Rating: 
Summary: Fine Lovecraftian Flick!
Review: This is one of the finer low-budget horror films I've seen. In fact, I'd say Dagon ranks with the better hooror films of any budget category. Having seen Hollywood mess up far too many horror films that had potential, it seems we needed a small time independent to show the rest how a horror movie ought to be made. I give four stars rather than five because I think the film could have been improved with added production values. Still, considering the budget, it's really very good. Now if someone will please take on some of Lovecraft's other gems in similar fashion...
Rating: 
Summary: Carefully crafted gem
Review: I've been a Stuart Gordon fan since I saw Re-Animator in high school. While I still enjoyed some of his follow-up work (From Beyond and Bride of Re-Animator) I got the feeling he wasn't really trying. Not so with Dagon. This is a creepy, atmospheric masterpiece. They didn't spend a whole lot of dollars on the production, but every single one of them shows up on screen. I rented it on VHS last night, but I'm buying it on DVD today. (If nothing else, I need subtitles to find out what the hell that old spanish guy was saying.) Highly recommended.
Rating:
Summary: Spawn of the Green Abyss
Review: DAGON is based on H. P. Lovecraft's long Cthulhu Mythos novelette "The Shadow Over Innsmouth", although the title is borrowed from another Lovecraft tale. The borrowing is appropriate in this case, since Lovecraft incorporated the Esoteric Order of Dagon in his Innsmouth story as the curious local alternative to the Congregationalist and Unitarian denominations found in more conventional Massachusetts towns. The movie transposes Lovecraft's shunned and decaying coastal village to the shores of Spain, but the effect is much the same: a physical and cultural backwater, peopled by furtive, shambling figures who do not take kindly to the presence of outsiders. Which brings us to Paul and Barbara, an American couple vacationing on a yacht cruise just off an obscure hamlet named Imboca. . . . A sudden storm drives Paul and Barbara ashore, where they are soon separated. Paul spends most of the rest of the movie fighting against, or fleeing from, the grotesquely mutated inhabitants of Imboca. Decades before, the Imbocans sold themsleves to the power of Dagon in return for wealth and plenty, but as always, such deals with the Devil come with a grim price: in this case, the progressive physical degeneration of the townspeople. DAGON has good mood and atmosphere, and there are some nice pulpy touches, including a ritual sacrifice complete with a trembling nude female victim and a throng of loathsome fish-people chanting "Ia! Cthulhu fhtagn!" Also, the high priestess of Dagon rather resembles a young Barbara Steele. DAGON is not a direct, scene-by-scene recreation of "The Shadow Over Innsmouth", but I think it does a more than adequate job of conveying many of the key elements of Lovecraft's tale.
Rating:
Summary: We got to see it a week early!
Review: So this DVD doesn't have to many extra features but some of the pictures that they came up with will scare you. It isn't very sexy like the trailer says it is but it is a decent H. P. Lovecraft movie from one of his stories, if thats what you like.
Rating:
Summary: Fishing with Dagon, the Bait Real Pros Use
Review: What do you get when you mesh unblinking eyes, priests with webbed fingers and innkeepers with gilled throats, fishermen with a strange affinity for covering their faces, plenty of gold from the depths of the sea to go with the atypical "bounty from the deep," a few faces getting peeled off to teach someone a lesson, a bit of octopi legging to replace those pesky bipedal ones, and one ancient tentacled God? No, it isn't your local barnyard sock-hop taking place at some yokel fairground, its Stuart Gordon's latest creation, the Lovecraft inspired Dagon!
Unlike many of Gordon's earlier, more goofy approaches to the horrific, this Shadows Over Innsmouth/Dagon recount wore a dark overcoat that shrouded almost all of the production. The tale begins with Paul (Ezra Godden) and his girlfriend Barbara, accompanied by two friends, as they toast the success of their new company off the coast of Spain. Paul finds himself plagued by dreams of the foulest sort, ones dealing with an underwater monument bearing a strange insignia and a half-fish/half-humanoid woman, the type that end with him awakening (once again) in a pool of sweat and screams. Soon after our introduction, a storm, if you can call the suddenly conceived, quickly overwhelming beast darkening the sky and tossing their boat around like a bath toy "a storm," impales their boat upon a black reef that any Lovecraft fan will well appreciate. This, in turn, injures one of the boat's occupants and forces them to seek help in a decrepit fishing town called Imboca. As they approach the town in their cheaply construed rubber lifeboat their woes begin, with the sound of gunfire coming from the ship and something brushing against their raft and knocking a hole in it. Is this sign of something to come? Well, in a world where the beasts run rampant in the water, you bet it is. The two quickly find themselves in a town that first seems deserted, a place where the churches read "Esoterica Orde De Dagon" and the occupants, once they are finally found, seem to grow odder and odder by the minute. All these things come together and finally lead them toward secrets that no Bostonian before them ever really wanted to learn, the truth behind the worshippers of Dagon.
