oung businessman Paul Marsh (Godden) has trouble relaxing, even on the private yacht where he's supposed to be enjoying a luxurious Mediterranean cruise with his beautiful girlfriend, Barbara (Merono), and his friends Howard (Price) and Vicki (Bofarull). He pretends concern over how the company stock fares in his absence, but he's actually been plagued by nightmares about a beautiful half-woman, half-fish, who turns savage during an encounter underwater.
One day, off the coast of Spain, a storm rises out of nowhere and smashes the yacht against jagged rocks within sight of an apparently deserted fishing town. Vicki is pinned in the wreckage, and Howard won't leave her, so Paul and Barbara take the life raft to row to town and find help. They aren't even halfway to shore before something massive jars their raft from below ... and Howard, left behind on the yacht, fires his handgun at something terrifying and unseen.
Unable to turn back due to the storm, Paul and Barbara reach the town, which turns out to be called Innsboca. They find a town of narrow alleys and shuttered windows, with grotesque residents notable for their shambling gait and cold, unblinking eyes. Many are masked or otherwise shrouded. Odd chanting, from the direction of the only church, stops in mid-note when Paul and Barbara draw near.
In the now-torrential rainstorm, a rescue launch finds Howard and Vicki both mysteriously missing. Barbara soon disappears as well. Paul seeks shelter at the town's only hotel, a building so filthy it must have been years since the last paying guest. Then the silent desk clerk turns to hand him the key, and Paul notices something odd about the man's throat: gills ...
Over-the-top fish story
Stuart Gordon was the director of both From Beyond and Re-Animator, two gore-soaked splatterfests loosely based on the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft. Both are so gleefully over-the-top, despite their cheerful sadism, that they function better as comedies than they do as horror.
Dagon has some of the same flavor, but it takes the story more seriously. The opening scenes, with the shipwreck, the likable leads and the steadily increasing sense of oddity and dread, are all played with a sense of relative realism that grounds the story, and gives us a reason to care about the horrid things about to happen to these four innocent people. It helps that Stuart Gordon does an excellent job making Innsboca the creepiest little village horror film has seen in quite some time, so much so that long before anything bad happens on land, both the protagonists and the viewers know that it's not a place anybody with a strong sense of self-preservation would ever want to be. It also helps that Ezra Godden, as Paul, and Raquel Merono, as Barbara, play their roles absolutely straight, with steadily increasing unease every bit as persuasive as their later hysterical terror. It helps even more that Francisco Rabal, who plays the elderly Ezequiel, the town's only remaining human occupant, milks the part for all the despair and madness and even nobility it's worth. With everybody taking their roles so seriously, and director Gordon putting so much effort into making Innsboca creepy before the bloodletting begins in earnest, it's easy to remain involved in the story when the film finally comes out and admits that it's about a town where people are turning into fish.
The horror, when it comes, is extreme, with terrible, bloody things happening to people we've come to like. Nobody gets out unscathed. Folks with a low threshold for this sort of thing will have trouble sitting through the film. Folks with a low threshold for fantasy in general will bail out even earlier. But really: This is an effective shocker, made by talented storytellers, who have here made about as believable and immediate a film about sacrifice to fish-gods as you're ever likely to see. There's even a secondary love story, involving the romantic ambitions of a half-woman, half-squid ... and damned if it doesn't work, too.
