Dagon (2001) makes exemplary use of one of horror’s most inexhaustibly freaky premises: the one that places a character somewhere way off the map, announces a deadly presence(s) is in the area concentrating all its energy right now on attacking them (and eventually worse), and forces them to grapple with the possibility that if they don’t make it out alive, there’s no way anybody’s finding them. (And if someone does, or gets close to it, they’ll probably die, too, which sucks.)
Dagon is based on a novella by H.P. Lovecraft, the author you wouldn’t be wrong to assume is writer-director Stuart Gordon’s favorite or, at least, one of his top five. (This is the third Lovecraft adaptation he’s done.) The film homes in on a party of four vacationing in Spain that, while out boating one sunny afternoon, is forced onto the shores of a closeby island when the clouds suddenly go gray and rumbly and the winds a couple notches below hurricane speeds.
The island, Imboca, looks like it’s been deserted for years. But after wandering toward the church there, whose insides teem with outré eye-centric imagery rather than expected Catholic iconography, two of the group’s members, Paul and his girlfriend, Barbara (Ezra Godden and Raquel Meroño), bump into a socially stilted but seemingly benevolent priest (Ferran Lahoz). He points them toward the town’s sole hotel and police to help the friends still back on the boat.
Both gestures, though, prove little more than politely introduced traps. Yet it takes Paul — who it’s established has been having creepy dreams about a place that looks a lot like the one where he currently is — a while to figure out. As he bumbles around his hotel room, decked out with a laughably leaky window, algae-pumping sink, filthy bed, lockless doors, and a disconnected phone, he figures this is purely bad service and not an indication this place of rest may be a front for something. What finally tips him off that something is awry is the zombielike townspeople, web-handed and gill-covered, that assemble en masse outside the building and then point and scream in his direction once they see his bewildered face.
The ugly truth about *what’s going on* emerges after much frantic chasing. It comes courtesy of a kindly drunkard (the late Francisco Rabal, whom the film is dedicated to) who’s the only local around who doesn’t either act like a ghoul or the unnervingly unperturbed minion of a head ghoul in charge. The population here isn’t weird and hostile to outsiders just because. Imboca used to be an ordinary fishing town until bad luck brought desperation. When a fishing dry spell seemed never-ending, the townsfolk were convinced to worship the watery entity Dagon to hopefully replenish their bounties. The move did make fish again plentiful, but not in the way they might have originally had in mind: Dagon is now overrun with half-fish, half-human residents. Members of the original population were either offered as blood sacrifices or mating partners for the tentacled beast of the title. (The drunkard is the now-elderly child of two original-gen victims.)
Things don’t end well for anybody. It would feel wrong if things turned out fine, anyway. The low budget is obvious, but by strategically spending most of it on special effects and costuming, Gordon has just enough to adequately transport you into a hell on Earth where it’s cold, dark, always torrentially raining, and where every corner promises something unthinkably frightening. The on-a-budget performances don’t have the unforgettable quality of the ones found in the decidedly fun and more teasing movies for which Gordon is best known; Re-Animator (1985) and From Beyond (1986) — both of which are, like Dagon, Lovecraft adaptations — are riddled with delightfully inventive work from game actors. But Gordon’s knack for evoking the macabre leaves you with few options but to feel freaked out. After a while you overlook the general inadequacy of the ensemble enfleshing his unsettling ideas.
Outright gore is saved for the very end of the movie. Gordon is among the few horror filmmakers whom you can tell appreciates how powerfully scary violence can be in the genre when it’s used methodically rather than as another mere aesthetic device propelling forward thrills. (At least when it comes to movies trying to nurture dread for as long as possible like Dagon: Re-Animator’s increasingly omnipresent violence has more than a hint of slapstick.) Dagon does a lot with a little. Despite meager resources portending bargain-bin quality, it’s up to snuff with Gordon’s best.
Peterson Reviews 