects work; Gordon got the most from his limited budget, and it's all up on the screen. The Ultimate Horror of Imboca is never revealed outright until the end, merely hinted at, and the effects underscore that strategy: the effects are repellent and nasty, but subtle. Take a good look at Lahoz's hand or Lifante's head and you'll see what I mean.
There are a few missteps, chiefly some bad CGI that hurt the dramatic effect of one superbly creepy scene (you'll know it when you see it), but not enough to diminish "Dagon's" relentless atmosphere of tentacled ghoulishness. On a technical note, the Lion's Gate release of the film is note-perfect: the colors are beautiful, the transfer is crisp and flawless, and the Dolby sound is a little *too* good (I nearly jumped out of my skin when a froggish hoot erupted from the darkness over my left shoulder).
Dark, richly atmospheric, and genuinely unsettling, "Dagon" is one of the most faithful Lovecraft adaptations ever set to celluloid and a deleriously unnerving little horror film.
JSG
Movie Review: He's slimy, misunderstood, and he needs your love
Summary: 5 Stars
...If you've ever read the story "Dagon" you know it's just a short about a castaway that sails into a morass and sees a nasty green behemoth capering around an oblelisk, just Lovecraft meat and potatoes. This movie is actually based on "The Shadow Over Innsmouth", though it's bottlenecked on an island instead of the coast of New England. I thought this was the best (and only decent) Lovecraft movie since T.D.H. with super hot Sandra Dee. There are major differences, of course, such as the addition of the hero AND his girlfriend. Lovecraft seemed to stay away from the chick factor whenever possible. And there is the fact that a hybrid priestess is involved, and the fact that Dagon's spawn, the Deep Ones, were a roughly bipedal version of fish and frog: In here, they tend towards octopoid traits, which makes you think of the main man Cthulhu. So don't worry, it's still cool.The hero and his girlfriend get stranded on the island, and the girl is immediately abducted by the freakish Dagon cultists. The hero, Paul (Marsh) is constantly plagued by dreams involving a nice looking little chick who frequently displays tentacles, fins and fangs. He ends up in a moldering, filthy hotel (check out the toilet in that place!), like the classic scene from Shadow Over Innsmouth, waiting for the return of his girlfriend, not knowing that she's been taken. This affords a kind of comical part of the movie, where all the flounder-eyed, webbed and tentacled freaks come to pay him a visit. He ends up escaping, crashing through a window, running through a gauntlet of cultists, until he eventually finds the poor old drunk guy, the only human on the island, that explains to him the advent and degenerate worship of the god Dagon. In the movie, Dagon takes on an uncharacteristic alpha male love-hungry mode, demanding female sacrifices to carry his unholy seed. The result of these sacrifices is a race of hybrid creatures that eventually shed their human vestigies to become blissful, ageless sea monsters.
Marsh eventually finds the flesh and blood girl of his dreams, drawn to her in ways he doesn't understand. She is the local high priestess, no less, a blood descendant of the seafaring captain that originally brought the Dagon theology to the island. When he pulls back the sheet and sees that she's a little more monster than chick, he freaks out and is on the run again. All of the running with the shambling, loping and crawling man-monsters only a breath or two behind him, kind of creepy and yet funny too, really captures the essence of Shadow Over Innsmouth. I didn't get the whole ritual thing with the skinning and tanning of human hides, though. The cultists wear ther skins to their ritual ceremonies; I think maybe they watched Chainsaw Massacre about two or three hundred times too many.
Near the end of the movie, expect a cameo by the big man himself, Dagon, who just needs a little love and understanding. I hope that the effort that went into this movie might mark the future efforts of other attempts. What about At the Mountains of Madness? Shadow out of Time? Or the Call of Cthulhu? Yeah baby. If you like reading Lovecraft, you'll like this movie. if you don't, it might not be your cup of tea.
Movie Review: Magnificent Horror Epic
Summary: 5 Stars
Awesome! Probably the best Lovecraft adaptation ever (in fact, it well Exceeds many of Lovecraft's written works) and probably the best film of director Stuart Gordon's career (famed for "Re-Animator", "Castle Freak", and other greats), "Dagon" is one of the greatest monster movies ever made as well. In a nutshell, two couples vacationing on a small private yacht run aground of a rock outcropping in shallow waters off the coast of Spain and have to try to make it to the small, antiquated fishing village visible on the coast. In the village, it becomes very quickly apparant that the inhabitants are...peculiar.
It's long been thought that any Lovecraft movie that attempts to actually show in detail entities like Chthulu or Yog-Sottoth would sabotage itself no matter how good the special effects were, because most of these beings are supposed to be literally indescribable, in some cases so indescribably alien and horrifying that just seeing one full on can drive a person insane. However, as all Lovecraft afficionados know, there are these, what are sometimes collectively called 'others', and then there are those beings who occupy an intermediary position between such 'others' on one hand and the human/animal kingdom on the other. By wisely focusing on these 'in-betweeners', the movie "Dagon" can actually show more than fleeting or partial looks at the creatures without falling into the paradox of visually 'describing' the indescribable. These 'in-betweeners' are shockingly realistic, more so than the movie's cover might have you believe, and leave one with the disturbing question of if these look the way the do, what exactly is the true nature of Dagon himself?
