I Saw A Film!
With faces like these it’s rather hard to get excited about the possibilities, but then, Scott Glenn shows up in another of his early biker roles and the lady from Soap and her dad played by a face you’ve seen on TV but can’t remember where are working together to uncover the lizard people, errr, I mean Gargoyle plot. What we’ve got here is a kind of “sleestack attack” (Land of Lost much?). Some rubber suits, inarticulate gloves, and lots of eggs. See, it turns out that humans and Gargoyles have been fighting one another for centuries, and every half-millennia or so, they rise again and this time they’re rising in the American Southwest for some reason.
It’s always best to have your protagonist just happen to be a world expert on the mythology of Gargoyles when he just happens upon the infestation, what luck! Like an expert on soft cheeses just happening to find the fabled city of cheese on his trip to the post office. I suppose there is something to having an expertise seeing their preferred study at every turn, heck, I know of a tale of a respected botanist moving out to a place in Durham and locating a rare tree right on the property, what are the odds. Years later when other experts came out to confirm it it turned out not to be the species after all, but you know, that’s life.
Our story opens right up with a Gargoyle dropping on their car, and then a disaster in old timer’s wooden shack while he’s being interrogated by our good doctor. The old timer houses a magnificent skeleton of a Gargoyle with horns, wings, and talons, very impressive! Suddenly, some nonsense happens: a beam falls, kerosene gets splattered around and a flame touches off a massive burning that our father daughter team have to explain to the police. Soon enough the Gargoyles grab our little lady and a certain motorcycle fellow has to be recruited to recover her.
We go into the Gargoyle caves, find out they’ve been collecting books by the good Dr. and demand the captured daughter teach them about what he’s been writing. We also get a good look at the large gooey eggs and witness the birth of one of their kind! The bottom line is total earth domination, humans must go! Interspecies warfare. Unfortunately for the Gargoyles they don’t seem to be equipped with anything. No special skills, no weapons, no plans, no information undermining human civilization and so the laughable impending fail compounds rapidly. I mean, the Gargoyles can’t even seem to handle some hick motorcycle clubbers, maybe they’re lead by the Gargoyle Trump, who knows.
This runs free on Prime, and while some of the masks look pretty cool, the action leaves much to be desired. The winged monster grabs the daughter but instead of flying off with her he awkwardly carry-hugs her. It’s far less than impressive a sequence, especially after the Gargoyle minions spend so much time looting the vehicle. Lastly, it’s still in TV defintion, very pixelated stuff, a terrible experience all around.
I Saw A Film 