NOTHING BUT THE NIGHT (1973) - Cushing and Lee

NOTHING BUT THE NIGHT

(1973, UK)

A creepy dry run for The Wicker Man

The bloodthirsty horror fan in me had always been disappointed with this on late night TV. But another viewing, in order to consider the new Nightmare Theater DVD release, was rather enjoyable, now that my expectations of gore have been lowered.

That's not to say this isn't a violent story, but it's too tame for the times considering for instance that Witchfinder General, Straw Dogs and Vampire Circus had already appeared. This may be explained by their lack of a special effects budget: in Christopher Lee - An Authorised Screen History, author Jonathan Rigby talks of Lee, and Hammer producer Anthony Nelson Keys, attempting to start their own production company, Charlemagne. The idea being to cash in on their own success. But in trying to get a distribution deal, their budget was driven down, not that it shows. With a top cast, a wide variety of filming locations and director Peter Sasdy (Taste the Blood of Dracula, Hands of the Ripper, Doomwatch). Peter Cushing joined in on a countrywide series of personal appearances to promote the film but it, and the company, failed.

Nothing But the Night begins as a grisly mystery, with three murders that look like suicides, yet we see that a black-gloved figure was responsible. A crashing coach full of schoolchildren then swings all attention on an orphanage on a remote Scottish island. Interested parties include the police (Christopher Lee), two pathologists (Peter Cushing and Keith Barron), the press (Georgia Brown) and one of the children's mothers (Diana Dors)...

The story still packs some solid surprises and its bleakest moments leave a lasting impression. You'll have to watch it yourself to discover exactly which genre this belongs in. Needless to say, the police investigation of the remote location brings The Wicker Man to mind, which coincidentally was the next film Christopher Lee made. The two would make a very suitable double-bill.

Foremost, it's a pleasure to see Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee appear in so many scenes together and playing friends rather than deadly enemies. Even though their characters argue bitterly, Cushing still ends the scene cracking a smile. Lee must have chosen this part specifically without silly make-up or costumes - at the time he was trying to get more 'serious roles' as well as break into Hollywood. Here he was on the verge of success with The Three Musketeers and The Man With The Golden Gun.

The rest of the cast is impressive, Georgia Brown (Tales That Witness Madness) especially intriguing as a pushy reporter. Keith Barron (The Land That Time Forgot) proves that he should have escaped TV more often. Diana Dors (Theatre of Blood, From Beyond the Grave) is more menacing than her usual bully routine, playing a mass murderer with an 'up' hairdo, reminiscent of Myra Hindley's.

There are great actors in small roles too - a young Michael Gambon (Sleepy Hollow, Toys, The Beast Must Die), Fulton MacKay (Britannia Hospital, Porridge), Duncan Lamont (Quatermass and the Pit) nearly unrecognisable as he's sporting a beard, and Kathleen Byron (Black Narcissus, Twins of Evil). The only weak link is the key role of the young girl traumatised by the coach crash, who starts off well but lets down some pivotal scenes.

I watched this again on a cramped fullframe VHS, but Nothing But The Night has been released widescreen on DVD in the USA, as part of Katarina's Nightmare Theater series. I understand that it's widescreen and that Katarina's introduction is optional, which means that they'll get my money. I'm also glad that they didn't use the alternate US title, which ruins the story.

Speaking of spoilers, I'll also mention Hot Fuzz, but not why...

TOMMY (1974) - Ken Russell visualises rock opera

TOMMY

(1974, UK)

Ken Russell passed away on November 28th last year. His death was unexpected, catching me out just as I was preparing this review of Tommy. How dare he. Hopefully he'll still haunt a few projection booths where they show silent movies and play old classical records. Maybe scare some BBC executives into letting some young auteurs have free range of their facilities...

I won't attempt a full tribute, there are already several books on the subject, some of them by Russell himself. But it's my pleasure to continuing to highlight his films on these pages. You can always look at the many obituaries and tributes signposted on his Facebook page. But it was sad to have to say farewell to the film-maker who helped visualise and influence my own small teenage rebellion far more than punk rock did. Besides feeding my brain at a tumultuous time in my formative years, he was belting out movies that annoyed my least favourite people.