The camera angles chosen are brilliant, such as the over-the-shoulder shot of the main male character as he's looking out the window and sees 'them', letting the viewer feel more as if they're experiencing the events themselves than watching someone else experience them. Having one of the characters apparantly very capable of escaping the situation at one point but unable to do so because his girlfriend has disappeared somewhere nearby, is very effective too; somehow in this case it comes off a lot scarier than having the characters trying to escape but unable to - to have someone capable at this one point of escaping but having no choice but to choose not to. All the characters are very believable and 'real', including the old homeless man who seems to be one of the few residents of the village to be less....different. It may sound like I'm giving too much away here, but most of what I'm referring to occurs early on; there's a lot more going on than I plan to mention.
Released a few years ago with minimal public awareness, right before the big horror boom hit, this title has sadly remmained a relative unknown. If released today with good advertising, this could have been as big as "The Ring". "Dagon" is as essential a part of a horror collection as "Star Wars" is of a space adventure collection.
Movie Review: Fishing with Dagon, the Bait Real Pros Use
Summary: 5 Stars
What do you get when you mesh unblinking eyes, priests with webbed fingers and innkeepers with gilled throats, fishermen with a strange affinity for covering their faces, plenty of gold from the depths of the sea to go with the atypical "bounty from the deep," a few faces getting peeled off to teach someone a lesson, a bit of octopi legging to replace those pesky bipedal ones, and one ancient tentacled God? No, it isn't your local barnyard sock-hop taking place at some yokel fairground, its Stuart Gordon's latest creation, the Lovecraft inspired Dagon!Unlike many of Gordon's earlier, more goofy approaches to the horrific, this Shadows Over Innsmouth/Dagon recount wore a dark overcoat that shrouded almost all of the production. The tale begins with Paul (Ezra Godden) and his girlfriend Barbara, accompanied by two friends, as they toast the success of their new company off the coast of Spain. Paul finds himself plagued by dreams of the foulest sort, ones dealing with an underwater monument bearing a strange insignia and a half-fish/half-humanoid woman, the type that end with him awakening (once again) in a pool of sweat and screams. Soon after our introduction, a storm, if you can call the suddenly conceived, quickly overwhelming beast darkening the sky and tossing their boat around like a bath toy "a storm," impales their boat upon a black reef that any Lovecraft fan will well appreciate. This, in turn, injures one of the boat's occupants and forces them to seek help in a decrepit fishing town called Imboca. As they approach the town in their cheaply construed rubber lifeboat their woes begin, with the sound of gunfire coming from the ship and something brushing against their raft and knocking a hole in it. Is this sign of something to come? Well, in a world where the beasts run rampant in the water, you bet it is. The two quickly find themselves in a town that first seems deserted, a place where the churches read "Esoterica Orde De Dagon" and the occupants, once they are finally found, seem to grow odder and odder by the minute. All these things come together and finally lead them toward secrets that no Bostonian before them ever really wanted to learn, the truth behind the worshippers of Dagon.
Touting nice effects in the monster category, some decent acting (Godden reminding me a lot of Jeffrey Combs, a great thing in my book), pieces of comedy to go with the more horrific, Deep One inspired portions of the movie, and some nice looking DVD quality, this is something to pick up and watch a few time. I highly recommend it for those who've always wanted augmentation by making deals with the oddities of underwater worship or for those simply wanting to stroll the beaches of human suffering as casual passerbys. It'll give you more reasons than the mere shark to stay away from the ocean.
Movie Review: We shall dive down through the Black Abyss....
Summary: 5 Stars
Starting out on a sailing yacht with another couple, on a beautiful day, skinny and whiney Paul (Ezra Godden) and his sexy girlfriend Barbara (Raquel Merono) are relaxing belowdecks while the boat is anchored off a quaint Spanish Village.Foul weather blows in *very* suddenly in a gorgeously filmed scene, huge dark clouds rising up over the little seaside town. The sailboat is pushed into the rocks where Vicki is pinned belowdecks.
Paul and Barbara must take the dingy to shore to seek help. The town filmed here is very cool; narrow, climbing streets and alleys between tall villas and not a soul to be seen anywhere. Until they find the church, but this is no ordinary church. The symbols inside are unrecognizable, and the priest behaves quite strangely. Fortunately, Barbara speaks Spanish and convinces the priest to help. Paul goes back to sailboat where there is no sign of their friends, and Barbara goes to local hotel to wait, where she is promptly abducted by the hotel clerk and the priest.
Paul checks into the filthy hotel, and things start to get weird when the townsfolk come out to play; and here is where the fun begins.
Eerily determined, they stagger and creep through the streets in search of Paul. Paul runs into an old man named Eziquiel (Francisco Rabal), who tells him a strange tale of the beginnings of the odd little church, and of course Paul believes he is mad.
With Eziquiel's help, Paul searches for Barbara, running into all kinds of trouble. I don't want to give away any of the juicier, more tingly parts of the movie, but suffice to say that my hunger for monsters, grotesqueries, blood, creepiness, and action was sated.
One fine face peeling scene is quite noteworthy and worth the movie in and of itself.
He finds the beautiful woman that he had been seeing in his dreams, Uxia; who embraces him and teaches him the mysteries of Cthullu, whether he wants to hear them or not.
Most of this movie was filmed around Barcelona, Spain, and has some very beautiful scenery shots, along with gorgeous old castle-type buildings and villas...plus some creepy filthy places that remind me of my first apartment.
This is truly a great horror flick, with wonderful monsters and lots of blood, a creepy atmosphere and an ending you won't want to miss. I recommend viewing this tasty, blood coated treat as I did, with your cuddly stuffed Cthullu and Shoggoth, along with Harm the Bunny, at your side. Enjoy!