Paul (Ezra Godden) is on a roll, having gotten Howard and Vicki to invest in his big stock market scheme, and it was a massive success that has made him, the investors, and his girlfriend Barbara very rich. They’re celebrating on Howard’s yacht off the coast of Spain, but Paul isn’t too into it, he keeps having these weird dreams about being underwater looking at strange symbols and being attacked by a mermaid with nice boobies, and he has terrible stomach cramps. Barbara’s demands that he lighten up fall to the wayside however when they see an odd, run-down coastal village. Mysterious, ethereal singing fills the air and a huge storm suddenly tears across the bright blue sky, a wind picks up and the small yacht is battered with torrential rain. The vessel proves to be no match for the great waves that the storm has created, and it is driven into a nearby reef. Vicki is trapped by a hull breech and cannot be freed, so Paul and Barbara head out in a dinghy towards the village on the coast to look for help. The village is a seriously run down affair, decrepit houses line the narrow roads, and there’s no evidence anybody is there. Paul and Barbara head through the village looking for help, and they end up at the church. The church is unconventional in that there are no crosses or standard Christian representations, there are a bunch of strange symbols instead, the central one being right out of Paul’s dream. He doesn’t have time to think about that now though, and luckily for them the church’s priest appears - a pasty-faced Udo Kier-ish guy, whom heads back down to the dock with them. He convinces the creepy owners of a small fishing trawler to go into the storm to rescue Howard and Vicky, Paul goes while the priest tells Barbara she’ll need to stay to talk to the police.

The priest points Barbara to the hotel with a webbed hand and tells her they have a phone. Barbara goes to the run down hotel to find a phone, and encounters a very odd and unresponsive desk clerk, who gets violent when she tries to use the phone, and both he and the priest subdue her. Meanwhile Paul finds the yacht empty, and goes to the hotel on instruction of the webbed priest. Waiting in a sordid hotel room, Paul manages to fit in another dream about the mermaid before being alerted by noise outside. He looks out of the window to see a number of the inhabitants of the village staggering about outside, walking as if their legs are barely able to hold them anymore. One of them looks up and sees Paul at the window and exclaims in a strange, inhuman voice to the others and they go crazy, squealing at the sight of him and streaming towards the hotel. In a panic Paul attempts to keep them out, but when there are too many for him to keep at bay, he instead leaps through the window and crashes into a storage room below. In there he finds the skins of pigs and more alarmingly, human beings including his poor benefactor Howard. Once again besieged by the village’s bizarre inhabitants Paul resorts to starting a fire amongst the hanging skin, and in the villager’s panic to save their trophies, he manages to slip away. Running down a side street he runs headlong into another person, they both cry out in fear before Paul drags the haggard old man out of plain view.

The old man is Ezequiel (Francisco Rabal), the last normal (well, relatively normal) inhabitant of this fishing village, Imboca. It seems many years previous, in the first couple of decades of the 20th century, the whole area was suffering from a lack of fish, and as you can imagine that’s not a good situation for a fishing village. The village prayed to God to send them fish but to no avail, until one day a sailor came and told the villagers of Dagon, the ancient god of the sea. He told them that Dagon would bring them fish, and that they should worship him instead of their Christian God, who had done nothing to help them. The sailor and some of his followers conducted a ceremony to summon Dagon, and things changed soon after. Suddenly Imboca is running over with fish, and amongst the fish comes gold too, in the form of oddly shaped jewellery and trinkets. As the village starts to flourish again, the sailor who started it all destroyed the Christian symbols of the church and killed the priest, and filled it instead with the symbols of Dagon. Ezequiel’s parents were sceptical and refused to be part of the worship rituals, it would cost them their lives as Ezequiel (a small boy at the time) witnessed his father’s throat cut in front of him, and his mother dragged off to be an offering to Dagon. Ezequiel was allowed to live, and spent his life as a drunken vagrant, left alone by the Dagon followers presumably because he was of no use to them. Ezequiel also says he saw both Vicky and Barbara killed and so Paul resolves to get out of there by any means necessary. The only car is owned by the head of the village, a descendant of the man who brought Dagon to Imboca, so Paul attempts to steal it from outside the head’s manor. He is discovered however and breaks into the manner in order to hide from his pursuers, but instead encounters someone else, the girl from his dreams.....

I’m not going to make any comparisons between this and the cult classic Lovecraft adaption that came before this from this same duo, this is a fine little film that does not deserve to have any previous Gordon/Yuzna productions hanging over it. Gordon has directed a neat adaptation of Lovecraft’s ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’, staying quite close to the original story, and creating a nice chilling atmosphere. From around ten minutes into the film until the last fifteen or so, the sound of rain is a constant and the storm never stops, always soaking the cast and creating a great ambient atmospheric noise that negates much of the need for a musical score. This gives the film a pretty unique feel, the rain always falling and lots of well timed blasts of thunder and lightening, its really very simple but very cool, the musical score is kept mainly for the dream sequences and the films climax. The town they used to depict Imboca looks great too, using mostly real places there really is a feel that something isn’t quite right, and that while the world around it had developed, this is regressed if anything, looking like its inhabitants had little use for it anymore. The flashback sequence were Ezequiel describes what happened to Imboca stands out because it shows the town in very warm colours, which contrasts strongly with the greys and blues of the rest of the film. The make-up effects and the way the voices of the sorta zombie-like Imbocan inhabitants have been digitally altered was also very effective, a favourite scene of mine being when they’re storming towards his hotel room, if you have a stereo set-up turn it up good and loud and listen as the garbled voices get louder and louder, its fantastic!

Ezra Godden stands out as Paul, giving a performance that in concept reminds me of Ash from The Evil Dead – the development of his character from an ineffectual wimp into a far stronger character because of the situation he’s forced into. Ezra plays the role well, giving a good representation of a nerd who finds himself flung into a situation where he really has to harden up or he’s not going to survive. Francisco Rabal is very good of Ezequiel, he’s a very famous actor in Spain who sadly died shortly after filming Dagon, but he gives a very assured, sympathetic and likeable performance as Ezequiel. Everybody else is as functional as they need to be and I have no complaints, everyone was pretty solid and I was impressed with the all the extras and their ability to walk like they were turning into icky fish people. I have two minor complaints though, because it wouldn’t be a balanced review without some petty bitching. First off, Paul had a ‘catch phrase’ that he kept using throughout the movie, you’ll know what I mean when you see it. His catch phrase is, quite honestly pretty crap and starts sounding pretty contrived in a sort of “who the hell actually talks like that?” sort of way. The film also sticks to the formula laid out by Steve Martin in Bowfinger, that a film consists of the hero running a lot – he runs towards the aliens (or in this case icky fish people), he runs away from them, and Paul just runs, totally soaking wet from the rain, for most of the movie. I know it was sorta central to his character that he’s meant to be a wimp, but a couple more icky fish person confrontations wouldn’t have gone amiss because the ones the film does have are really cool!

But these are minor niggles for what is a very good, creepy and fun movie. The Yuzna/Gordon team has come up trumps again, it has bags of creepiness, atmosphere, and a fun little story which gives some nice little touches that you’ll have lots of fun noticing on repeat viewing. Two big webbed thumbs up!