Touting nice effects in the monster category, some decent acting (Godden reminding me a lot of Jeffrey Combs, a great thing in my book), pieces of comedy to go with the more horrific, Deep One inspired portions of the movie, and some nice looking DVD quality, this is something to pick up and watch a few time. I highly recommend it for those who've always wanted augmentation by making deals with the oddities of underwater worship or for those simply wanting to stroll the beaches of human suffering as casual passerbys. It'll give you more reasons than the mere shark to stay away from the ocean.
Rating:
Summary: Fishy Fun
Review: I got lucky and saw this movie at the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin, a theater that playes cult movies, and this is definately an instant cult classic. The story is about four people who are shipwreked outside a small coastal town. What follows is in truly Lovecraftian. The movie is a little low budget, but makes up for it with creepines and wit. Overall, this movie will be an instant favorite among H.P. Lovecraft fanatics, but does have a few flaws. Most of the dialogue by older Spanish actor is unintelligable. The main character is not immediately likeable, but soon evolves into an Ash/Crawford character. The two friends in the boat could have been dealt with a little more grisly. Aside from these minor points, this is a fun movie with one of the greatest death scenes ever.
Rating:
Summary: Best Weird Horror film since Suspiria
Review: DAGON Thick, gray sheets of rain and images half-seen behind battered village shutters and doors, and behind: beauty and horror, alien and old and hysterical. Dagon is one of my favorite horror films, and I saw it first yesterday. Now in limited release and headed for DVD, the movie is a remarkably creative piece that accomplishes two seemingly at-odds mean cinematic feats: it successfully adapts HP Lovecraft, one of the last century's most unfilmable writers, and it does it with humor that enhances from the horror rather than detracts from it. It's hard to put good humor in horror-I was always one of the critics who was a little turned off by hamminess of films like Stuart Gordon's Re-animator or the out-and-out camp of farce like Toxic Avenger. But now Gordon himself has come back to his beloved HP Lovecraft with a much more mature style of cinematic humor reminiscent of the sad comedy of Evil Dead II. Example: there's a moment when our hero, Paul (Ezra Godden) tries to steal a car to get away from some strange creatures chasing him. After he manages to sneak into the car, he rips out the wires below the ignition to hotwire the car. This is the first movie I've ever seen that ends this sequence the way it logically should if Paul is anything like me. The movie opens with a boating accident, as two couples sailing on a boat off Spain hit a sudden storm and wreck on some high rocks. With one of the party injured, the young couple Paul and Barbara take a raft in the storm to the decrepit fishing village they see nearby. Stuart handles these early moments brilliantly-it's rare to see so clearly that moment when the characters cross a threshold into another world, as the atmosphere suddenly turns foggy and strange and the pair begin to search the deserted village for help. They find a strange, delapidated church, and a priest whose distant eyes would tell you or I not to trust him at all. Gordon plays the shouldn't these guys get the Hell out of this town motif well by keeping us aware that the heroes are trying to help their injured friends. By the time that duty is less compelling, it's too late. Dagon unfolds the details of its horror at a steady pace, in layers that make you cringe and laugh as the strange, aquatic creatures who inhabit the village appear. The monsters in Dagon are the villagers, who wear human clothing and more and haunt the village in some strange imitation of human life. The best humor of the story comes when we see these creatures trying desperately to act like people. Who are they? People, or their desdendants, whose souls and bodies are in the thrall of something very old. The village itself is a movie world created from whole cloth, flooded with rain and ominous, and just dripping with literacy of films that have gone before. Watch how Gordon passes along the other-worldly lessons of Argento's Suspiria with the corridors of the hotel Paul stays in, or even calls back to City of the Dead with its use of one of horror cinema's most sublime creepy triggers: barely seen figures in the distance, just in frame. Movies like City of the Dead and Let's Scare Jessica to Death, in fact, seem to have informed Gordon's work here: Dagon rests squarely in the camp of stories about protagonists who fall into other-worlds-right-around-the-corner. But it stays fresh not by keeping tongue in cheek, but by daring to find the hero's situation as funny as it is. Gordon has moved past camp and irony and into black comedy. Dagon is such an inventive, joyously creative horror film that critics are having a hard time figuring out what to make of it. Most of them have focused on assets and called them liabilities, unwilling to succumb to the film's spell. They don't like accents-much of the explanatory dialogue belongs to the person least equipped to deliver it, Spanish actor Francisco Rabal, whose accent is so thick you can only catch every third word. Personally, I think Gordon did this on purpose: we have to strain to understand the old man, which heightens our sense of panic. Nothing in the movie works the way other horror movies would have them, and that seems to disturb critics. Genre is supposed to be predictable while we leave creativity to art films. How inventive? So inventive that you'll probably be catching it on DVD instead of in a theater. But the touches add up: I love that Paul is a hero who behaves more or less like a normal guy-his fighting is clumsy, his panic realistic, and his tenacity inspiring. He sometimes does stupid things that come across as very, very believably stupid. Playing a key role in the film is Macarena Gomez, whose face alone is a special effect-with a fragile, sharp, wide jaw and huge, liquid eyes, Gomez appears barely mortal, as if she's sidestepped into our dimension. She's a magnificent discovery and the part she plays would crush beneath anyone else. Dagon closes in on you and gets stranger and stranger, and ends in a place as different from the tranquil sailing vessel and the drizzling village as any place can be: an entry to the realm of HP Lovecraft's Deep Ones. Stuart Gordon's work has matured and given us a classic horror film that fans of the genre simply cannot ignore.
