- Directed by Stuart Gordon
- Written by H.P. Lovecraft. Dennis Paoli
- Stars Ezra Godden, Francisco Rabal, Raquel Merono
- Run Time: 1 Hour, 38 Minutes
- Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gArYSHXzMFk
Spoiler-free Judgment Zone
This was pretty fast-moving and steady with the thrills. The main guy is more of an everyman kind of guy rather than an action-hero type, and it works well for this. The effects are consistently good throughout, and we were entertained.
Spoilery Synopsis
After the credits, we open on a man with scuba gear diving down to what looks like an undersea well or cave. It’s shaped like an eye. It’s carefully sculpted and very ornate. It’s possibly even made of gold. Suddenly, he finds a naked girl there with him. No– she’s a mermaid with huge fangs!
Paul wakes up, it was just a dream. His girlfriend Barbara tells him to just enjoy it, since they’re now extremely rich. He says no, their stocks are going down. She complains, “You can’t program life,” but he argues the point. She gets annoyed and throws his company laptop off the board. He flips out. Vicky and Howard are on the boat too, and they are amused.
A storm blows in extremely suddenly, and everyone goes below deck. The boat is pushed into some rocks and springs a leak. Vicki’s trapped and stuck, so Barbara and Paul take the raft to the nearby village for help. Howard stays with Vicki. Vicki’s blood leaks through the hole in the boat and heads downward.
Paul and Barbara make it to the village, but there’s no one around. They come to a church that has a symbol on the side that looks a lot like the “eye” from Paul’s nightmares. They find a priest and some fisherman who say they’ll help. Barbara and the priest go to find the police, and Paul goes with the fishermen.
She notices that the priest has webbed fingers. On her way to the hotel for the phone, she sees that the villagers here are very weird people. She makes it to the hotel, where the hotel man and the priest attack her.
Paul gets back to Howard’s boat, but both Howard and Vicki are gone. He does find a bloody towel. When Paul gets back to the village, the priest takes him to the hotel. The hotel clerk appears to have gills on his neck but still rents a room to Paul. The window in his room is open in the rainstorm, and the lights don’t work. The bathroom is quite extreme. The whole room would make any truck stop bathroom look wonderful in comparison.
Barbara comes into the room, but it’s really the fish-woman from his dreams. No, that was a nightmare too. He looks out the window to see dozens of villagers down there pointing at him, and they don’t seem quite normal either. They growl and moan outside his door, but that little lock isn’t going to hold them for long. He ends up jumping out the window and through a skylight to escape. Everyone in town seems to be out to capture Paul.
Paul hides in a butcher shop, and he finds human remains hanging from the hooks. The villagers screech and squeal and move like animals. Somehow, Paul does get away from them. He runs into a homeless man who says they want his face. “Two women dead. One from boat, one come with you. They killed. No one leave Imboca. People come, no one leave.”
The old man recalls that Imboca used to be a town of God when he was a boy. There were no fish, so they prayed. Captain Cambarro arrives and says he has a better way. The great god Dagon will bring fish to Imboca. Cambarro and the villagers do a ritual and start doing new prayers. They start finding lots of fish and even gold from the sea. They turn against the Christian God and kill their priest. Eventually, Dagon wanted a sacrifice, so they took the old man’s parents. Old Exequiel says he’s the last man in town because he drinks and he’s crazy– they don’t want him.
There’s only one car in town, and it belongs to Xavier Cambarro, the grandson of the original captain. Ezequiel says the villagers are turning into sea creatures. The old man distracts the guards as Paul tries to steal the car. Paul has no idea how to hotwire a car and ends up running into the Cambarro house to hide.
He goes into a room and sees the girl from his nightmares, only this time, she’s real. She lies and sends the guards away. She knows all about him, and she’s very happy to see him. She’s Uxia, and she’s been waiting for him. He pulls back the blanket, and she has tentacles instead of legs.
He runs outside and gets the car keys from a guard. More people chase Paul to another house. A tentacled monster grabs him and forces Paul’s head into the lizard-filled toilet, but Paul whacks him with the toilet tank lid. Regardless, he’s soon captured.
Paul wakes up in a barn with Barbara. Ezequiel is there now, a prisoner as well. Vicki is there as well, but she’s missing her leg. “It’s inside me!” Barbara tells Paul that if that happens to her, she wants him to kill her. Villagers arrive outside, and they all make a run for it. They’re all caught once again, and Vicki kills herself in front of the group.
Paul and Ezequiel are chained up, and the priest cuts the old man’s throat and eyes and then peels off his face. They get started on Paul, but then Uxia comes in and makes them stop. She says that until they came, there had been no sacrifices for a year. He begs for them to release Barbara, and that makes Uxia jealous. She leaves, and Paul escapes once again, killing the priest and his henchmen.
Paul runs to the church and finds a secret tunnel leading down into caves beneath the city. Meanwhile, Uxia is cutting and tormenting Barbara in the ritual room. They hook her up to a pulley system and lower her into the water where Dagon awaits to impregnate her.
Naturally, Paul arrives in the same room and sets some of the cultists on fire. Paul slowly wheels Barbara back up. “Kill me. You promised.” Then Dagon reaches up and pulls Barbara down with him, leaving her arms behind in the restraints.
The villagers beat up Paul, but once again, Uxia makes them stop. Uxia’s father informs Paul that he is a Cambarro and part of the family. His name is Pablo Cambarro. Uxia tells him to remember his dreams, and he knows it’s true.
Refusing to accept what he is, Paul pours fuel on himself and sets himself on fire. Uxia grabs him, and they both jump into Dagon’s watery pit. He sprouts gills, and the two of them swim down into the big stone eye…
Commentary
Paul is very much not a macho leading-man type. He spends much of the film whining, hiding, and running. Paul rips the ignition wires out of the car to hotwire it, and then a few minutes later, he gets the keys, and it starts right up– with no wiring connected. I lost track of how many times Paul was captured and escaped in this.
It’s really good and intense. It never slows down or relents for even a little bit. The villagers are creepy and seemingly everywhere. The makeup effects and tentacles are all really well done.