Released: October 2001
Director: Stuart Gordon
Rated R
Run Time: 98 Minutes
Distributor: Vestron Video via Lionsgate Studios
Genre: Horror/Fantasy
Cast:
Ezra Godden: Paul Marsh
Francisco Rabal: Ezequiel
Raquel Merono: Barbara
Macarena Gomez: Uxia Cambarro
Brendan Price: Howard
Birgit Bofarull: Vicki
Adapting a movie from a literary source can be a very tricky proposition for many different reasons. First of all, you’re trying to adapt something that’s more than 400 pages into a 2-hour film. In order for something like that to happen, you would need to cut out a lot of fat in order to maintain the story’s narrative. Let’s face it, books have a tendency to really meander in a lot of areas, but they can afford to do that because there’s no time limit on when a reader finishes the book. Movies, on the other hand, need to have a time limit in order to keep the audience engaged, which means keeping the run-time down to a reasonable level. On top of that, you want to try and get the fans of the book on your side, which means you have to strike a balance between what gets adapted and what gets cut. Cut out too much from the source material, and you run the risk of alienating the readers, keep too much in and you will bore the audience. It’s a balancing act that very few movies get right. Lord of the Rings was adapted not once, but twice: Ralph Bakshi’s animated film and Peter Jackson’s three-picture epic. A perfect example of alienating readers is Starship Troopers. Both the source material and film were awesome, in my opinion, but they were so vastly different that readers of Heinlein’s book dismissed the film as a cheap and gory cash-in. There is one author whose works have been notoriously difficult to adapt to the big screen: H.P. Lovecraft. There are a number of reasons why that is, but I’m going to save that for another day. That said, there are some of his works that have been well-adapted: From Beyond, Re-Animator, and most recently, Color Out of Space. So, where does Stuart Gordon’s Dagon fit into all this?
Dagon follows Paul Marsh and Barbara, a young couple taking a vacation off the coast of Spain with their friends Howard and Vicki. While they’re on the boat, a freak storm suddenly appears and crashes their boat into the rocks, trapping Vicki in the cabin. With the storm gaining strength, Barbara and Paul take a small boat to a sea-side village that they noticed earlier, Imboca. When they arrive at the village, they try and get a local priest to help them. Offering to take Paul back to their boat, Barbara elects to stay behind. Discovering that Howard and Vicki seem to have vanished, Paul returns to the village only to find that Barbara herself has gone missing. Exploring the village trying to find her, Paul discovers that the villagers may not be as human as they thought. After encountering Ezequiel, the town’s only “normal” resident, Paul realizes that there is something truly sinister lying beneath the town driving the events there. The story in Dagon is actually based on The Shadow over Innsmouth rather than it’s namesake. Lovecraft never scares his audience by jumping out of the shadows and making a loud noise. Oh, no. What Lovecraft does is build an atmosphere of dread and foreboding. His method of affecting his audience is to make their skin crawl. For the most part, Dagon succeeds. There are some issues that bring the film down however.
Let’s talk about what works here. The film’s atmosphere and set designs are dripping with dread. Literally. This film is incredibly damp. It looks and feels slimy, like fish, because the town is populated by fish-people. You can feel the decay. It’s not just the village that’s grim. The denizens of Imboca are as equally twisted, having been turned into half-human, and half-fish creatures by the ancient sea god, Dagon. The make-up effects are absolutely fantastic. The webbed hands and gills that you on these folks is wild. The character of Uxia from the waist up is a gorgeous woman, but from the waste down, she’s got squid-like tentacles. A lot of the other characters in the film don’t even come across as human, because of their design. There is one character, Ezequiel, who is the village’s only “normal” resident. This guy was played by Francisco Rabal and he’s awesome. The character is old enough to remember when the village used to be normal, but became corrupted because they made a deal with Dagon to save their village. Unfortunately, that deal involved in kidnapping tourists and sacrificing the women to be consorts for Dagon, while the men were skinned alive. Also, the gal that played Uxia made it suitably crazy, while being strangely alluring at the same time. I liked how she brought her twisted character to life. This is a film that isn’t afraid to get gory when it needs to be. The gore is done practically and it adds another layer to the film. The pacing of the movie is pretty frenetic, and it goes by pretty quickly.
Now, we need to discuss the stuff that DIDN’T work. The acting is uniformly not good. With the exception of Francisco Rabal, the performances in the film just aren’t convincing enough. The characters are thinly written and we aren’t given enough to really care about what happens to them. For example, the two lead characters, Barbara and Paul are supposed to be in love with each other, but Paul comes across as a spoiled little twerp who is more concerned about his money than his girl. At no time during the film was I ever convinced that he actually cared. The same thing goes for Barbara as she’s a bit irritating. She just seems to be there to look pretty and be the damsel in distress. It’s an age-old cliché that really shouldn’t be used anymore. When it comes to visual effects, I’m going to try and cut this movie some slack because it’s a direct-to-video release from 2001. The practical effects are outstanding, there’s no arguing that point. However, when CGI is brought into the mix, it’s PAINFULLY obvious. Some of the CGI tentacles are poorly animated and Dagon himself when he shows is absolutely atrocious, and not in the right way. Dagon is supposed to be this huge and ancient god, but he looks like a cheap video-game monster. Granted, Lovecraft never really described what these creatures looked like or why and how they affected people. In fact, he went out of his way to avoid doing that. That was probably the point. So, I do have to give credit to the film-makers to try and give a form to this monster, even if it didn’t necessarily work all the time.
Dagon is a strange beast. On the one hand, it’s a movie that really shouldn’t work as well it does, and that’s due to the great Stuart Gordon. At the same time, it doesn’t quite hold up to some of the other movies like From Beyond that nailed the source material. When it comes to H.P. Lovecraft’s work, you really need an interpreter of sorts in order to really get around his prose and understand what he was trying to go for. There aren’t a whole lot of directors and writers out there that can successfully do that. Stuart Gordon was one of them and Richard Stanley is another. At the end of the day, I would argue that Dagon, while not perfect, is still a pretty good horror movie in it’s own right. If have even the slightest interest in Lovecraftian horror, this one is worth checking out.
My Final Recommendation: Waking up the ancient gods of the deep is not really a good idea, especially since they can turn you into fish-people. 8/10