2001, United States. Starring Ezra Godden, Francisco Rabal, Raquel Merono, Macarena Gomez, Brendan Price, Birgit Bofarull, Uxia Blanco, Ferran Lahoz, Joan Minguell, Alfredo Villa. Written by Dennis Paoli. Directed by Stuart Gordon.

Generally speaking, Lovecraft hasn't been adapted to film very well. Most films based on his stories--rife with dense prose, antiquarian ramblings, and a strange combination of subtlety and the absolute antithesis of subtlety--fall short. In truth, they tend to suck. Whether it's in film or in literature, many people who attempt to do something "Lovecraftian" take something iconic like, say, a plasmodic squid-headed demigod/priest, and run with it, having little regard for the sense of untold aeons, strange conspiracies, bizarre alternative histories, and cosmic and extradimensional musings which actually ever coaxed anyone into taking the squid demigod halfway seriously to begin with. Or they'll pull a Daniel Haller and have some curly-haired guy stand in front of the camera with his fists against his ears and his thumbs pointed straight out from his skull reciting "Yog-Sothoth! Yog-Sothoth! YOG-SOTHOTH!"

...which, to be fair, does at least suggest insanity on someone's part.

It's even worse if you hear "Lovecraftian" or "inspired by H.P. Lovecraft," because nine times out of ten it's just generic horror crap loaded with all of the cliches that are less reminiscent of Lovecraft than, well, other generic horror crap. Sometimes they'll even conflate Lovecraft's strange interstellar "demons" with Satan and Christian demons, and although I'm sure there's a talent great enough to pull that together brilliantly instead of just looking like they understand neither cosmology, that person has never attempted it. Well, unless we want to count Jaume Balaguero's Darkness, which is Lovecraftian in spirit but (thankfully) not unnecessarily so in content.

Stuart Gordon is generally credited with the best Lovecraft adaptations out there. He's generally famous for his Lovecraft and Poe adaptations, though he also directed a few original horror films and contributed, oddly enough, to Honey I Shrunk the Kids. His adaptation of Re-Animator is a very enjoyable movie based off of one of Lovecraft's weaker stories, and I do remember liking Castle Freak years ago when I saw it, though his From Beyond--again, one of Lovecraft's weaker stories--is... not good.

Part of why he chose some of the less-impressive stories by Lovecraft, I'm sure, is that bringing them to the screen could be realized with less of a budget-based compromise of the original vision. Working with a budget about five times larger than he did with Re-Animator, and presumably trying to return to his success in the Lovecraftian field after some time away from it, Gordon created a script which is sort of a pastiche of several Lovecraft stories, including "Dagon," "The Shadow Over Innsmouth," and possibly "The Horror of Red Hook" and others.

Paul Marsh and his wife/fiancee/girlfriend Barbara are in a boat off the coast of Spain. We gather that somehow, Paul got rich by playing the stock market; but Barbara's tired of him never leaving his laptop because he neurotically wants to keep checking stock prices, so she takes it and throws it overboard. Then we see that there's a sunbathing older couple on deck who make wry, rich-person-sounding comments in wry, rich-person-sounding accents.

Why do so many horror movies always seem to be filled with people who are completely, or at least generally, unlikable?

When the boat crashes in a storm, Paul and Barbara go ashore to find out that the villagers are weird, pale freaks who all congregate in the town's bizarre church. When the priest promises to help them, they find that he has webbed fingers. Then the same priest convinces them to split up on the lame pretense that "someone has to stay to report to the police"... Whatever. Paul leaves to find out that his friends have disappeared and left blood behind, and then returns to find out what Barbara has already discovered--these freaks are dangerous and weird fanatics.

What follows is familiar to anyone who's familiar with Lovecraft's writing. Admirably, Gordon even stays true to Lovecraft's xenophobia without himself being xenophobic--the film is shot in both English and Gallego, a Portuguese-like language spoken only in the northwest corner of Spain. The villagers, who were once peaceful fishermen, are corrupted by a man who's a stranger in his own right, and so although their language is a baffling concoction similar to, yet not identical with, Spanish and Portuguese, the people are treated as both humble and exotic, regular joes and yet also bizarre creatures which are not quite human. In fact, since it appears that Dagon premiered in Spain, the Galician language was chosen intelligently, as it is quite possible (though my Spanish and knowledge of Spain isn't good enough to say this with any certainty) that the dialogue stands on that unnerving edge that separates the familiar from the incomprehensible for the Spanish-speaker. Certainly, at least, that's how it was for marginally-Spanish-comprehending me--I'd constantly find myself thinking, "I almost understood that... but what the hell did he say?"

The film is also pleasingly reminiscent of the video game Resident Evil 4, in which homocidal Spanish peasants chase down the protagonist with farm implements and occasionally rifles and other more lethal weapons (but then, anything that might remind one of such things tends to be pleasing, really). Beyond that, there's something genuinely creepy about the weird, winding streets and "queer houses" of Imboca ("boca" means "mouth" in Spanish, mirroring Lovecraft's invented New England town of Innsmouth), and some of the CGI creations are conceptually Lovecraftian and visually interesting, even if the CGI itself suffers from feeling unnatural in the wrong sorts of ways for even a Lovecraftian venture.

I won't tell you that the film is perfect. It's not. I hated most of the characters, and I thought the action scenes were sometimes energetic in all the wrong ways--i.e. sort of less like what I'd be doing if I felt like my life were endangered, and more like what the Three Stooges might do. Overall, I couldn't call Dagon a good film.

But the point is, it's a generally fun time and well worth watching, as long as you're not bothering yourself with identifying with characters. I can't call Gordon the best director of all time, but he deserves his title as the best director of Lovecraftian movies.

Labels: Director: Stuart Gordon, Horror: Creepy Cults, Horror: HP Lovecraft, Year: 2001