Gargoyle

In this movie, the gargoyles deserve to take the earth. It feels like they're the only one taking this whole movie seriously.

The premise of the film is gargoyles which are mythical creature; they fall somewhere between demons, bats, dragons but just looks like a meaner Dracula in the bat form from Van Helsing. These gargoyles then meaninglessly kill a lot of people. And, it's up to our hero to save the day and the world.

The CGI is awesome and it's stuff right out of "Van helsing" with the bat/human flying creature and the countless spawns flying around. The sets are awesome. The action scenes and car chases are tight.

But, the acting is really bad. The way the movie is between the action scenes is really bad. Also, the story is really bad. But, the gargoyles are really mean and they do some really cool stuff.

The main action here's lethargic way of dialog makes him seem dumb; the blond girl doesn't look sexy enough or forceful enough - she just feels ordinary and without an interesting character; the girl who plays the scientist doesn't really act like one.

This is really low on quality in the genre of monster movies - except for the monster itself.

Not really worth watching.

A fellow reviewer complained about continuity, BUT if he actually watched the movie and listened to the dialog he would have known WHY the priest anointed the arrow with his blood then shot the gargoyle. Special effects were not bad, but not top of the line. I thought the shots of the interior of the church were well done. I liked the beginning of the movie, which set the tone for the rest of what happened. The acting was fair to middlin as my mom would have said. This is your basic B rate movie. If you like B rate movies it is right up your ally. Not a bad way to spend some time. Michael Pare is still a good looking guy, the ladies are nice to look at according to my hubby.

You know that mouthwash commercial where the guy has a mouth full of Listerine or whatever it is and he's trying really hard to keep from spitting it up into the sink? That's a great metaphor for this movie. I kept watching, even though it was really difficult. But keeping mouthwash in your mouth will leave you with a minty fresh feeling. This movie left me with a bad taste in my mouth. I should have spit it out when I had the chance.

The premise is corny enough to be fun. For the first time in like a thousand years, Gargoyles have returned to Romania, and all of the priests who knew how to fight and kill these things are long dead. It's up to Michael Pare and some other secret agents to get to the bottom of things before the Gargoyles run amok. Unfortunately, the premise is completely lost in bad dialog and less than enthusiastic acting on the part of the human leads. The best acting is done by the CG Gargoyles.

In the end, this movie feels like a poor man's Van Helsing. If you check your brain at the door, this might get you through a dreary Monday night. I gave it 3 out of 10 stars.

I honestly have to say that this movie blows. The special effect look almost ten years old, the script is choppy, the acting is minimalist, the cinematography is thin, the lighting is less-than-stellar, the camera angles are amateurish and the foley editing (sound effects and sound editing in general) sounds like it was done on a Mac Power PC without a decent sound board. Lots of the dialogue has a tinny, thin sound to it, like it was almost telephoned in or the person was talking into a tin can from across the room (especially Michael Pare's voice). The music score sounds like someone tried futilely to imitate the stylings of Danny Elfman and failed miserably in the attempt.

The actresses are all fairly attractive, which makes for mediocre eye candy, but that's about the only thing this movie has going for it.

I don't think I'm spoiling anyone's experience of this film by telling you not to see it if you have anything better to do, like clean under the stove. It gets dirty under there and you've gotta clean it sometime.

I think the movie suffers from a lack of sex and violence, though there is one car chase stunt that looks so dangerous it could only have been filmed in a country where life is cheaper than beer. "Gargoyle"'s heart is in the right place, but its aspirations are conservative. It is at least not pretentious. But I had a great time acting in it, playing the perennial idiot in the horror movie who says "What's down this hole?" and dies for his hubris. Plus I got to meet Michael Pare. Every film junkie should work with a B-movie staple at least once before death. And Romanians are the loveliest people I've met. Literally the loveliest. Walk down the street in Bucarest: if 7 of every 10 women aren't absolutely beautiful, you're walking down a street I didn't come across; and be consoled by the fact that at least 5 of the 10 are available for drinks.

Part of the film was shot in Casa Radio, an abandoned, unfinished Classic Communist Bloc-cum-Georgian Nightmare edifice originally intended to house KGB propaganda ministries, i.e. Radio Not-so-Free Europe. The building's five stories tall and takes up a city block; best of all, while its facade radiates Big Brotheresque state solidity, it resides near the city center like a post-apocalyptic ruin in a jungle of burdock and hemp peopled by dozens of Gypsies and scores of wild dogs. Construction on Casa Radio was suspended when Caucescu and his wife were executed on TV in 1989, and still there are gaping holes that drop from the sun-baked top floor (offering surreal vistas of a modern quarter-mile stretch of concrete roof, decorated with jutting rebar and old car parts, overlooking a crumbling ancient city) all the way down to the damp, creepy sub-basement (which doubles in the film for the Gargoyle lair.) No American-style guardrails or warning signs for Bucarest.

Since the demise of the Soviet Union, Casa Radio has hosted several non-union film shoots, including "Highlander III". It is attractive to producers because it's a cheap location, massive in terms of scale and available space, bizarre looking, and free of insurance headaches as it's still state property. Plus no one complains if you don't clean up after your production: anything left onsite is interpolated into the resident Gypsies' construction of their shanty town in this actual urban jungle.

An assistant director was bitten bloody by a wild dog during the shoot of "Gargoyle". The apples provided by catering were pressed into service by cast and crew as projectiles in order to keep the prowling dogs at bay. I too was bitten by wild dogs in Bucarest, once in a bar (!) and once in a city park. I also survived two car wrecks in two weeks, both in taxis and neither of which was seen by the drivers involved as grounds for stopping the cars.

GEEK NOTE: The Sci-Fi Network or Channel or whatever was one of the backers of this film (the smaller the budget, the more producers on set), so it's a little weird that nobody had a problem with the original title, "Gargoyles", until it was almost time to show it on the network, even though Sci-Fi already had an unrelated series of that name. The title was changed sometime relatively close to release, as I have a color-corrected copy labeled with the former title.