DAGON (2001) Stuart Gordon returns at last! Once, long ago, there was this guy named Stuart Gordon. If you can't immediately place the name, don't feel bad - his last movie was in 1644. Gordon made cool Lovecraft adaptations, like Re-Animator and From Beyond. Then he was sucked into a vortex from beyond the cosmos and did not resurface, until now. Dagon is another Lovecraft adaptation, presumably a pretty loose one (from both "Dagon" and "The Shadow Over Innsmuth", I understand...Iread them long ago, and don't remember much). It's not in the league of his previous films (360 years of filmmaking atrophy will do that to you), but it's not a bad start if he wants to start honing his craft again. If you can ignore all those "With the participation of..."'s in the opening credits, Dagon opens with an awesome sequence where a scuba diver discovers a great chasm beneath the waves...and not just any run-of-the-mill oceanic abyss, but one that is vast, circular, tiled, and obviously manmade, or something-made. It sets up that great gothic larger-than-time Lovecraft atmosphere, which gets pulled down to earth a little too soon with its nerdy hero and occasionally silly humor (always a trademark of Gordon's past Lovecraft adaptations, but previous ones never approached this movie's sense of soul-shrinking grandeur and I don't like seeing such possibilities deflated). The plot is typical Lovecraft - people happen upon a fishing village where everybody is weird beyond weirdness, and they wish they'd stayed home, especially when the hotel gives them the nastiest, filthiest room they have. In this case, these people are Paul and his girlfriend (Ezra Godden and Raquel Merono), his business partner, and that guy's girlfriend, or wife, or mistress. His squeeze. That's a lot of people crammed onto this boat, but it's not the other couple that makes things suck for Paul, it's the girlfriend who's a pain in the ass, throwing his computer into the sea in a moment of petulance. She's cute, but it's easy to see why he's tempted by tentacle-girl later on. Yes, tentacle-girl - the village has a lovely young lady who's like a mermaid, but more disgusting. Actually mermaids are pretty disgusting in the first place, but this one really hammers the point home for the die-hard romantics who think of them as half-woman instead of half-seafood. Small coastal towns that worship sea-gods don't like visitors, as is demonstrated in one scene where Paul and a VERY unlucky villager are captured. This requires use of some animatronic gore effects which aren't very realistic, but are convincingly gruesome, Paul's terror palpable as he has to watch the terrible fate planned for him. One is reminded of that poor bastard from last year who got eaten by a bear while his wife watched...before getting eaten by the bear. Other scenes can't quite ratchet up that kind of suspense, like a particularly ridiculous one which involves a rush to install a flimsy door bolt that wouldn't keep out anybody. I can't totally get behind Dagon - too much dream-sequence nonsense, unsubtle foreshadowing, that kind of thing - though moreso than most movies about which I'm ambivalent, I can easily see myself revisiting this in the future. And it's an easy bet that anyone tired of the teen-oriented stuff that gluts video shelves these days will find this a hell of a lot more fresh. BACK TO THE D's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE