It’s Stuart Gordon time! Everybody get hype!
If you’re a connoisseur of B-movies (and I am), you’re probably already a fan of the late great Stuart Gordon, who passed away just last year. He’s a filmmaker who never let a small budget get in the way of his ambitions. Dagon from 2001, is one of his later movies, a less-celebrated work, but one I was glad to check out for this series.
Stuart Gordon is best-known for his two Lovecraftian body
horror movies from the mid-80s, Re-Animator and From Beyond. Those both starred
his frequent collaborators, Barbara Crampton and Jeffrey
Combs, each schlock legends in their own right. But Gordon did more than gross horror. He also made an early mech movie
in Robot Jox, a grungy space SciFi movie in Space Truckers, and an inexplicable movie in Castle Freak, a strange little story about a freak a castle. Gordon and his frequent
partner Brian Yuzna helped fill video stories with miles and miles of VHS tape, every feet of which magnetically stored some cheap but lovable trash.
In the early 2000s, Brian Yuzna had moved on from America to start making movies in Spain. Those are things like Faust: Love of the Damned and Beyond Re-Animator. Gordon and Yuzna got to work on their third movie based on H.P. Lovecraft’s writings. Thanks to the move to Europe, they had access to a very handsome seaside town to shoot in.
The location really makes Dagon. It's the best bit of production value in the movie. There’s a lot of tight, stone streets, with buildings that
seem centuries-old. Many of the actor speak Galician, a relatively small language
that has survived in Northwest Iberia. That gives the place an even more
unfamiliar and insular feel. Dagon, like any fine wine, has a unique terrior. You won't find these flavors in any other horror movie.
In 1917 H.P. Lovecraft wrote a four-page short-story called Dragon, which has little to do with this film. Gordon and Yuzna are instead
adapting Lovecraft's more famous story, The Shadow Over Innsmouth, which features a dark cult dedicated to the god, Dagon. Since they had to shoot in the Spain, the New England setting is moved to the Galician coast. Innsmouth is now Imboca, with the same dark
backstory, just with different languages spoken.
(I also need to mention that Innsmouth was a story written out of Lovecraft’s fears of miscegenation and genetic pollution. Those are bad themes and H.P. Lovecraft was a notorious racist. Dagon at least avoids most of that toxicity. It’s a “wow, cool fish
monsters” movie, luckily missing Lovecraft’s horrible points.)
Our heroes are Paul (Ezra Godden) and Barbara (Raquel Meroño),
a wealthy yuppie couple on vacation off the coast of Spain. When their ship
sinks, Paul and Barbara make their way to Imboca for help, only to
be separated by the eccentric locals. Slowly Paul begins to notice webbed-fingers, gils, and gross unblinking fish-eyes hidden behind sunglasses.
After being separated from Barbara, Paul has to hide away in Imboca’s rotten edifices, while being
chased by the entire town. Along the way Paul meets Ezequiel (the great
Francisco Rabal), the last unmutated human in Imboca. And then he’s tempted by
Uxia (Macarena Gómez), the town’s priestess. While Uxia is beautiful, her tentacle legs are a step too far for Paul.
Hey, his loss.
I have a suspicion that Paul and Barbara are supposed to be stand-ins for Jeffrey Combs and Barbara Crampton. Barbara might have been named after Stuart Gordon’s greatest Scream Queen. And Ezra Godden plays Paul like a completely nebbish wimp in a Miskatonic University sweater. Then he finally snaps and starts stabbing fish people. It’s the kind of intense nerd that Jeffrey Combs usually played. You still miss Combs and Crampton here, even though this cast is able enough to meet the material.
Dagon starts slowly with great atmosphere, mostly from the Galician town and dark, wet, cold vibes. It all plays rather well, especially the gross hotel room Paul tries to hide in, featuring a bed full of mold. But even at the movie's best, you can still feel in Dagon many places where a bigger budget might have helped. Gordon has to use CG to film the ship crashing, and it looks terrible. The finale too requires a huge climax full of gore and hundreds of Imbocan fish people. The scene calls for dozens of extras, and Gordon has maybe twenty, tops.
You
only get a brief view of Dagon himself. (Another unfortunate theme, Dagon
apparently likes to rape women, and we didn’t need the sexual violence.) You see plenty of tentacles and mutations on the people of Imboca. though. There's also a fantastic body horror sequence where a poor bastard gets his face skinned-off while still alive.
Dagon is not really underrated. You
can imagine a bigger, more-polished version of this movie, much like you could
imagine bigger versions of nearly all of Gordon’s films. It's a decent enough survival horror premise captured on screen. I wouldn't call Dagon essential to any horror fan's collection, like Re-Animator is. But it isn't bad.
Look, it's 31 Days of Frights, they're not all gonna be winners.
Next time we travel to 2002, the year of Anakin Skywalker hating sand and Sand People, a band called Nickelback conquering the Hot 100 to the enduring shame of us all, and our next movie, Queen of the Damned.
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