Customer Reviews

Dagon

5 star:		(21)
4 star:		(19)
3 star:		(14)
2 star:		(9)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

H.P. Lovecraft wrote stories of ancient horrors, of demonic gods exiled to earth who built profane metropolises populated with worshippers of enormous evil. Often, the author's stories--which eventually became known as the Cthulhu mythos--placed nosy human beings in direct conflict with these eldritch terrors. After Lovecraft's death in the 1930s, other authors stepped forward and wrote their own tales of terror incorporating many of the same themes found in those original yarns. Perhaps it was inevitable that moviemakers would attempt to transform some of these stories into feature films. Efforts to do so should have been successful, especially nowadays when CGI technology and other elaborate means exist to actualize Lovecraft's nameless horrors. Unfortunately, only a handful of films based on this author's writings have come close to conveying the dread found on the written page. Director Stuart Gordon is responsible for several of the success stories; he is the guy who made "The Reanimator" and "From Beyond," two movies based on Lovecraft tales that really work well. Sadly, "Dagon" constitutes one of Gordon's rare misses, a movie that works on several levels while failing on many more.

A group of people, including our hero Paul and his Spanish wife, run into trouble off the coast of Spain when a sudden storm devastates their vessel. Seeing a coastal fishing village within hailing distance, Paul and his wife decide to set out for help. There is some worry about how fast this weird storm came up, but help is absolutely necessary because one of the female passenger's legs is bleeding and caught in the crushed boat. Things get a lot weirder once Paul and his woman reach the village. Realizing they no longer need help with the boat because they saw it sink shortly after the left it, they have little choice but to examine the surroundings. The village is a dank, smelly place that initially looks abandoned. The discovery of an odd church and the creep manning the desk at the local inn raise more red flags, as does the filthy room Paul rents. Even worse, Paul gets the sinking feeling that a recurring dream he frequently has is starting to remind him of this odd little town. Suspicions turn to shrieking horror when our hero discovers that the town's population consists of weird human/fish hybrids, all of who want to kill the human intruders in unpleasant ways. Paul becomes separated from Barbara and ends up meeting a strange old geezer who tells him a weird tale.

According to this old tar, the village was once a prosperous fishing area until the sea became lifeless. As the people slowly died of poverty and starvation, a lifeline appeared in the form of Dagon. An ancient sea god with a bad attitude, this deity promises salvation and wealth if the citizens worship him and his minions. The result is the shambling sea beasties presently tracking Paul. Paul's mission, if he chooses to accept it (and he does), is to find his woman and get the heck out of Dodge. All types of obstacles appear in his way, not the least of which is a pale faced little girl Paul runs across from time to time. This girl also appeared in our hero's dreams sporting a mouth full of razor sharp teeth. Predicatably, the sea creatures capture Paul and threaten to do him in if he doesn't play along. They also detain the old tar as well, a fact that achieves stomach churning dimensions when several of the fish men promptly peel his face and scalp from his head. Paul comes within inches of destruction himself before he discovers the reason why he ended up in the village and what the creatures expect from him. It should go without saying that Paul's destiny isn't a pretty picture, involving as it does the corporeal form of Dagon, Paul's dream girl, and his hapless girlfriend. The end.

"Dagon" went straight to video for a variety of reasons. For one thing, the movie isn't all that engaging. The script has so many holes that you could sail a battleship through it. I am still scratching my head over Paul's sudden reversal at the end, and that is only one of the problems in this swiss cheese movie. As for the acting, don't go there. It's awkward and not in a good way. One problem here rests with the choice of Ezra Godden to play the Paul role. This guy looks so much like Gordon regular Jeffrey Combs that I thought Godden was that actor's brother or son. Why not just get Combs to play the part? One of the great elements of Gordon's prior efforts is Jeffrey Combs, as many others would surely agree. Perhaps Jeff was busy with another role, but I sorely miss him here. Finally, the CGI effects used in "Dagon" are ineffective and cheesy, especially when the time to reveal tentacles and the like rolls around. Gordon's film would have, could have, and should have been better with a few minor changes to script, cast, and effects.

What does work with "Dagon" is the sense of doom hanging over the film like a veil. The village, with its windswept and rain driven streets, does a lot to promote a sense of eeriness. That horrific scalping looked great too, an effect that would probably make a few viewers unused to these types of films lose their lunch. The girl who plays the creature in Paul's dream is truly frightening looking and is a good addition to the film. Overall, "Dagon" is an average horror thriller too often marred with mediocrities--like the acting, plodding pace, and weak script--to merit an enthusiastic review. It's worth watching once before moving on to greener fields.

