DAGON
Kicking off a whole month of Lovecraft adaptations is the film that reunites the producer, director, and screenwriter of Re-Animator. Much of Dagon’s running time is comprised of Paul’s desperate flight through the seemingly inescapable labyrinth of the crumbling village, mobs of bug-eyed, tentacled creatures always close behind. Most of this sticks pretty close to The Shadow Over Innsmouth. While it changes the motivation for arriving in the decrepit old village (a ship wreck instead of general curiosity) and the location of the village (somewhere along the coast of Spain instead of somewhere along the coast of New England), and adds a girlfriend into the mix, once arrived in town the action is more or less the same. Particularly well executed is Paul’s ordeal in his own room at the inn, where first he is mere disgusted by the squalid nature of the abode then becomes terrified once he realizes the hall is crowded with things that want his blood. Although the comedy in Dagon is not as pronounced as it was in Re-Animator, it’s still present and evident in scenes like this. Paul, realizing that there is no lock on his room door, desperately scrambles to remove a tiny deadbolt from the bathroom door and screw it into the main door. That the lock is so tiny it could hardly stop a child from knocking in the door never seems to cross his mind. He also spends most of the movie doing his best to look threatening to his pursuers while brandishing a small pocketknife the likes of which are often given away as novelty items at conventions.