Dagon

 In many ways this is as close as anyone’s ever come to producing a feature-length movie that’s really, genuinely based on a short story by H.P. Lovecraft. Of course the story in question is “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” rather than “Dagon,” and there are still a fair number of liberties taken with the tale. As usual with Stuart Gordon productions, the plot’s pretty hard on the female characters. That notwithstanding, it does my heart good to see someone (even Gordon) make a serious attempt to adapt Lovecraft for the screen. Some of it even manages to border on genuinely unsettling (particularly the noises made by the zombie-fish-esque townspeople, not to mention the skinning-alive sequence). Worth seeing

Genre: Horror

Subgenre: Lovecraft

Date reviewed: 8/8/2002