REVIEW: DAGON (2001)
by Lin Carbajales (*)
H.P. Lovecraft is one of the most influential horror writers of all time, but a difficult one to adapt into a movie. Nonetheless, when it was the work of Dennis Paoli as a writer, Stuart Gordon as a director, and Brian Yuzna as a producer, you could expect something good, even if it wouldn’t be faithful to the letter. Their classic RE-ANIMATOR adapted with great success one of Lovecraft’s most atypical stories, HERBERT WEST, RE-ANIMATOR, which was perfect to be re-shaped into a fun and ludicrous 80s splatter movie. Just after that, the trio got much closer to the author’s usual cosmic horror themes with their amazing FROM BEYOND adaptation, which expanded on the original idea with some sexual motifs and a lot of body horror. Much later, in the early 2000s, Brian Yuzna, and Spanish producer Julio Fernández were running the Fantastic Factory in Barcelona. It was then that the old team of Paoli, Gordon, and Yuzna tackled one of the core stories of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos. Unlike the movie, title might suggest, DAGON is much more based on THE SHADOW OVER INNSMOUTH than on Lovecraft’s DAGON.
The main character is called Paul Marsh, his surname being an indirect reference to the source story. Played by Ezra Godden (BAND OF BROTHERS), he’s a young, wealthy man obsessed with his own company’s stock, who is on a leisure boat trip along the Spanish coast with his girlfriend Bárbara (Raquel Meroño, AIRBAG) and an older couple. They shipwreck next to a small, sinister Galician village named Imboca (“boca” meaning “mouth” in Spanish). Soon Paul becomes isolated and is chased by the strange-looking and violent locals, while he finds out the whole village worships Dagon, a dark sea deity who demands sacrifices. Among the villagers, in relevant roles, we find Macarena Gómez (MUSARAÑAS), who became very successful after this movie, and Spanish long-time star Francisco Rabal (VIRIDIANA), as the only unchanged human left in Imboca. This was Rabal’s last role: he passed away before the release of the movie, and there’s a dedicatory message for him in the final credits.
Ezra Godden‘s character Paul is a very unappealing protagonist, without likeable or compelling characteristics. He’s the stereotypical workaholic yuppie, an archetype that I don’t think has ever been considered relatable. Besides that, his only noticeable personality trait is an obsession with everything in life having exactly two different possibilities. This thing shows up a few times in his dialogues. It crossed my head that maybe it was intended as some kind of coping mechanism of his, but the way it’s presented makes it seem like an attempt to turn Paul into a fun or relatable hero. Instead, it just makes him look stupid, and it doesn’t have any kind of payoff within the story. Besides that, there’s one single clear comedic line Paul says, after using his phone as a weapon, and it works very poorly. His travel companions are even emptier than him and exist almost solely to be victims, especially the older couple, who we know nothing about.
The protagonist hindered the movie’s ability to capture my imagination, but not enough to completely counter the fantastic atmosphere and setting, which is DAGON’s strongest point. The dark and rainy Galician village feels real, and the strangeness of their inhabitants and their violent customs is supported by more common, believable details. In this sense, I found especially compelling the scene in which a very realistic Galician kid lamented the death of his grandfather, a monstrous mutant with tentacles. As a powerful figure of Imboca, Macarena Gómez is a fantastic casting choice, and she does a great job at being a creepy monster cultist and an alluring mermaid. Her character, Uxía Cambarro, embodies an important aspect of the original story that would be harder to capture without her.
DAGON manages to be quite unsettling at some points. The mood gets even more sinister when we leave behind the chasing and fighting around the village to get into the core of the cult and witness gory sacrifices with weird attires of human skin and golden garments. This ambiance is briefly ruined when Paul Marsh dashes into the lair preceded by one of his dumb lines, which is squeezed in-between his understandable episodes of murderous rage and desperate pain. The tone of the movie is unstable at times like this when it doesn’t seem to be sure if it wants to delve a bit more into the adventure genre or just stay creepy. It’s much better at doing the latter, so it’s a good thing that it ends on its darker, more prominent style.
The practical effects aren’t as impressive as what we could find back in FROM BEYOND, but they still are pretty nice. The tentacles feel a bit stiff sometimes, but the monster face, in the end, is really cool, and the gore in the skinning scene is as good. The movie also includes some CGI scenes, and, as it usually happens with this kind of effect, most of them have aged terribly. For the mutant villagers of Imboca there’s a mixture of factors that makes them vary ineffectiveness. I disliked some of the voices and groaning sounds, and not in a good, horror way. Since, as usual, the team was going to do other disturbing sexual stuff, maybe they could have focused more uncomfortably on Uxía’s fishy parts for the intimate moments (I’m thinking of THE LIGHTHOUSE). Or just in general, because we don’t see her lower half much, maybe as a way to save budget, and sometimes I almost forgot about it being a thing.
Even though not as good as RE-ANIMATOR or FROM BEYOND, DAGON is an interesting watch for Lovecraft fans, faithful to THE SHADOW OVER INNSMOUTH and to the kind of horror the author captured on one of his most famous stories. While the 80s adaptations of Stuart Gordon and his peers benefitted greatly from their makers’ own style, DAGON is different in which it shines when it’s the closest to evocate Lovecraft’s work. Even so, the graphic and bloody scenes fit great and are very well suited for a movie of more recent times.
DAGON can be watched in streaming services like Prime Video or Tubi, and there’s a Collector’s Edition Blu-Ray by Vestron Video, which has been announced on this same website.
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Lin Carbajales writes about video games, movies, and books for Spanish sites Todas Gamers and Libros Prohibidos, focusing on the horror genre. Besides that, they are a fiction writer and artist and have developed their own short, text-based, horror video games, which are available on itch. A few of their short stories can be found online or in anthologies from indie Spanish publishers, spanning fantasy, horror, and soft science-fiction.
