DAGON

Directed by Stuart Gordon. Spain. 2001.

The Shadow Over Innsmouth is one of Lovecraft’s most cinematic stories, part mystery, part urban survival story. Set in an isolated, decaying seaport, Lovecraft’s brilliantly unnerving novella follows an unnamed protagonist as he uncovers the town's dark history, including a sinister pact between its former inhabitants and a race of amphibious beings called the Deep Ones. Once night falls, a horde of half-human monstrosities lumber into town and begin to pursue him. It’s a darkly entertaining thrill ride just begging for a proper adaptation. Alas, we’ve never gotten one. DAGON comes close, but close isn’t always enough.

No stranger to Lovecraft adaptations, director Stuart Gordon spent well over a decade trying to get his preferred vision of The Shadow Over Innsmouth to screen, but to no avail. We got this instead. DAGON was shot in Spain on a meager budget of just four million Euros. The shift from Massachusetts to Europe required changes. The small budget demanded cuts. What we got in the end is Innsmouth Lite. Half the calories, half the flavor.

Paul Marsh, a work-obsessed entrepreneur whose company has hit it big on the stock market, is cruising around on a yacht near Spain. Lately, Paul has been dreaming of an underwater temple and a beautiful mermaid with pointy teeth. His girlfriend, Barbara, wants Paul to log off and have some fun with her and their guests, Howard and Vicki. When Paul refuses to get off the internet (I’m not sure how they’re getting Wi-Fi out at sea near a remote town), Barbara tosses his laptop into the ocean.

A seemingly supernatural storm soon kicks up, crashing their yacht against the rocks. Paul and Barbara jump into a canoe and head for the shore, leaving Howard behind to care for Vicki, her leg crushed in the crash. We are now in the desolate town of Imboca. They meet a priest with webbed hands and a couple of pasty-faced fishermen. Barbara and the priest head to a hotel to find a telephone while Paul returns to the wreck with the fishermen. When he arrives, there’s no sign of Howard and Vicki, just Howard’s blood-stained clothes floating in the oily water. Barbara gets herself kidnapped by the priest. We’re down to one idiot, folks, and that’s Paul.

The sun goes down, and the rain intensifies. Looking out his hotel window, Paul witnesses the residents stumbling around in the rain. One sees him and screams, “¡Agarradlo!” Paul pulls out his trusty handgun and runs from building to building, pulling off headshots and leaping from windows, until he hears the horrible sound of a chainsaw in the distance. Before he can react, Paul is swarmed and must seek shelter in a rundown house. The chainsaw begins cutting through the door. Paul, frantic but steady, takes down villager after villager until a nearby church bell captures their attention. The villagers wander off. Paul looks around himself, confused. He quips, “Where’s everybody going? Bingo?”

Nah, just kidding. Paul is nowhere near that competent.

Paul fumbles with a tiny door lock for five minutes before jumping out a second-story window. Despite landing on his back, he somehow twists his ankle in the fall. The rest of us would have a shattered tailbone. Our frazzled hero meets Ezequiel, the town drunk and local exposition machine. Ezequiel tells us Imboca’s dark history. Once a prosperous fishing town, Imboca fell into poverty when the fishing nets started coming up empty. Less fish meant more despair. At the urging of a mysterious visitor, they turned their backs on the Christian faith and began worshipping Dagon, an ancient, pagan sea god. Their nets started coming back full. And what was the cost of prosperity, you ask? Well, forcing locals to breed with fish monsters, naturally.

Paul needs a car to escape. Wouldn’t ya know it, there’s only one working car in all of Imboca. It belongs to the town’s ruling family, the Combarros. Ezequiel distracts the guards outside the Combarro Estate so Paul can hotwire the vehicle. Unfortunately, Paul is fucking useless, and everything goes to shit. Instead of running off into the night, Paul runs into the family estate where he can be easily caught. After running upstairs, he meets the literal girl of his dreams. He finds the beautiful Uxia Combarro, the town patriarch’s daughter, lying in bed. Bewitched by her beauty, he embraces her. They kiss. But his lust turns to disgust when he pulls back the bedsheets and discovers that - GASP! - she has tentacles where her legs should be. He runs off once again.

