• Directed by Stuart Gordon
• Written by Dennis Paoli, based on stories by H.P. Lovecraft
• Starring
  • Ezra Golden
  • Francisco Rabal
  • Raquel Merono
  • Macarena Gomez
  • Brendan Price
• Produced by Brian Yuzna

“That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons, even death may die.”

Such a statement can sometimes apply to a movie project as easily to a sanity-destroying Old One comatose in its lair. After director Stuart Gordon and writer Dennis Paoli made their first Lovecraftian movie, Re-Animator (1985), for Charles Band’s Empire Pictures, Paoli’s script entitled “Dagon” was supposed to be the followup. (From Beyond is what happened next instead, and “Dagon” got shelved.) Later, when Band had moved to producing movies through his Full Moon label, Gordon worked with him again, producing, among other movies, 1995’s Castle Freak — a movie which manages to be wonderfully Lovecraftian despite no basis in any one of Lovecraft’s stories, nor even any fantastic elements. It was also announced that Gordon would be helming a motion picture version of “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” for Full Moon, but like so many Full Moon projects, it never materialized.

…Until Gordon and Paoli got together with their old producing buddy Brian Yuzna, who had set up the machinery to make horror movies in Spain under the “Fear Factory” banner, and dusted off Paoli’s old script for redevelopment. The result, Dagon, owes a lot less to the Lovecraft tale of the same name than it does to “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” but with enough changes from that latter to make a title change reasonable. In any case, elements from both stories show up, coupled with plenty of original elements. Gordon has turned out to be the best director of Lovecraft-based movies ever; he respects the material, but he also understands what elements must be changed –sometimes slightly, sometimes drastically — to turn an old weird horror short story into a successful motion picture.

“I knew we should have taken that left turn at Albuquerque!”

The DVD case bears a quote from Fangoria Magazine, declaring Dagon to be “Gordon’s best film since Re-Animator.” I’m not sure I would say that; Castle Freak is certainly a strong contender. But it’s probably the best adaptation of “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” that could possibly be made with the setting changed from early 20th-century New England to modern-day Spain. (Now you see why my quotes don’t show up on DVD cases much.) I always look askance at Lovecraft adaptations which change settings for the story, as milieu was as much a character in Lovecraft’s work as any of his protagonists. On the other hand, it would be impossible to suspend disbelief at a modern New England town which is as yet as sequestered as the story demands it be, while we Americans are more than willing to believe in isolated backwards villages just about anywhere else in the world. Dagon capitalizes on the strengths of its transplanted setting and gives us a good (though probably not great) horror movie inspired, at least, by the ideas which begat “The Shadow Over Innsmouth.”

Our protagonist, and the single non-Spanish character in the movie, is Paul (Ezra Golden), a tech wizard in Bill Gates glasses who’s just become disgustingly rich thanks to something dot-commish. He’s not exactly settled into his newfound prosperity, but to celebrate, he’s on a yacht cruising the coast of Spain with his girlfriend Barbara (Raquel Merono — is “Barbara” a Spanish name?), and the yacht’s owners (and, one presumes, his business partners) Howard and Vicki (Brendan Price and Birgit Bofarull). Paul’s tension over his sudden wealth expresses itself in a sour stomach, and in a recurring dream involving SCUBA diving, a huge stone symbol on the ocean floor, and a beautiful but carnivorous mermaid.

“Of course there’ll be someone here to help us. It’s bingo night.”

Yeah, enough with the whiny inner turmoil and self-doubt; Paul gets a taste of REAL trouble when a sudden storm swamps the boat and sends it into a spur of rock sticking out of the ocean. With the yacht taking water, and Vicki’s leg caught and pinned in splintered boards, Paul and Barbara have to take the inflatable raft to shore, to see if they can beg assistance from the citizens of the small oceanside village they can see.

