Dagon

Dagon, 2001. Directed by Stuart Gordon. Ezra Godden, Macarena Gomez, Raquel Meroño, Francisco Rabal, Ferrán Lahoz.

Synopsis: Paul Marsh and his wife, Barbara, are on a pleasure cruise off the coast of Spain with two friends. Paul has been having nightmares about an underwater encounter with...something. A freak storm cripples their boat, and Paul and his wife make for the town on shore for help. The church where they go for help has a mysterious symbol over the door, one Paul recognizes from his nightmares. The priest at the church offers them help, and sends Paul back to the boat, where his friends have vanished. Paul is loath to leave his wife alone on the shore, particularly given the strangeness of the town's inhabitants, and when he returns his wife has vanished. Paul takes a room at the local hotel. As night falls, the town's inhabitants, all grotesquely deformed, fall upon him. Paul flees for his life. During his flight he encounters an old man who claims be the "last man" in the town. The old man tells Paul of how a stranger came to the town during a time of poor fishing and offered a new religion to the people that would bring fish and riches from the sea. Shortly, the elder god, Dagon, became the patron of the town, and began to remake the people in his own image. Paul is shortly captured by the townspeople, who intend a ghastly sacrifice with his wife. And the high priestess of Dagon is a girl who has haunted Paul's dreams....

Fish Story: Back when Stuart Gordon was the next big thing in the horror genre after the success of his debut feature, Re-Animator, Gordon and his partners, screenwriter Dennis Paoli and producer Brian Yuzna planned an adaptation of H. P. Lovecraft's "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" as their second feature. The plans for that feature were ambitious, but funding never materialized. Gordon turned out From Beyond as a conditionally successful second feature, though one without the spark of invention and sick humor of his debut. Then he moved on to other projects that took him away from the horror genre. The occasions when he returned to the genre were lackluster: Dolls, his third feature, was uninspired, and The Pit and The Pendulum and Castle Freak were lacking in the spark that made Re-Animator so memorable. Returning to Lovecraft after all this time might seem like an act of desperation, an attempt to jump start a flagging career. I wouldn't necessarily argue with this. But, significantly, Lovecraft may well have been the spark for those first two films. Dagon returns to the long abandoned "Shadow Over Innsmouth" project and reassembles Gordon's collaborators from those early films, minus the conspicuously absent Jeffrey Combs (Ezra Godden is a Combs lookalike). The result is the most satisfying movie Gordon has directed in over a decade.

The Call of H.P. Lovecraft: Of the three major figures in horror fiction (Poe, Lovecraft, and King), Lovecraft has been the most ill-served by the movies. There is a practical reason for this. The concepts one finds in Lovecraft are so vast that the ability of film to convincingly depict them hasn't really existed until very recently. Certainly, most films that even attempt Lovecraft have done so on a budget. Like films based on POE, films based on Lovecraft often wander far afield of the text (one barely recognizes, for instance, "The Dunwich Horror" in the film of the same name, or "The Colour Out of Space" in either Die, Monster, Die or The Curse). It says something that From Beyond is arguably the closest to Lovecraft that movies directly adapted from him have ever come. Until now, that is. Dagon could have stepped whole and breathing from the mouldering pages of an old issue of Weird Tales. Combining "The Shadow Over Innsmouth," one of Lovecraft's best late stories, with "Dagon," one of his best early stories, works better than I would have imagined. The depiction of a community of degenerate half-breeds, part human, part fish, is particularly effective here, and Gordon and company go Lovecraft one better by adding an innocents abroad element to the mix. Portions of the film seem like Luchino Visconti's La Terra Trema as re-imagined by a lunatic. Certainly, the spiraling escalation of horrors from elements that start as merely disquieting (why does that priest have webbed fingers?) and builds to an appearance by the Great Old Ones themselves is in keeping with Lovecraft's own narrative strategies. The film isn't as broadly comic as Gordon's first two Lovecraft adaptations--it prefers to meet Lovecraft on his own terms--but Gordon's own impulses aren't entirely absent. The film contains a wicked send-up of American fears about foreign hotel rooms and bathrooms that would never have occurred to Lovecraft. But for the most part, Lovecraft would have recognized this as his work, from the opening scenes beneath the sea to the surprisingly ambiguous climax.

Performances: For the most part, Ezra Gooden is fine in the lead, even if one would prefer to have Jeffrey Combs in the role. The role provided for him is largely one-note--varying degrees of blind panic--and any number of actors could have filled it, I guess. More interesting by half are Gooden's Spanish co-stars. Francisco Rabal is terrific as the last man in Imboca, who relates the sad tale of how Dagon came to the sleepy fishing village. If viewers remember anything from the film, though, they will remember Macarena Gomez as Uxia, the high priestess who is part Barbara Steele, part Esther Williams. As was said of Williams: when she's on dry land, she's okay, but when she's wet, she's something else.

The real star of the film, though, is the location. Gordon found the ideal seaside village and filmed it with an arresting murk of rain and grime and oceanic dread. He turns the necessity of filming in Spain into an asset, and the ambiance of decay that pervades the film makes up for a lot of the film's shortcomings. If the film isn't as gonzo or as arresting as Re-Animator, there's no shame in that. It's certainly refreshing to see a film that occupies the genre without apology or clever post-modernist winks and nudges. One only wishes that Lion's Gate Films had had enough faith in the film to release it to theaters: the DVD is nice, but there's no substitute for seeing a horror movie with an audience.