Stuart Gordon’s new Dagon comes out for sale in the US April 23rd, 2002.
Luckily through some finagling (read: pact with Satan) and an unpleasant run in
with South American smugglers, I’ve got in my greasy hand.. The New Dagon
DVD. Without further ado, here is my general over all feel.
First off, I ordered my copy from Brazil from a company called CDBrazil.
I am not linking to them, as they are a very poor company to deal with, I do not
recommend them to anyone. If you absolutely have to have the DVD before
anyone else because you’re a petty shallow little man like I am, check out
DVDBrazil, I’ve heard good things about them. My experience with CDBrazil
rivaled
Mel Gibson’s experience with Gary Sinise from a popular 1996 movie called
Ransom. Only much less pleasant.
But enough of my hatred for Brazilian smugglers, on with the film;
The film did have some rather nice special effects for a low budget piece,
and the plot was unfortunately thin as one would expect from a B movie.
Watching it as a B movie, however, its quite fun and even has a few frontal
nudity shots. As far as sticking to Lovecraft, it does fall short.
What Dagon is, is a fun little film, that I will probably watch again and
again and force upon all of my friends. The basic premise is a young
business mogul and his impossibly beautiful girlfriend (not that she was that
pretty, a girl like that would just never date HIM in real life) take a cruise
of the coast off Spain with some investors. Turns out he was originally
from Spain but his mother escaped for America when he was very young.
Since then he’s been plagued by mermaid nightmares.
Well, of course the ship crashes, they go ashore and hijinks ensue. Everyone starts acting weird and no one has a standard Deep
One mutation.. instead they vary, from webbed fingers to tentacled arms. A
few of them looked more like they where devolving to the thing from Deep Rising
then an actual Deep One.. and they all walked like zombies, I couldn’t get over
that. I could see them hopping per chance, but most of them where
crippled. I thought I was watching
Bleeders for a second there.
The main character, perpetually clad in a Miskatonic letterman sweatshirt
(orange and black, not purple and white), runs all over town discovering its
mysteries and even talking to a drunken fisherman who tells him of the town’s
blasphemous past. As many of you are realizing, this is far more Shadow
over Innsmouth than Dagon. In the town, he meets the mermaid (not a
true mermaid, she’s got tentacles for legs) from his dreams and is inexplicably
seduced by her (read: frontal nudity shot #1). She later turns out to be a
high priest of Dagon and has plans on offering up his girlfriend as breeding
stock (read: frontal nudity shot #2). Of course at the end, he realizes
his fishy heritage and returns to his ancestors under the sea.
All in all, it wasn’t a bad flick and was worth its place in my film library.
I heartedly recommend it to others who collect Lovecraftian cinema. Just
don’t buy it from unscrupulous Brazilian smugglers.
