Since I enjoyed From Beyond, here’s another Stuart Gordon / Brian Yuzna / HP Lovecraft movie, Dagon (pronounced “DAY-gun”) which was released straight to video in the U.S., for some shameful reason.

Whole new cast and crew for this one, which was set/filmed in Spain. Sadly no Jeffrey Combs, just a nerdy Ezra Godden (who later starred in Gordon’s first Masters of Horror entry) and a lot of Spanish actors, including Francisco Rabal: the film director in Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down… the voice of Luis Bunuel in 100 Nights of Simon Cinema… a hit-man in Sorcerer… the guy monica vitti dumps at the start of L’Eclisse… the guy Viridiana ends up with… somebody (dom morel) in The Nun… Father Nazarin… and in his final role, a drunken old man, the only human survivor in a small Spanish town overtaken by the cult of DAGON.

More serious and faithfully Lovecraftian than From Beyond. Some unfortunate-looking digital effect shots of the boat, but all the makeup effects and sets are very good. It’s not exactly a tense, rapid-fire battle of wits and strength, but rather semi-competent Ezra (channeling Harold Lloyd) versus an army of slow-moving dull-witted fish creatures.

Oh yeah, so Ezra is sailing off the Spanish coast with his girl and another couple when a storm hits. He and the girl raft to a deserted town for help. Ezra returns to the boat to find his friends gone (he later turns up skinned to death, she turns up minus one leg and raped by fish-creatures), then returns to land to find his girlfriend gone. He hides at the hotel until the cult comes calling, hilariously escapes using his limited physical abilities and a pocketknife, then crashes with Francisco Rabal who fills him in on some back-story about the townsfolk’s demon-worshipping and eventual devolution into fish-beasties.

Ezra, of course, turns out to be the son of the high priest in this town, and his half-sister is the gorgeous mermaid he’s been dreaming of, who wants him to stay with her and have dirty incestual hot mermaid sex (which may actually be possible, since her legs are just sorta tentacles, it’s not the full-on fish fin). He fights this idea at first and tries to rescue his girl from being sacrificed. When his girl is raped by and then eaten by Dagon, Ezra is given another chance, but opts to set himself on fire instead. Fortunately (for those of us perverse enough to have hoped for such a thing), he’s extinguished and goes on to live eternally underwater with the half-human half-sister in the kingdom of DAGON.

Ezra (left) with girlfriend and evil priest:
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High priestess:
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Francisco Rabal, a fine actor whose final scene in his final film had his face getting graphically ripped off by the evil priest:
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Mermaid love:
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Dagon (left):
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From Beyond fits in nicely with other 80’s horrors featuring characters who explore the outer limits of bodily experience, like Brain Damage (1988), Hellraiser (1987), Society (1989) and Teen Wolf Too (1987). Maybe it was a topic on everyone’s mind, or maybe they were just getting around to ripping off David Cronenberg. This one has an S&M-tinged sex theme to its body horror (as opposed to the blatantly S&M-drenched sex theme in Hellraiser or the hallucinogenic drug theme to Brain Damage). Movie never takes itself seriously, dialogue and character behavior a bit on the stupid side, still totally worth seeing.

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Movie stars everyone’s favorite lunatic Jeffrey Combs as a research assistant to weirdo Dr. Pretorius in a big spooky house. They succeed in their attempts to create a crazy machine that magnetically taps into the pineal gland, psychically revealing a new dimension of reality where swimming, bitey eel creatures and larger, darker things lurk. One of these things bite Pretorius’s head off, and Combs is committed to an ethically unsound institution by some questionable cops. He is released into the care of an even more ethically unsound psychiatrist, Dr. Katherine (the hot girl from Re-Animator), and taken along with somewhat-competent cop Ken Foree (from Dawn of the Dead!) back to the old house to reignite the experiments for no clear reason. They just hang out doing experiments until Pretorius reemerges all messed up from the alternate dimension and starts to gain control over everything. Oh, also our heroes’ newly-awakened pineal glands make ’em want to have kinky lite-S&M sex with each other.

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The horror and monsters escalate towards the end, there’s a sidetrack visit back to the hospital (where our psychiatrist is just rescued from shock therapy), Ken finally dies (eaten by a million black insects), and Jeffrey and Pretorius destroy each other in the end. Final shot is pretty great, Dr. Katherine going mad, just like Jeffrey apparently did at the end of the opening sequence.

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Gordon and producer Brian Yuzna have built their careers on filming HP Lovecraft stories… you could certainly find worse things to do with your time. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that this screenplay isn’t very close to the source material, especially the funny/campy parts.

Wikipedia: “The pineal gland is occasionally associated with the sixth chakra (also called Ajna or the third eye chakra in yoga) or sometimes the Seventh (Crown) chakra. It is believed by some to be a dormant organ that can be awakened to enable telepathic communication.”

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Edmond doesn’t love his wife anymore, maybe never has, so he leaves her, just walks out into the night. Goes to a pawn shop, gets himself a nice knife. Walks around getting increasingly frustrated, looking for a woman, but when he finally gets one alone he slices her up. Ends up caught for the crime, in jail.

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William H. Macy is Edmond, and it’s a David Mamet script, so of course Macy’s got those stilted speech patterns down as only he can. George Wendt runs the pawn shop, Joe Mantegna probably begged for a cameo, Julia Stiles is the hot girl who gets sliced, and good to see Jeffrey Combs in a non-lunatic role as a faggy desk clerk. That’s Mamet vet Jack Wallace as the priest. Feels great to see a “respectable” Stuart Gordon movie… the guy needs more recognition as expert auteur of slimy and disturbing entertainment.

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Edmond is a complicated guy, alternating between meek + wormy and enraged + righteous while on the streets, then unremorseful on his way to prison. He’s almost a hero for how purely he unleashed his thoughts and desires, if only he weren’t so full of hate, misogyny, homophobia and racism. Edmond finds peace at the end, some huge black guy’s bitch, becoming everything he has feared and learning (having) to live with it. Maybe that’s what brings him peace, it’s not confronting his fears but having no choice in the matter, having no free will to worry about anymore. After all, the choices he made when he had choices to make turned out badly. Anyway, pretty great movie, short and shocking.

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A novel plot (and supposedly based on a Lovecraft story, so no wonder). Ezra Godden (of Stuart Gordon’s Dagon) is a poor physics student who rents a room in a very crappy boarding house. After some fun about studying the angles of his walls, a hot nude witch appears with her rat-creature pet to take over his mind and make him do weird things like sleepwalk to the university library and kill his next door neighbor’s baby. After he’s arrested for the baby-killing, the cops find the remains of all the other babies that past residents of the room have killed, and the rat-creature sneaks into prison to bite our hero to death. Oh and the crazy old man downstairs kills himself.

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A lot better than the plot description sounds. Ezra is pretty convincing and the weirdness and atmosphere and pacing are all well held.

MOH trademarks: naked women, eye gouging (the witch’s eyes / ezra’s fingers), and our hero looks like Edward Norton most of the time (and Ben Affleck the other times).

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Katy didn’t watch this one. Katy wouldn’t have liked it.