It’s an unsettlingly old town, with close foot-streets winding between antique stone houses, and they can’t find anyone to help until they reach the church at the center of the town of Imboca from which they earlier heard dissonant singing, a church whose sign reads “Esoterica Orde de Dagon.” While Paul stands around helpless, Barbara manages to explain to the priest (Ferran Lahoz) their plight, and they manage to find a fishing boat whose crew — all sallow-faced, quiet men, not unlike the priest — can take Paul back out to the boat, while Barbara stays behind to try and contact the police.

Deep Ones don’t flush.

That’s the story, at least. But when Paul gets back to the yacht, Howard and Vicki are nowhere to be found; and when the fishing boat gets him back to the village, Barbara has similarly disappeared. The priest says she’s begun the fifty-mile journey to Barcelona to reach the authorities, leaving Paul alone and unable to communicate with most of the locals. Locals with odd skin texture and unblinking eyes. Locals who walk with a shambling gait and seem inordinately interested in this outsider. Locals who have abominable standards of cleanliness, if the hotel room Paul checks into is any indication.

Locals who immediately begin to try to kill him. Though Paul is hapless and almost helpless without a working Blackberry (and though his glasses are constantly misted from the continuous rainfall), he manages to stay away from the shuffling legions who swarm the hotel while seeing more and more of the deformities — or mutations — which mark the pasty-skinned denizens of Imboca. Thus it’s doubly a relief when he he literally runs into old Ezequiel (Francisco Rabal) while escaping down an alley: Drunk, crazy, ancient Ezequiel, who is “the last man” in Imboca, the last person alive untouched by the taint of Dagon. He was there as a boy, when a dearth of fish shook the locals’ faith in their Judaeo-Christian God and opened the way for a well-traveled sea captain (Alfredo Villa) to introduce them to a more responsive god that he knew from his time in the Pacific, a god who responds to the needs of his seaside devotees, if plied with the right kinds of sacrifices, of both blood and flesh.

No, that’s not Michael Berryman. Yes, it should have been.

It’s gratifying to be able to see so many elements of Lovecraft’s original preserved in the movie, though most of them have been moved around chronologically, given a different significance, or otherwise permuted. Old Ezequiel is a much more active figure in the movie than his analogue was in “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” trying to help Paul escape from the village and thus finally calling on himself the ire of the Dagon worshippers. The female characters — Barbara, and the Imbocan girl Uxia whose face Paul saw on the mermaid in his dreams — are almost complete innovations to Lovecraft’s story, but because the original was deeply concerned with inhuman heredity (yes, it’s another of Lovecraft’s “NO! Don’t mate with THAT!!” stories), their addition becomes a natural way to express themes of crossbreeding that Should Not Be. (An interesting note on how that theme changed in the seventy years between text and film: In the original, the crossbreeding between humans and Distinctly Not Humans is shown largely as human sailors and others taking inhuman wives, expressing both Lovecraft’s racism and sexism in the idea that these New England men degraded and “sullied” themselves with this extreme form of miscegenation. In the movie, though, such interbreeding is mostly shown as unwilling human females being “sacrificed” to Dagon, with the semi-human inhabitants of Imboca thus being the result of coercion and rape.)

It is, as I said, a good movie, though not a great one. Ruminations on destiny vs. free will have been so overused that even their most thoughtful expressions in a movie nowadays can’t escape feeling threadbare. Some wonderful cinematic storytelling that leaves Spanish dialogue scenes rightly without subtitles is counterbalanced by those scenes in which Spanish actors speak English with such authentic but thick accents that subtitles seem like a good option. The CGI work is sparing, but so obvious that it’s not nearly sparing enough. And too many of the little details, drawn from sincere reseach into comparative religions, are only comprehensible when listening to Gordon’s and Paoli’s commentary track.

“I can even pick up the UHF stations!”

That said, there are a great many moments of admirable and stunning cinema here, from action and suspense to the quiet horror of a single understated line: “Kill me. You promised.” It’s a flawed but striking movie, and as it was based on a striking but flawed short story, that may be exactly how it should be.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 16
• breasts: 6
• pasty male butts: 1
• explosions: 0
• dream sequences: 2
• ominous thunderstorms: 1
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0