Meadhall of the Comitatus

Furor: Don’t call it a comeback! Sure it’s been 10 days since the last review as we fight to keep Horrorama going in the face of November snow, but we got a whole hard drive full of flicks to praise ‘n raze before HH8 is done. Getting right back to it: way back in college I borrowed Oz’s H.P. Lovecraft anthology and was hooked straight away, so it’s fitting that we both tackle Dagon, a movie that really suits puns like ‘hooked’. Ok, sorry, I’ve gotta dial it down from here on because after all, cosmic horror is serious business!

Oz: SERIOUS. BUSINESS.

Premise: 5/5

What do the dreams mean? It's Lovecraft so it can't be good...right?

Furor: If you don’t know what a Dagon is, and have $250 to blow, well you can buy your own here. Seriously, don’t do that; there’s a recession on, and the damn thing’ll just devour you anyway. You know what, do buy it.

In its native Spain, this movie was released on Halloween of 2001, and it still holds up well 10 years later. This comes as no surprise since the great Brian Yuzna was involved, aka co-producer of Re-animator, which may just be the only movie to earn the full 5 stars from Oz.

Oz: “Ah yes, Re-Animator: I LOVE this movie.”

Furor: Aye. As for this one, Dagon‘s plot is a great reworking of Lovecraft’s original stories The Shadow Over Innsmouth and Dagon, transplanting it from their familiar (and by now a bit cliche’) New England environs clear off to sunny Spain! This outsourcing works out great, though, running with the same setup of a spooky fishing town complete with overcast skies, decrepit buildings, and a totally bizarro church. The town of Inboca (Innsmouth in Spanish) suffers under a mysterious curse, and you’ll have a creepy evening and tons of fun as it unravels.

Paul Marsh is a wealthy young professional going on a sailing vacation in Spain with his hot girlfriend Barbara and a older couple. However, Paul can’t keep his hands off….his laptop, endlessly trading stocks while his girlfriend fumes until she throws the damn thing overboard. Soon afterward, a storm comes outta nowhere and the ship strikes something underwater and it begins to sink, with the older woman wounded and trapped in the hold. Her husband stays with her, forcing Paul and his girlfriend to brave the increasingly savage storm to go for help in Inboca.

Things get really weird in town, which is in the same godawful shape as its creepy residents, many of whom are covered up, limping, or otherwise disfigured. The couple stops at a rickety hotel where Barbara soon goes missing, and now Paul has to find her and figure out just what the hell is going on here. He runs headlong from mutated fishmen into a meeting with Ezequiel, the only human left in Inboca, who relates the tragic tale of the port town and the powerful Cambarro family responsible for its decline. Impressed by Paul’s determination, he agrees to help find Barbara and hopefully escape from Inboca.

A slight snag in the plan occurs when Paul sneaks into the Cambarro mansion and literally meets the girl of his dreams, moon-faced beauty Uxia Cambarro–the hauntingly lovely figure who has been calling to him all his life in his sleep.

Wow, dreams really can come true!

Uxia recognizes him from her own dreams and throws the floodgates of her passion wide open, planting muchas smooches all over the guy until he realizes that from the waist down she’s a freako mutant fish-woman-thing (about half of whom is admittedly really hot)!

Wow. Okay. Weeee're gonna need a bag.

Shortly after rejecting Uxia’s advances, Paul is captured by the deranged villagers and faces a grisly fate (see below…yick.). Narrowly escaping thanks to his newfound if unrequited love interest, Paul makes his way to where Barbara is held in the subterranean hall of worship of Dagon himself, where he is ultimately forced to face the ultimate horror–his own confusing yet inescapable duality.

Oz: …where he yells the best line of the film: “FUCK Dagon!”

Yep, Yuzna and Stuart Gordon worked on both Re-Animator and Dagon, so that’s a pretty good deal there. What’s also great is how relatively accurate to Lovecraft’s original story Shadow Over Innsmouth the movie was, especially the main guy’s cornering and subsequent escape from the hotel. Well, OK, I think the hotel in this movie was a good deal grosser than the one Lovecraft described, but even in the story it was pretty icky.