Tommy makes the front page for the UK release

It helped that many 'messages' in his films weren't hidden under layers of cryptic metaphor or obscure satire. If he wanted to say something, it was shouted from a mountaintop by a female stormtrooper in leather fetish gear, or screamed by a dozen naked nuns, or projectile-vomited from a television set. It wasn't subtle, but it was very accessible. Much more than most other 70s arthouse. It was symbolism that anyone could understand. That is, I understand what's being said in individual scenes - TV advertising is hard sell, don't buy crack off Tina Turner, Marilyn Monroe was bigger than Jesus... But with Tommy, I still don't quite understand the main thrust.

Tommy is a child of World War 2, but just as he's born, his air force father is shot out of the sky. His mum (Ann Margret) brings him up alone until she meets a cheeky wide boy (Oliver Reed) at a holiday camp. But after a childhood trauma renders him deaf, dumb and blind, his mum and new dad give up on him as a hopeless case. While they enjoy themselves, they leave Tommy in the care of various unsavoury friends and untrustworthy relatives (Paul Nicholas, Keith Moon, Tina Turner...).

But when Tommy discovers an astonishing mastery of pinball machines, his parents are delighted that his miraculous popularity could be hugely rewarding to them all...

Tommy isn't Russell's best film (I honestly think it's The Devils), but it was his most financially successful. For me it's a musical equivalent of Zardoz. Mad, mystifying fun that I enjoy without fully understanding. I thought it was my young years to blame for being confused by this at a midnight cinema showing. But years of TV and video revisits have left me none the wiser.

I'd suggest Tommy as a parallel with Pink Floyd The Wall (1982) which I also don't fully 'get'. I know they're both concept albums angry at something, or a lot of things, both topped with a pop star with too much power. The central characters both have problems relating to the world, one is cut off from his senses, one cuts himself off from the world.

The difference is that The Wall is full of anger, hate, and so much negativity that some critics confused its Nazi-imagery with, well, Nazism. I can understand Pink's anger at his mother, teacher, judge, the war, but not Pink's transformation into a drugged-up hate-monger. The film and the music are memorable, but not enlightening. A dark vision of a young musician descending into a complete mental breakdown, in an England that could easily be nudged into fascism. Like Tommy, I understand which institutions he's angry about, and the subject of each chapter of the story, but not where it's all going.

Tommy offers a few similar observations on the power of pop idols, but as a much lighter morality play re-written by the Carry On team. Oliver Reed provides seaside humour, and the nightmarish interludes are played for cruel laughs. I'd rather watch Cousin Kevin torturing Tommy and Uncle Ernie fiddling about as visualised by Ken Russell, rather than Alan Parker. It's still startling enough without shocking us into stark depression.

Russell has the hefty task of visualising every song before the vocabulary of the pop video had even begun. The crash zooms, lightning edits, costumes, sets and production design can still sufficiently blow your mind, with a fair few unintentional laughs (do gangs of bikers really find hang-gliders awe-inspiring?).

I really have no clear idea what Tommy is ultimately getting at, but at least Russell remains faithful to the text - the lyrics of The Who's original album - rather than trying to impose his own storyline. But this seems to be a story without a clear target. Organised religion? But is Tommy so oblivious that he's being organised? He seems really happy about it all.

A large part of the pleasure is the cast of familiar faces doing extremely unfamiliar things. There's Roger Daltrey acting and running around half-naked. His acting debut is earnest but not very special, but his tanned muscular physique is quite astonishing.

Meanwhile, Hollywood sex kitten Ann Margret is sensational - she can sing up a storm, dance like a wild thing, and can rock a huge chocolaty phallic symbol like no other. She gets full marks for apparently doing whatever the director suggested, in whatever clothes were provided. Her various transformations throughout the story demonstrate an impressive range of many talents.

