Savage Night - Creature Feature: Dagon

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	spacer Dagon 2001 Color - Stuart Gordon, Director Filmed in English _________________________________ Reviewed by Christopher Fulbright spacer
	How great it was to be wandering through my local movie store and find Dagon with Stuart Gordon's name listed as director and Brian Yuzna as co-producer. I was assaulted by snap flashes of Re-Animator and From Beyond. Oh the bygone days of my youth when I first saw From Beyond while tripping on acid in my best friend's bedroom one night, the sweet reek of marijuana lilting about us in clouds. Since those days I've cleaned up my act a bit, but the movies reamin as fond memories of my misguided youth.
	But I digress. I saw it there in the store. I snatched it up, gazed at it with something like awe. After a stunned pause I quickly made my way to the front counter and now forget what else I even rented that night. I was curious to know how Gordon had created a film out of the very short story Dagon, since the original tale by Lovecraft is brief and more like a dreamlike vignette. As it turns out, this was actually a film that Gordon had wanted to make right after his first Lovecraft adaptation, Re-Animator, but could not get American backing for. Dagon is based more on the Lovecraft tale Shadow Over Innsmouth, which quickly comes apparent after the first few minutes of the film.	spa
	Paul, the main character of Dagon, is beset by bad dreams. He is scuba diving alone when he comes across an enormous underwater shrine of black stone and gold. In the dream, as he explores the massive structure, he comes across the pale beautiful face of a mermaid, who begin to seduce him and suddenly turns into an awful monster with lots of teeth. Paul (Ezra Godden) awakens on a boat off the coast of Spain, with his girlfriend Barbara (Raquel Merono). They're on a yachting vacation with two other friends when they pass by a coastal fishing village on a nearby shore, suitably dilapidated and spooky looking. They hear eerie chanting coming from the shore and when a nasty storm rolls in quite suddenly and smashes their boat against the reefs, trapping the wife of the boat's owner below.
	Paul and Barbara take a raft to the village to seek help. They make their way through the seemingly deserted village to a church. Thinking the church a likely place to get help, they rush up the steps through a raging storm. Above the door is a symbol that Paul recognizes from his recurring nightmares, but of course they rush in nonetheless, where they meet a strange, pale faced priest. The "priest" takes them back to the dock where they enlist the help of some decidedly unfriendly fishermen to go back to the boat and save their friends.
	The priest insists that Barbara stay behind to notify the police and find a doctor. As he points the way for her to go back into town and use the phone, she notices the priest has webbed fingers. Barb takes a scary walk through the rain to hotel where she is kidnapped. Meanwhile, Paul gets back to the boat to find their friends completely missing, and the hull of the boat filled with a disgusting murk of a black oily substance and blood. He returns to the town and is directed to the hotel by the priest, where he meets the unhelpful hotel keeper with gills on his neck rents him a room that looks like something marginally more disgusting than the places I lived in my bachelor days. Barbara, naturally, is nowhere to be found. When Paul hears a commotion out in the street, in the midst of a raging storm, he steps out on the balcony to see what all the commotion is about, he sees a shambling mess of "people" in dark robes. They spot him on the balcony, scream and point him out as a group ... then begins a chase that doesn't end for the next hour of the movie, leading Paul through the streets of Innboca in a desperate search for Barbara. He meets the one lone survivor of Innboca's early days as a normal fishing village, when they were a God-fearing people and just trying to make an honest living.
	Many years before the town dried up of fish, and they prayed to God for help, but their prayer remained unanswered. One man came through the church one day, denouncing God, saying he knew a god that would bring the fish back, vowing to call Dagon to Innboca. As soon as he performed his ritual, fish and gold began washing ashore. The people tore down the church and erected in its place the temple of Dagon, and all the town prayed to it. But then one day, when the fish and gold came no more, they were required to make sacrifices ... and then began the madness.
	A lot is happening throughout this movie, and I can honestly say that there isn't one dull moment. It's compelling to watch, and with the exception of a couple cheesy CGI effects, most of the effects are "real deal" and look fantastic. The monster/fish-folk are mutant-like and frightening. There's just enough campiness to offset the creepiness and genuine scary moments. While Dagon doesn't take itself too seriously, it does deliver what most of what we expect out of horror movies these days; a few chills, and a lot of entertainment. I'm shocked that this film didn't make it to the big screen - it certainly would have kicked the ass of anything coming out around the same time it was released. But then, the simple fact that Gordon couldn't get financial backing for the picture in America goes to show how the tastes of American "horror movie" makers run.
	The film culminates in a gorefest and weird sexy rituals that generally mark Gordon's Lovecraft adaptations. And despite the entertaining quality of these, and how they fit into the story line quite nicely, I can't help but picture Lovecraft turning over in his grave at the thought of his tales infused with smutty sex and erotic overtones. It has been said that Lovecraft was adamantly against the concept of having any of his tales adapted to film, but perhaps Gordon's obvious care for the subject matter would have changed his mind. Or not.
	It can be said with a fair amount of authority however, that Gordon's adaptations have given credit where credit is due, and have made considerable efforts to accurately convey the atmosphere and seeds of inspiration from Lovecraft's work. Over the years, many filmmakers have used Lovecraft's ideas for inspiration and given him little or no credit. In fact, the Corman film The Haunted Palace, starring Vincent Price, actually credited the original idea to Poe, although the story was based on Lovecraft's "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward." One fairly decent movie from 1965 was based on "The Color Out of Space," starred Boris Karloff; Die Monster, Die is reviewed in this issue of Savage Night. Following is a fairly extensive list of full length feature films based on Lovecraft's work from The Lurker In the Lobby website, which I highly recommend as a guide to Lovecraftian cinema: Alien Alien Terror The Beyond Bride of Reanimator Cast a Deadly Spell Castle Freak The Crimson Cult Cthulhu Mansion The Curse Die Monster Die The Dunwich Horror The Evil Dead Forever Evil From Beyond The Haunted Palace The Legendary Case of Lemora Lurking Fear In the Mouth of Madness Necronomicon Re-animator The Resurrected The Shuttered Room The Unnamable The Unnamable II: The Statement of Randolph Carter spacer
	Related Links The Lurker In The Lobby: A Guide to the Cinema of H.P. Lovecraft H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival Official Website "The Onion" Interviews Director Stuart Gordon The Official Dagon Website Support Savage Night! Purchase "Dagon" from Amazon through this link:



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