"Dagon" is one of the few attempts to capture the essence of H.P. Lovecraft's works that actually manages to convey his sense of horror and dread to the screen. Inspired by two Lovecraft short tales - "Dagon" and "The Shadow over Innsmouth"- the plot follows two couples who are on a yacht cruise celebrating the succes of their dot.com co. when a freak storm wrecks their boat and sends two of them to the coastal town of ImBoca for help. Upon arrival, the man- Ezra Godden, effectively filling a role originally intended for director Stuart Gordon's regular Jeffrey Combs, begins to realize all is not right when his girlfriend vanishes and a society of half human/half fish denizens emerges from the rainy, dilapidated village to sacrfice them to the sea deity Dagon.
Here are the flaws- and this is where there are some spoilers, so the uninitiated beware:

1) in the scene where Paul is besieged by a literal horde of the fish-people in his hotel room, his actions seem clever at first, but the end result leaves you wondering "Hey, why in the hell didnt he just bust through the secondary door to begin with?"

2) When the 'High Priestess" is revealed for the first time from the waist down, her "appendages" could gave been more realistic- I say this becuase , by and large, the fish people prostethics created for this film are very, very convincing, and in this scene the f/x people dropped the ball.

3) The sole surviving human in ImBoca ( Francisco Rabal ) is so difficult to comprehend through his thick accent that you wish the flashback sequence- which does a damned fine job of explaining the events leading to Imbopca's current state of affairs without the aide of narration- had been left in just that condition: Lacking narration.

Beyond those qualms which- believe me- do not really detract from the cumulative effect of the film, this is a creepy, exciting, well acted and well directed adaptation of a Lovecraft tale from the people who brought us "Re-animator." I highly recommend this to horror fans and to fans of good, freaky cinema. One other note, Lovecraft fans should get a real kick out of one of the film's better in-jokes. Check out Paul's sweater early on in the film.

If I could have given this less than 1 star I would have. It is horrible, quite possibly the worst movie I have ever seen. I am a fan of less than box-office hit movies, (So to say "B" movies) but Dagon is by far the stupidest of them I have ever seen. If a movie that makes you actively want the main character to die (preferably the most painful death your numbed brain can come up with) is a movie you want to see, Dagon is perfect. However, if you want to actually enjoy a movie (and avoid a few months of nightmares in witch an irritatingly scrawny likewise pale man is dying), stay far far away from this movie.

PS: Only people with great empathy would consider those nightmares, as a normally detached person would be the one killing IP,LSM. (Irritatingly pale, likewise scrawny man)

What a pleasure to discover this movie ! I really appreciate and I have been so surprised. I was expected a bad moment but I have been really glad indeed. It's quite low budget but you finally enjoy. I didn't like the end personnaly but it's from a HP LOVEXRAFT's story so you can't expect it differently.
The actors are very good.The story is mysterious and the direction is not bad at all.If you liked the old ROMERO and FULCI movies, this stuff is 100% for you. As a matter of fact, i didn't watch and enjoy this kind of movie for a very longtime and Dagon is an enjoyable moment.Thanks to the Fantastic Factory ! Good Job !

This is easily one of the best H.P. Lovecraft adaptions. Surprise, surprise! What's the surprise?! Stuart Gordon has directed all the best 3 of them: Re-animator, From Beyond and now Dagon. The opening sequence on a boat is reminiscent of the short story Dagon which it is based. It may in fact be 100% accurate. Then it goes further, which all good Lovecraft adaptions do. The stories are so short 90% of the time that they do throw in all or most of it, but they jazz it up with gore and nudity and other stuff to make it a feature film. Here what they did is use the short story as the opening scene, and then developed a grandiose plot with special effects that is about a race of fish-men and women who worship a terrifying sea monster known as Dagon. As with any good Lovecraft adaption, the lead is a Miskatonic Univeristy student. He is on a boat with friends and problems arise where he and only 1 of the 3 others make it to shore. There they are purued by the fish-men, which leads to a really cool scene and set piece which involves a church devoted to the worship of Dagon. It called "Esotic Order De Dagon." They meet up with a drunken bum, who tells of his childhood dealings with the creatures. He ends up getting his face torn off by the creatures. It took me quite a few viewings to truly appreciate this masterpiece. When I did I sat down and had a few beers to the point of mild intoxication. My only would-be criticism is this is a sort of Lovecraft retread- nudity, gore galore, a hideous monster, Miskatonic University students, Stuart Gordon and Brian Yuzna. However, these are what makes the Lovecraft adaptions so good. A by-the-numbers classic that is getting a growing reputation as a good horror film, and one of the best Lovecraft adaptions of all time. I would also like to recommend Stuart Gordon's Castle Freak on DVD.

