Featured Actress: Raquel Merono - Stuart Gordon returns to the genre most welcoming to him with surprisingly entertaining and creepy results in the HP Lovecraft-inspired tale Dagon. Scripted by Gordon’s Re-Animator screenwriter Dennis Paoli and based on Lovecraft’s tale “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” Dagon is a well-shot and mostly well-acted tale about Paul and Barbara, a couple that due to a boating accident end up in a run-down Spanish fishing village hiding a deep dark secret. Before long they are separated, and Paul is hunted down by the majority of the town and introduced to their beautiful and frightening leader, Uxía.

Rife with various mutations and slimy, gilled freaks, Dagon is typically Gordon in that it offers plenty of graphic carnage to turn the stomach. As Paul, Ezra Godden picks up more or less where Jeffrey Combs left off as Dr. Herbert West, making one wonder if Combs’s schedule was full when casting began. Raquel Meroño is sutibly fetching as Barbara, but like the various skin-showing scenes in other Gordon pictures, her nude scenes aren’t made to titillate so much as horrify. And as Uxía, Macarena Gómez is both seductive and frightening.

In this day and age of diluted teen horror that fails to scare or even strike a chill, Dagon is uniquely chilling experience.