Actually, now that I think about it, the one thing the movie did that was easily superior to the story was the revelation that our protagonist actually belongs to Innsmouth. It kind of came out of nowhere, more or less, in the story, after the exciting stuff (escaping the town, etc.) was done with. I don’t really know why Lovecraft would take an up-to-that-point intense little story and keep writing it long after it should have been over, especially since all the protagonist does is pretty much go to a library, do some research, and then decides he needs to go back to Innsmouth so he can chill on Devil’s Reef forever. WTF kind of tedious ending is that? The movie did it MUCH better with all the dream conceits, and we didn’t have to watch a guy hang out at the library after all was said and done.

What’s also interesting are the many comedic moments in the film. It’s not quite as heavily comedic as Re-Animator, of course, but there’s moments I’d almost forgotten about in this movie. Paul trying to convince the crazy growling/burbling monsters outside his door to just leave him alone was funny; the part where he’s pulled a dresser in front of one door to the hotel room and is wedging his shoulder up against the other door has an almost Bruce Campbell-y slapsticky feel; the part where he runs over a villager in the car and then has to get out while being chased and get the body un-stuck from the tire well (which of course then tries strangling the shit out of him); the look on his face when he’s feeling up the pretty girl and goes a bit lower than teh b3wbs only to feel her gills– and of course the swirly scene! All these scenes played with an understated kind of gross-out comedy sensibility, and it actually made me laugh out loud a couple times while watching all these scenes again, even though I’d forgotten it was supposed to be funny in these spots. Sure, it’s funny, but also very much “you’re gonna die!” at the same time, which is really cool!

Furor: Yuzna definitely gets Lovecraft, perhaps owing to his eldritch last name…? He’s done the Old Ones proud!

Cast: 4/5

...In-laws, amiright?

Furor: Ezra Godden is good throughout the movie as poor Paul, playing him as a likeable nerd with a real stick up his butt and who’s entirely out of his element here in Inboca. Like many a hero caught up in Lovecraft’s mind-wrenching plots, Paul’s problem is that he’s always trying to analyze and reason his way out of trouble: “Two possibilities–” is his mantra to deal with everything from the stock market to the yawning void of unreality.  This trait works especially well in Lovecraftian stories where the audience is in on the joke as the characters’ once-sane world is gradually but permanently eclipsed.

Francisco Rabal is also pretty great as the half-drunk half-crazy old man Ezequiel, the last human left in doomed Inboca. And of course Macarena Gomez deserves special mention for her earnest performance as Uxia, an endearingly creepy and complex character. And hey, let’s hear it for all the Inboca extras! We’ve got a whole town full of insane croaking abominations, and that’s Lovecraft done right!

Cinematography/FX: 4/5

Oz's filename for this one was 'Faceoff.' Dual review or no, I gotta call him on that kinda thing.

Furor: Dagon has more than a few neat scenes, especially the flashbacks. Blood, water and decay are everywhere we look. We also get a bit of the old ultra-violence via the face-flaying scene above that’s just unbelievable, and took me totally by surprise when Oz brought over his DVD since I’d only seen Dagon edited on SciFi. This is the absolute goriest thing I’ve seen in a movie of this quality. Wow just wow.

Oz: Yeah, you’re right about the gore…like you, I only saw Dagon on SciFi up to this point, and holy SHIT was that grody! You can be sure I’d have remembered the face-flaying and the arm-ripping if it had been shown on TV. But really, since I watched it again in fast-forward to dig up these screencaps, I also noticed that there really isn’t *a lot* of gore in Dagon outside of those scenes. There’s a lot of slime, dirt, and decay, but not much giblets. I actually think that’s more to the movie’s credit than anything, though: too much gore would’ve dragged the movie down (and probably sent it well over its likely-tiny budget) and taken away from the seriously invasive creep-factor. This creative team understood that dirt, when properly applied, can be every bit as effective at creating a mood and a sense of dread–and that blood, when pointlessly applied, can just cheapen the whole package and make an otherwise stand-out movie look like just another hokey grue-fest.

Furor: Too true.

Cultycorn Factor: 4/5

:) I don't care WHO you are, the Pope or whoever, this got a laugh out of you, and that's why we love Dagon. Update: My wife did not laugh.

This is such a great modern interpretation and distillation of Lovecraft! If you’re a fan of the man and his works, pop Dagon in and have a wacky evening of unnamable horror.