A few chase scenes later, Paul is captured, and we can get down to business. By now we understand that the women (namely Barbara) are to be given to Dagon to be forcibly impregnated. Paul and Ezequiel are to be skinned alive to make skin suits for the mutant fish men to wear. The stakes are clearly set. The fishmen manage to accomplish two out of those three tasks. Meat Loaf said that ain’t bad, and who am I to disagree? After all, I have bigger issues with this nonsense. Allow me to whine at you about them.

Paul is isolated by the 26-minute mark, which is bad news, as Ezra Godden is absolutely awful in this role. It doesn’t help that they dressed the guy up to look like Jeffrey Combs in RE-ANIMATOR, but the greater sin is that Paul is an utter blank slate for the entire film. We would think Paul’s acumen, the thing that made him wealthy, would come into play at some point, but it can’t because we don’t know anything about him. Maybe he designed some fancy niche product, and now he has to use it to help get himself out of trouble. That would be cool, wouldn’t it?

The narrator of The Shadow Over Innsmouth is revealed to be descended from Innsmouth folk, hence his strange, unshakable interest in the area. The Innsmouth denizens share a strange complexion. Lovecraft describes it as “the Innsmouth look”. At the end of the novella, the narrator begins to change. He acquires the Innsmouth look and realizes he cannot fight his DNA. He is fated to return to Innsmouth and dive beneath the cold waters, dwelling forever in the depths below, a servant of Dagon.

Meanwhile, vacationing in Spain isn’t even Paul’s idea. In fact, he bitches about being there. This lessens the Cosmicistic impact of the final reveal. Uxia just flat-out tells him they’re half-siblings and that his mother escaped the town before he was born. Wouldn’t it have been better to drip-feed that information throughout the film? If the town legacy is etched into his DNA, maybe he could have instinctively known where to go or have vague impressions of hearing the name Dagon before. Wouldn’t it be cool if Paul begins to recognize the local language as the story progresses, as if he’s slowly acquiring the “Imboca look”? Wouldn’t it be nice to know something about the lead character so the surprise twist at the end of the film had an impact?

Nah, he just sets himself on fire then goes for a swim. He also runs away from Macarena Gomez just because she has tentacle legs. Give me a break. I’d have made that work. The rest of her is fine. She’s only like 23.6% squid.

While DAGON didn’t have me invested in Paul’s survival, it did have some other things going for it. One, it’s a wonderfully visceral film. I’m not just talking about the violence, which is sometimes nauseatingly gruesome (the face-peeling might not be on par with BONE TOMAHAWK, but it’s definitely on the list of worst torture sequences ever put to film), but the rain, the dirt, the oiliness, and overall muck… The movie sticks to your eyes. The atmosphere is oppressive and overwhelming, with gorgeous photography that belies the film’s meager budget.

Of course, this is all balanced out with some moments of sheer stupidity, like when an extremely large man with octopus arms and a mouthful of razor-sharp teeth tries to drown Paul in a filthy toilet or when Paul beats a guard to death with a tiny cell phone. It was also massively disappointing to see Dagon, a truly terrifying and majestic Lovecraftian beastie, reduced to a poorly animated CGI squid inside a well, but that’s Lovecraft adaptations for you. Lovecraft’s monsters work best when they are only half-described in fractured confessions from raving lunatics. On screen, they never quite work.

And neither does DAGON. It’s not the worst Lovecraftian adaptation, just the worst Stuart Gordon-helmed adaptation. If I had to choose between this and, say, CTHULHU MANSION, I’d take this any day of the week. Wouldn’t be a great week, but it’s 2026. When do we ever have a great week?