Dagon, my sweet Dagon, oh what foul stench thou emits,
enough to make one sad at how it all went once again amiss,
cursed indeed by another Elder God these adaptations seem
of Lovecraft’s hate for fish supreme.
For the record, i don’t hate or begrudge Stuart Gordon’s work overall and his obvious love for the source material, i mean, the Reanimator series was also spun from a H.P. Lovecraft story and that managed to work, though it became its own thing, i am more than “ok” with that.
I mean, for fuck’s sake if that story in particular needed to be scrubbed – in adaptations – of the obniouxsly blatant racism, you’ll need to clean the Lovecraft out of Lovecraft “sometimes”.
But i also can’t deny there are reasons why fans of Lovecraft are beyond sick of the many adaptations that defy the thousand monkeys & thousand typewriters logic, and that somehow no one over decades has managed to adapt any of his stories (in films, strictly speaking) with success without fuckin things up, as in, completely destroy any attempt at atmosphere, deviate so much from the original story to the point it might as well be adapting another Lovecraft tale, AND making crap movies that are bad regardless of what author’s name they borrow.
Obviously, there is the innate difficulty of depicting cosmic horror in movies, where this type of fright has inescapibly a need to be visualized in clear, so adapting material that conceptually struggles outside of its original medium is already an up-hill battle in itself.
You don’t really have to “shoot yourself in the foot” by making the adaption SO barely interested in following the source material, but Dagon does this as well.
Look, i understand that some of the shorter stories might need changes to accomodate the bare minimum runtime expected out of a movie , but this isn’t the case, so of course fans will be fuckin angry that you make a movie based on Lovecraft’s eponymous story, Dagon, and then offer something that has barely anything to do with that story, and it’s more an adaptation of The Shadow Over Innsmouth with elements taken from “Dagon”.
Which i can kinda understand, since Dagon was later connected to the Lovecraft Mythos in regard of Innsmouth, its population and its damp secret, so yeah, it’s not really that much of a stretch.
Makes sense in that regard, and the plot here sees two couples on holiday near Galicia having their boat attack by a creature, which forces them to escape to the nearby creepy – and seemingly empty – town of “Imboca” (a literal translation of “Innsmouth”), where they discover the populace uses the old christian church to instead worship the deity known as Dagon, and the people themselves turned into fish-like humanoid creatures, bent on keeping the cult alive and sacrifices coming.
Problem is that the movie isn’t good, the script its plain dumb shit, the characters are laughable stereotypes, and the whole affair it’s B-movie schlockery through and through, which is made worse since everything else undermines some decently atmospheric cinematography, due to the inspired choice of shooting it in a little old town in Galicia, can’t deny the setting it’s proper and fittingly dank as heck, but this alone can’t make up for this graceless dumbass of a movie.
I wasn’t expecting them to set a Dagon adaptation in the same historic and geographical background as the original novella, i really wasn’t, but you known, an attempt at not making everything else more goofy and hockey would have fared better than whatever this was, because at times it almost seems to “get it” but then something incredibly dumb or convenient happens, so it never escapes being a hammy B-movie and nothing else. Not even a particularly fun one, mind you.
Characters feel even more out of place than intended, and in terms of scenes there are few notables one, the ritual at the end it’s enjoyable to look at (you gotta love fish people on fire), but the big one is definitely the face skinning of the crazy hobo while he’s still alive, which will also remind you there could be some good practical effects in these early 2000s horror movies… alongside some low budget ass CGI, including Dagon itself.
My lamentations aside, it’s not horrible, it’s not, there’s effort and the love of the source material shines through, but it all amounts to a camp, middle of the road low budget B-movie with some laughably bad characters, an awful script, one that it never just comes fully together in terms of creating a proper atmosphere, so it just feels more goofy and cliched than creepy, overall.
This with some random ass shit that comes out of nowhere, like the incest angle to the ending, where did that come from? I guess the same place the main character’s fiancee did, with her obsession of throwing everything into the fuckin sea, even if doing so literally bankrupted them in the very beginning of the movie (i’m not joking), how i’m supposed to care if the obviously creepy trout people want to sacrifice her to Dagon?
If you expected better you’ll be disappointed, but then again by this point you really would expect this kind of Lovecraft adaption to be the norm, especially from the era and even more in terms of stapling together story beats and plots from many of his stories to the point it’s moot using titles from the stories themselves. Just a random-ish mish mash without much wit or money behind it.
I’ll recommend reading the stories in the many collections, or give the amazing manga adaptions of Lovecraft by Gou Tanabe a read, THOSE alone prove it can be done right.
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