Director Stuart Gordon had a massive challenge: film H.P. Lovecraft's champagne and caviar classic "The Shadow over Innsmouth" on a beer and pretzels budget. With ghosties, ghoulies, long-legged beasties and squid waiting in the wings, what's a cash-strapped director to do?

Simple: Gordon packed up his team and headed off to Spain, where they could make the most of their shoestring budget and capitalize on some genuinely eerie locations. The result is one of the most faithful, ghoulish, hysterical, and genuinely unsettling adaptations of the Master's timeless and merciless mythos, and Gordon delivers the goods, making the most of his haunting Spanish locations, solid actors, and plenty of red sauce, tentacles, Elder Gods, and ghastly-gory goop.

Dot-com gazillionaire-to-be Paul (played to the bespectacled Lovecraftian hero-hilt by Ezra Godden), his pretty Spanish fiancee Barbara (played with conviction by Raquel Merono), his financier Howard (Brendan Price, for about 25 seconds), and Howard's snippy wife Vicki (Birgit Bofurull, who does snippy just as well as she does slack-jawed terror---nice job!) are all on a sailboat off the coast of Southern spain, celebrating riches to come, when a nasty squall rolls in. Faster than you can shout "Gilligan!" the tiny boat is lost, wrecked on the Old Devil Reef, with Howard's snippy wife not so snippy anymore as her ravaged, trapped leg bleeds into the water. What, pray tell, might her blood attract?

Howard stays on the doomed boat with his wife while Paul and Barbara set off in a raft to get help in the eerily deserted fishing village they spied before the storm hit. They make landfall, meet the village---Imboca ("Innsmouth" in Spanish, get it?)---priest, split up, and the fun begins!

Gordon goes heavy on the atmosphere in "Dagon", to telling effect: this is a movie dedicated to that white, deformed face at the window, to shadowy and batrachian figures shuffling along rain-swept cobbled streets, to inexplicable thudding sounds coming from the room above you in the foul-smelling hotel room at 3 in the morning, to the dank, the wet, the forsaken, the inbred, the bizarre. Barbara's trip to the Hotel Del Mar through the shadow-haunted streets of Imboca gave me the crawls.

Gordon is masterful at taking Lovecraft's raw horror and ratcheting it up a knotch. The scene where a perfectly normal little boy wails over his fallen, leech-mouthed "Papa" gave me the chills; Lovecraft would doubtless shiver and approve.

The acting here is uniformly solid. Some might be put off by Ezra Godden's bespectacled nebbish hero, but true Lovecraft enthusiasts will be delighted with the most iconic Lovecraft protagonist since the Jeffrey Combs as Herbert West in "Re-Animator". Godden blends a fine arsenal of nervous tics and glasses-adjusting nerdiness with panicked courage under fire, and the result is hysterical and totally believable, making "Dagon"'s final revelation even more unnerving.

The fine Spanish veteran actor Francisco Rabal is also great; his soupy accent is a little tough to understand, but make the effort and you'll be rewarded with a superior performance. Rabal's nose is also something of a special effect in itself, nearly as terrifying as anything Imboca has to offer. Macarena Gomez is creepily gorgeous as Uxia, and the dream sequences in which she figures as a mermaid gave me nightmares for a week. Ferran Lahoz (Priest) and Jose Lifante (Hotel Del Mar Desk Clerk) gave me the crawls, and brought a huge dose of creepiness to the movie with their tiny and terrifying parts.

The real standout here aside from the deliciously Lovecraftian atmosphere is the special effects work; Gordon got the most from his limited budget, and it's all up on the screen. The Ultimate Horror of Imboca is never revealed outright until the end, merely hinted at, and the effects underscore that strategy: the effects are repellent and nasty, but subtle. Take a look at Lahoz's hand or Lifante's head and you'll see what I mean.

