…and I’m not afraid to say so – AGAIN – even though the last time I used that line, it provoked snickering from some immature types who apparently didn’t understand that the operative word in that sentence isn’t “lady”, it’s “snake” Hmmph!
Anyway…
In which some stalwart Brits set out to prove they can make a film as bad and stupid as anything produced in Hollywood, and succeed.
In a small village in the north of England, at the turn of the last century, a mad scientist injects his wife with cobra-venom, in order to treat her mental illness. Unfortunately, besides being insane, she is also pregnant. The child, a girl, is born with cold blood and strange, staring eyes. She survives an attack upon her father’s house by a torch-carrying mob, and almost twenty years later, a wave of deaths from snakebite strikes the residents of the village…
Then Scotland Yard feels compelled to investigate. Interfering bastards!
(In other news, I have also re-formatted Cobra Woman, and re-formatted and added screenshots to Cult Of The Cobra. Ohhh, yeah!)
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If my review of The Dunwich Horror proved anything, it was that neither H.P. Lovecraft or the gothic horror films of American International Pictures are areas in which I am particularly expert. It’s for that reason that, when word came down that October was going to be yet another month O’ Lovecraft here at Teleport City, I eschewed making the obvious choice of tackling Dunwich director Daniel Haller’s earlier Die, Monster, Die! I just didn’t think I had that much more to add to what I’d already said on the subject.
One of the many things that makes Lovecraft interesting, at least for me, is the discussion of why his writing work, if it does work for you (and despite my jokes about gambrel rooftops and fishmen, it does work for me most of the time). Everyone has their own reasons. Some can be agreed upon by the larger body of Lovecraft fans. Others are acutely personal. My example has always been my tendency to go backpacking in the wilds of New England, seeing firsthand how, even in our modern, developed world, civilization can vanish abruptly, leaving you surrounded by nothing but the night and woods. Even in those small states, the amount of land that gives way to untamed solitude is vast, and when you walk into the middle of it with nothing but boil-in-bag stroganoff and a headlamp to fend off the grip of the wilderness, it becomes a lot easier to believe Lovecraft’s tales of ancient things lurking in the mountains and foothills. You look up and realize how tiny you are. You look around an realize how vulnerable you are. Wolves, bears, and rutting moose are bad enough. I guess if I had to also deal with chattering crab monsters from space, I’d find them a lot scarier than I might have while sitting at home with a dram of Glenmorangie, reading The Whisperer in the Darkness. Because as has been pointed out to me in discussion, it’s not so much the monster as it is the isolation.
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.
I discovered two things about 