Happy October.
Like I said last year, I would be discontinuing Monster Madness as a 31-day marathon.
Instead I'd be making more videos spread throughout the year.
And that's exactly what I've been doing,
with weekly movie reviews, all year long.
And now that it's October, of course we should delve back into horror.
The 10-year history of Monster Madness is behind us,
but now I give you Son of Monster Madness, with a new video every Sunday Bloody Sunday.
The rest of the month will be filled out with reruns.
They're old videos, but they'll be seen on YouTube for the first time.
I hope this adds a little Halloween spirit for you this month because that's the whole point.
Let's start it off with Gargoyles, a 1972 made-for-tv movie.
I can't say I've heard of that many movies to feature gargoyles, it's usually vampires or werewolves.
I saw this movie on TV sometime in the 80s, and then it faded into obscurity.
But there's still lots of people out there who remember it.
For those coming to it fresh, it may seem real cheesy. But if you were young when you first saw it, it's one of those things that sticks in your mind.
Today it's not that special, but back then it was pretty cool.
My favorite part is the opening.
It starts out like a documentary, explaining the history of gargoyles.
Basically, according to the film, they're the army of Satan, who are reborn every 600 years to battle humans for supremacy of the world,
because for Satan, having only hell wasn't enough.
I like all the artwork and stock images, and the narrator voice plays it straight like it's something you'd watch in school.
Then it cuts to this green slimy title that lets you know the movie itself will not be as serious.
An author, who's writing a book on the supernatural,
brings his daughter with him on a road trip to meet a museum owner who claims to have an interesting artifact to discuss.
When they get there, they see the museum is just some old beaten down shack out in the desert, and the owner seems like he
hasn't had a visitor in years.
He shows them the artifact, which is a
gargoyle skeleton. The author laughs him off and tries to leave, but soon the shack is ambushed by the gargoyles, presumably.
They're off-camera
but we hear wings flapping.
The shack gets lit on fire, the owner dies, and the father and daughter escape. A bunch of other stuff happens.
They go to the police, who blame a group of motorcycle riders as being responsible for the arson.
But those "gar-things" as they're once called, show up and in the final act hold the father and daughter captive.
They want the humans to educate them and to coexist,
but that plan falls flat.
The plot is pretty generic and the movie abruptly stops without an ending, as if they left it unfinished,
or it was meant to be a cliffhanger for part two, which never happened. But it doesn't even feel like a cliffhanger.
It's like the movie just stops.
But let's talk about these gargoyles.
Obviously, they're actors in suits and prosthetics.
They sort of remind me of the flying monkeys in Wizard of Oz,
except you never see a gargoyle fly until the very end.
On one hand, they look kind of silly, but also appealing in the same way as classic monsters like Creature from the Black Lagoon.
It's pretty good considering this was made for television,
which in those days didn't have the same kind of budget that television has now.
The gargoyle effects were created by Stan Winston and won an Emmy.
Lots of times the gargoyles are shot in slow motion, which may seem like an odd choice,
but somehow it creates a spooky effect. When you see that weird choppy slow-mo,
accompanied with that steady drone and weird sound effects like,
[James making gutteral noises]
it's just creepy.
These are the only parts I can vividly remember seeing as a kid.
As an adult, I can understand why, because it's so odd.
The lead gargoyle was played by a football player, Bernie Casey.
But, little-known, he was voiced by Vic Perrin,
who did the control voice for the intro of the Outer Limits.
I don't have much else to say about this movie.
It's getting harder for me to find films that overflow me with insightful thoughts to pour out.
But the things I wish to say
don't need many words.
It's just that, for those who saw it as a kid,
Gargoyles is a film that brings you back to a simpler time, when a person in a monster costume was scary.