There are a few missteps, chiefly some bad CGI that hurt the dramatic effect of one superbly creepy scene (you'll know it when you see it), but not enough to diminish "Dagon's" relentless atmosphere of tentacled ghoulishness. On a technical note, the Lion's Gate release of the film is note-perfect: the colors are beautiful, the transfer is crisp and flawless, and the Dolby sound is a little *too* good (I nearly jumped out of my skin when a froggish hoot erupted from the darkness over my left shoulder).

Dark, richly atmospheric, and genuinely unsettling, "Dagon" is one of the most faithful Lovecraft adaptations ever set to celluloid and a deleriously unnerving little horror film.

Aside from being a "somewhat" faithful adaptation of the H.P. Lovecraft classic "The Shadow over Innsmouth", this film falls short of the mark and relies entirely too much on gore, schlock, and gratuitous nudity. Of course there is a time and place for that. This film is not it. As far as the "acting talent" is concerned, I didn't know F list actors even existed if that gives any indication of the caliber of talent stocking this film. 98 minutes of my life that I will never get back. The only reason I gave it 2 stars rather than 1 is because it's the team that gave us Re-Animator, and they appear to have read the short story. To sum it up in a word G R O S S!

Usually whenever one of H. P. Lovecraft's short stories is filmed, the result is a discredit to the master of 19th century horror fiction. However, director Stuart Gordon took DAGON, one of Lovecraft's lesser known short works and has presented a stunning thriller that keeps the viewer's mind firmly entrenched in a morass of religious paganism, creepy sets, and surprisingly effective acting. After I finished seeing this film, I had to take some moments to analyze how much the fish-god Dagon impacted on me. Director Gordon cleverly kept changing the film's pace so what started out as a pleasure boat ride with a mixture of nerds, Hispanicas, and middle class types quickly morphed into a series of visual horrors. The hero is Paul, who begins the film as some bespectacled dweeb who cannot comprehend why his Latina girlfriend tossed his PC overboard when he fails to pay sufficient attention to her. A storm cloud appears with amazing speed and beaches the craft on a reef near a town on the coast of Spain. He and his girlfriend Barbara paddle a raft to town where they find it inhabited by citizens whose faces and anatomy are at first vague and well-hidden by swaddling clothes. Slowly, both recognize that the town's residents are more fish than human. Decades ago, during a time of economic crisis, they abandoned Christ to worship the Philistine god of fish, Dagon, who over the years has been altering the DNA of his captive townspeople so that they grow fins, scales, and gills. The thrust of the second half is to discover if Paul and Barbara can escape before they are offered to Dagon as sacrifice.

DAGON is a successful horror film, not because of the special effects, which, by the way, are upsettingly frightful, but because of the interaction between actor and setting. Much of the outdoor filming takes place in a dreary evening downpour which accentuates a middle ground between the two humans who are land bound and the fish-people who are water-linked. The followers of Dagon lumber slowly around or simply slither in and out of each scene. Paul tries mightily to dart around these fish-folk out of water, and he does elude them long enough for him to discover a shocking truth that took both him and the viewer totally by surprise. One of the supporting actors was Francisco Rabal, who plays the last human resident of the town. His character is old and grizzled, but despite his drunken demeanor and thick accent emerges as a man of immense dignity who remembers what his town was like before the acolytes of Dagon took over. By the closing credits, I found myself more concerned with his fate than with Paul's and Barbara's. The chilling horror of Lovecraft's Chluthu monster is in DAGON transformed in a series of of visceral images that cause the viewer to ponder the impossibility of what he just has seen and to conclude that only the best of the horror genre can force him to think that maybe the impossible is possible after all.

Another adaptation of horror master H.P. Lovecraft. With so many bad films based off of his work and butchered by no talent hacks, I was surprised when I rented Dagon. It isn't completely true to the original story but it holds enough to make it a good film. I won't waste my time telling you the plot. The effects are great for the budget and I'm alwayas happy to see the Elder Gods on screen. With a great story, creepy atmosphere and nice gore, it's well worth your money. Plus it features the amazing Macarena Gomez. I'd let her take me to live with the Deep Ones any day...

Excellent movie but they seriously should have dubbed it since the accents in it are difficult and the rest is in Spanish. Otherwise, no complaints. Excellent acting, excellent scenes, shocking and graphic enough to keep any mythos fan happy and exotic enough.