brendan halpin

I missed this when it came out, probably due to having a small child at the time. But I saw that it was Stuart Gordon adapting Lovecraft and thought it might have some of the wonderful over the top gonzo comic energy of Re-Animator or From Beyond. It didn’t, but it was still pretty good!

It’s essentially an adaptation of The Shadow over Innsmouth, inexplicably moved to Spain, where the town in question is called Inboca. Get it? The effects are mostly practical, which is good because the few bits of low-budget 2001 CGI are…really horrible!

But what’s really captured well here is the horror of the whole town being comprised of people slowly transforming into horrors from the deep. This could be done very comically (as it was by me in my Scooby-Doo fanfic The Velmanomicon!), but Gordon manages to make it genuinely disturbing and completely devoid of The Incredible Mister Limpet references, a feat I was incapable of!

There’s some gratuitous nudity, and the big reveal and the ending didn’t quite work for me, but overall a nice, creepy diversion!