DAGON, Stuart Gordon's long-in-development Lovecraftian follow-up to RE-ANIMATOR, comes Blu-ray from Australia's Umbrella Entertainment.

Paul Marsh (BAND OF BROTHERS' Ezra Godden) is a freshly-minted dot com millionaire, but he is finding little joy in celebratory trip off the coast of Spain with wife Barbara (Raquel Meroño, BENEATH STILL WATERS) on the boat of investor Howard (Brendan Price, SLEEP OF DEATH) and his wife Vicki (Birgit Bofarull, THE SECOND NAME). This visit to his "mother country" – even though his mother fled Spain before he was born and never spoke of it – has provoked a recurring nightmare in which he encounters a beautiful woman (Macarena Gómez, WITCHING & BITCHING) who turns out to be a mermaid of the fanged variety (which severely puts a damper on his wife's offer of a therapeutic blow job). Strange chanting from the coastal fishing village Imboca seems to summon a sudden storm that crashes the yacht into a reef, pinning Vicki below board and requiring Paul and Barbara to take the dingy to the shore to seek help. Although the village seems deserted, the chanting leads them to the village's church which is rich in gold ornamentation but low on Catholic icononography. The priest (Ferran Lahoz, THE MACHINIST) is able to secure Paul a boat and a fisherman to get back to the yacht, but he is reluctant to leave Barbara with the priest (even before she notices his webbed fingers). By the time Paul gets back from the yacht where he has found no sign of his friends, Barbara has gone missing and he is soon on the run from the town's deformed residents. The only remaining human is hobo Ezequiel (Francisco Rabal, NIGHTMARE CITY) who tells him that the village turned to worshipping a god from the deep when the fishing dried up in exchange for gold and fish. Now, the villagers are starting to transform to go into the sea, and the god Dagon demands sacrifices.

In development by Gordon and Empire Pictures since the completion of RE-ANIMATOR, DAGON actually draws more from "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" – the name of the town Imboca means "in mouth" – than the titular story, but readers familiar with the story may have the film's ending spoiled for them. The Galician setting seems more believably "eldritch" than modern day New England (which might have still worked in the pre-GPS/mobile phone eighties), and the ancient stone village, houses, and mansions provide far more atmosphere and production value – especially with aide of composer Carles Cases (DARKNESS), production design by Llorenç Miquel (ARACHNID), and cinematographer Carlos Suarez (ROWING WITH THE WIND) – than Gordon or producer Brian Yuzna might have achieved with the same budget stateside. The effects work of David Marti – whose effects company DDT would later work on Guillermo del Toro's PAN'S LABYRINTH – is proficient and nasty when it needs to be, and some gratuitous nudity gooses the setpieces even if it never matches the frisson of vulnerable naked Barbara Crampton being fondled by a headless body and licked by a bodiless head. Godden's myopic protagonist is not as quirky as Jeffrey Combs but injects some physical comedy into the action (like trying to stretch his body to keep one door barricaded with his foot and another with his hands), and is ably supported by Rabal (who died shortly before the film premiered). Godden would later appear in Gordon's Lovecraft adaptation "Dreams in the Witch House" for MASTERS OF HORROR.

Released direct-to-DVD in the United States by Lionsgate with an anamorphic transfer, 5.1 audio, and two commentary tracks – one with Gordon and writer Paoli and the other with Gordon and star Godden – the film's first turn on Blu-ray was a disaster, being an upscaled German release that was also cut by eighteen seconds of gore from the face-skinning sequence. Fifteen years after the domestic DVD, fans have two editions to choose from thanks to LionsGate's Vestron series in the US and Umbrella's region free Australian offering. The 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.78:1 widescreen image is sadly not that much of an upgrade over DVD, sourced as is from an HD master struck nearly a decade ago, and early reviews of the Vestron release suggest that it is not much better. The image is clean and colorful, but looks more like a good-looking, high-bitrate, well-compressed DVD than an HD offering of a 35mm film. The English DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track – there are actually two, but they appear identical – is frequently active thanks to the underwater sequences, storms, and falling rain. The Spanish language dialogue on the track is not translated, but it is transcribed on the English SDH subtitle track to maintain the disorientation of the protagonist.