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Dagon
Background Information: Dagon With Dagon, director Stuart Gordon returns once more to author HP Lovecraft, this time for an adaptation of the novella The Shadow Over Innsmouth, with the setting switched from the coast of New England to the creepy Spanish fishing village of Inboca. After a sudden storm & a yacht-wreck, a bespectacled & bewildered Paul Marsh finds himself stranded in the literally fishy town, which has thrown over Catholicism to devote itself to the worship of the Philistine sea-god Dagon. His influence means that the inhabitants are transforming into pop-eyed, tentacled & gilled creatures. Though Gooden perhaps strikes too strident a note to convince as an everyday guy, director Gordon orchestrates the rising terrors well. These range from a supremely damp & uncomfortable hotel room through an impressive flashback about the rise of the Esoteric Order of Dagon to some sinister business with a mad-eyed mermaid , human sacrifice & nasty surprises all round. Unfortunately, Gordon still cant quite distinguish between acceptably gruesome & downright nasty, especially when it comes to disposing of secondary female characters. On the plus side, Dagon boasts an excellent score, which even tries to set to music some of Lovecrafts invented language . Biography: Francisco Rabal Francisco Rabal was born in Águilas, a small town in Murcia. In 1936, the Spanish Civil War broke out. Rabal & his family left Murcia & moved to Madrid. Young Francisco had to work as a street salesboy & in a chocolate factory. When he was 13 years old, he left school to work as an electrician at Estudios Chamartín. Rabal got some sporadic jobs as an extra. Dámaso Alonso & other people advised him to try his luck with a career in theater. During the following years, he got some roles in theater companies such as Lope de Vega or María Guerrero. It was there that he met Asunción Balaguer; they married & remained together for life. Their daughter, Teresa Rabal, is also an actor. In 1947, Rabal got some regular jobs in theater. He used his full name, Francisco Rabal, as stage name ; however, the people who knew him always called him Paco Rabal. Paco Rabal became his unofficial stage name. During the late 1940s, Rabal began acting in movies as an extra, but it was not until 1950 that he got some speaking roles in cinema.
Editors Choice: Dagon, View DVDology
// Stuart Gordon in Chicago, Illinois is a director, writer & producer of films. Most of Gordons film work is in the horror genre, though he has also ventured into science fiction. Like his friend & fellow filmmaker Brian Yuzna, Gordon is a big fan of H,P. Lovecraft & has adapted several Lovecraft stories for the screen. Gordon attended the University of Wisconsin. In 1968, he produced a version of Peter Pan that got him & his wife arrested for obsenity. I had been protesting against the war in Viet Nam & got tear-gassed by the Chicago police & it suddenly struck me that you could take Peter Pan & turn it into a political cartoon about the whole situation. So, Peter Pan became the leader of the hippies & yippies, Captain Hook became Mayor Daley & the pirates became the Chicago police. We left all of the James Barrie dialogue intact, so when they all went off to Neverland they sprinkled pixie dust on themselves & think lovely thoughts & up they go. That was an acid trip, which was visualized by a psychedelic light show that was projected onto the bodies of seven naked young ladies.
Editors Choice: Dagon, King Of The Ants, Space Truckers, Fortress, Daughter Of Darkness, Pit And The Pendulum, The Pit And The Pendulum, View DVDology
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