Rating: 
Summary: Nice modest-budget take on Lovecraft
Review: I just saw a theatrical screening of this little opus (thanks to a local theatre; this is the kind of nifty little horror movie that no Hollywood studio would have a clue what to do with) and thought it was among Gordon's better films. Gordon's first two Lovecraft movies are more pastiches of HPL than actual adaptations. Re-Animator and From Beyond are horror camp classics but bear little resemblance to their original stories. Gordon's next HPL effort, Castle Freak, was, I thought, a failure; an attempt to adapt "The Outsider," it seemed as if Gordon wasn't nearly as confident trying to do Lovecraft seriously as he was doing spoofs. But Dagon is much more successful as serious HPL. Adapted from two stories, "Dagon" and "The Shadow Over Innsmouth," Dagon was shot in Spain on a $3 million budget, and Gordon got some good bang for his buck over there. The production design is suitably dark and creepy, and this is the first HPL movie that really communicates Lovecraft's terrified obsession with the ocean, which he turned into the realm of the Deep Ones. The script details the ordeal of two couples whose boat runs aground on some rocks near a remote Spanish seacoast town (Gordon's decision to stick with the Spanish location and not try to fake New England works surprisingly well); rowing into town for help, they are almost immediately set upon by the grotesque, shambling locals, all of whom are worshippers of the sea god Dagon and are afflcited with the curse of the Deep Ones. Gore-hounds will appreciate the face-skinning scene. The movies flaws include a weak American leading actor whose high-pitched whiny voice doesn't exactly lend authority when he brandishes a knife and shouts "Come on, m--f--!" It seems as if Gordon was looking for a guy with a Jeffrey Combs quality and just got an annoying little mouse. Some of the Spanish actors stumble over their accents as well. And while the effects are generally fine for the budget, a couple of key CGI shots look bogus. Still, this movie is entertaining to watch on its own modest terms, and ought to provide inspiration to up-and-coming filmmakers on what can be done on little money (even if you have to go to Europe to raise it). As for the DVD, I don't know yet whether or not it will be widescreen (as it says here) or full-frame (as it says at [another DVD store]). I saw it projected at roughly 1.78:1 and I hope the DVD retains that aspect ratio for 16:9 monitors.
Rating:
Summary: not bad, but could have been better
Review: there's a lot to like about this movie, not least of all the unabashed use of CGI and rubber tentacle appendages. all things considered, the special effects were pretty good, and the set itself looked great. the creepy-assed town was perfect, the monsters were loathesomely believable, and the acting is not half as bad as the sanctimonious amazon.com reviewers would have you believe. and while i'm at it, my other amazonian metacriticism would be as follows: he who waxes petulant about plot holes reveals his lack of geek cred, for a passing familiarity with Lovecraft's mythos pretty much caulks up those story cracks that seem to have bothered you so much. but at the end of the movie, i simply couldn't forgive Paul and Barbara for not running. these are FISH PEOPLE, for heaven's sake--they can barely hobble about on land, and they aren't exactly the sharpest cookies in the cupboard. the "holding cells" into which the captives are herded could be kicked down by a small contingent of special-ed kindergarteners, and much time is wasted trying to salvage a suicidally insane (and possibly pregnant with slimy demon spawn) compatriot who is clearly, hopelessly, chronically DOOMED. leave her ass, for crying out loud! she's got a knife and she's going to use it on herself! you can't stop her, you barely know her, and you don't particularly like her ... so use her as a distraction! now make like a missionary and get the devil out of there! cripes. okay, fine. stay there and make whimpery, floppy-lip faces. you get no sympathy from ME. eventually i just got bored of screaming, "FLY, YOU FOOLS!" and i wanted everyone to hurry up and get sacrificed to death and be done with it. the ending (for those of you who have seen the movie and have been waiting for me to bring this up) is perfectly weird--but not altogether out of left field if you're a Lovecraft reader. i don't know. it's not how i would have concluded the tale, but heck, i'd more or less lost interest in what happened to the protagonists by the time the weirdness came around, so i can't say it bothered me any.
Rating:
Summary: Another Gordon-Lovecraft match made in Hell
Review: Re-Animator director Stuart Gordon helms this low budget H.P. Lovecraft adaptation which can be caught on one of the Sci-Fi Channel's many schlock fest marathons on the weekends. Dagon finds a group of shipwrecked people dealing with monsters, and that's pretty much it for the story. Gordon makes no bones about Dagon being a glorified B-rated horror romp that carries the spirit of H.P. Lovecraft's source material. The makeup and gore effects are about what you'd expect, and the CGI looks, well, you can probably guess. Dagon isn't a bad film at all, but it will depend on how much of a horror fan or Lovecraft afficiando you are to fully appreciate it.
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