Russell-regular Oliver Reed can't sing or dance to save his life, but he can act his way through it all. Elton John can't act, but famously sings a great rendition of 'Pinball Wizard'. Incidentally, The Who's original album doesn't sound nearly as special without all these guest vocalists, like Tina Turner (as the freaky, frightening Acid Queen).

Jack Nicholson surprises simply by appearing in this at all, but also by giving an understated performance, in a Ken Russell film of all things. And he sings. In a convincing English accent. And he's just so damned handsome. And he knows it.

Like the other unrestrained 1970s Russell films, like the less-successful Lisztomania (also starring Daltrey), Mahler, The Devils... it helps if you lean back, enjoy the ride and let the madness just play out, as if your screen has just vomited baked beans all over you, but it's alright because you really like baked beans.

1969 album review of The Who's original album in The Observer

Bizarrely, the day after watching Tommy again, my Dad gave me an old newspaper cutting on the back of which was this album review.

Tommy - the soundtrack album, with much less Who

Vinyl double-album interior photo-montage

I watched this remastered region 2 UK DVD (above) which looks and sounds fantastic but is very short of extras compared to the earlier 2-disc release, which includes a documentary I'd like to see. It does still however have Ken Russell's commentary track. Pretty hateful cover art though...

For those who want the best sound and vision quality, there's also a Blu-ray release in the USA (which I've yet to see). Again apparently short of extra materials.

A wealth of photos from Ken Russell's movies on this picture-heavy blog devoted to him...

THE HAUNTED HOUSE OF HORROR (1969) - new DVD release

In November 2011, The Haunted House of Horror was finally released as a standalone DVD. It had previously only been available in Anchor Bay's Tigon Collection boxset, which saved the movie from a the limbo of murky VHS releases.

This new Odeon Entertainment release is an improvement, with a 16:9 anamorphic release which adds picture information at the sides. It also retains the director's frank and funny commentary track from the Tigon boxset. It's a PAL region 2 DVD for the UK.

A proto-slasher that beats from a decade before Halloween and Friday the 13th, it stars Frankie Avalon trying to get away from the smiling beaches, Jill Haworth, Dennis Price, George Sewell, Richard O' Sullivan...

I've added these details to my updated review of The Haunted House of Horror, and added more photos and screengrabs too.

Click here for the full article.

ZARDOZ lands in the UK - March 1974

ZARDOZ arrives!
Films and Filming, March 1974

Preceded by a lengthy career interview with Sean Connery, Films and Filming magazine devoted a hefty four-page spread of publicity photos from John Boorman's sci-fi parable timed with its UK debut. Zardoz seems to be more popular now than it ever was, but as a benchmark for bad seventies' sci-fi. I think there's far worse out there, but not nearly as entertaining. I thought you might like this peek at it's original presentation.

In the reviews section, we're reminded that also on release in the UK that month, Zardoz was up against Enter The Dragon, Electra Glide In Blue, The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (which I saw at the time), Magnum Force and Swallows and Amazons. Being too young to see Zardoz with its 'X' certificate, I had to settle for reading John Boorman's novelisation - which is pictured in my review of the movie.

QUATERMASS AND THE PIT (1967) - invades Blu-ray

QUATERMASS AND THE PIT

(1967, UK, Five Million Years To Earth)

A unified theory that explains everything that's wrong with the world...

For Halloween, we watched all three Hammer films featuring that unlikely sci-fi hero Professor Bernard Quatermass, prompted by the arrival of the new Blu-ray release of Quatermass and the Pit (above).

Although it's the third of the films and adapted from a BBC TV series, this low-budget movie pushes ideas that rival and even mingle with the extra-terrestrial plot of 2001: A Space Odyssey. As alien visitations go, it looks small scale, not showing the global reaction but just a few streets and buildings in the centre of London. Even so, its claustrophobic approach is still largely effective today, mixing up apocalypse, sci-fi and horror into a unique, fantastic story.

With three hours of TV scripts to cut down into a fairly short film, the story rips along, throwing up some very grand ideas along the way. An Underground subway extension project hits a wall when a large metal object is found buried in the clay. A huge futuristic missile that appears to have landed before the Stone Age. Archaeologists and military experts can only guess what it might be. The more clues they get, the less sense it makes. Only Quatermass's wild theories can explain it all. But while he tries to warn everyone away, curiosity and the need for public transport unleashes forces that threaten to destroy the whole city.

Thankfully, Nigel Kneale gets to adapt his best story for the big screen (unlike Hammer's The Quatermass Xperiment and Quatermass II). Besides original scripts, Kneale was excellent at adapting other people's work for the screen, such as 1984 and The Woman In Black for TV, and HG Wells' First Men In The Moon for the Ray Harryhausen movie.

Andrew Keir (Dracula - Prince of Darkness) provides Quatermass's most rounded characterisation, better than even Sir John Mills in The Quatermass Conclusion. Besides his usual bullish attitude, the rocket scientist here shows warmth and even vulnerability. He's teamed up with a pair of experts as inquisitive and open-minded as himself, James Donald (The Bridge On The River Kwai, The Great Escape) and Barbara Shelley (also Dracula - Prince of Darkness, Village of the Damned), both of whom steal several scenes when it's their turn.

After her startling transformation from prim and proper wife into a ravening vampire, it was hard to imagine Shelley could top that. But she convinces us that she's possessed in several scary scenes that purely work due to her performance. A telekinetic troublemaker, years before Carrie.

In another brief scene that gives me the chills, a timid victim is cut down by the uncaring power of the silent majority. As chaos spreads through the city, blank-faced crowds mindlessly kill any 'others' with their telekinetic powers. It's like the Children of the Damned have all grown up and gone on a rampage. 

Admittedly, the special effects are stretched to their limits, considering it's a low Hammer budget trying to put on a Lifeforce city-wide catastrophe. Some of the exterior sets look too much like a backlot, but the London Underground station interior at the core of the story still looks excellent. On Blu-ray you can now check out all the Hammer movie posters lining the walls! It's clever the way that so much happens on the same street - every house, door and alleyway outside the station entrance gets its own scene.

Wires are occasionally visible, you can see them if you look for them, but not if you're following the story. Barbara's 'vision' is the lowpoint of the film in an over-ambitious scene.

After a lifetime of immediately unravelling every single movie special effect that has fooled my eyes, I now avoid certain 'making of' reveals. I want the creatures of The Mist and Monsters to continue to mystify me. I like to think of Teddy in A.I. as a character rather an effect, so I've avoided any behind-the-scenes footage or articles. I want to remember them the way they were in the story. Similarly, the final ethereal apparition in Quatermass and The Pit. I've no idea quite what I'm looking at - it might as well be real. I don't want to know how they did it - to me I'm looking at the thing from the pit.

While it was regularly shown on late night TV throughout the seventies and eighties, Quatermass and the Pit gathered a growing hive of fans through the years and its continuing popularity has inspired well-produced editions on every home video format.

The new Blu-ray, from Optimum UK, looks superb - it's never looked so sharp, so clean and colourful. The aspect ratio refrains from cropping the original 1.66 image down to the standard Blu-ray 1.77:1 (16:9) shape. So with the 1.66 ratio, there are thin black 'pillars' at the sides of the image, but these might not even be visible on a screen set to 'overscan'. I'd have liked even a little more headroom, but this is the best aspect ratio presentation for the film that I've seen for many years.

 

In the extras (only on the Blu-ray) there's sadly no archive footage behind the scenes, but there is a commentary track from the late writer Nigel Kneale and the late director Roy Ward Baker. Plus a group of insightful and often funny new reflections on the Quatermass phenomenon, with The Pit being everyone's favourite. There are valuable stories from Kneale's widow Judith Kerr, some set recollections from star Julian Glover (Colonel Breen), reminiscences from expert horror fans Kim Newman and Mark Gatiss, (who made me laugh out loud with their descriptions of Brian Donlevy's acting), Hammer expert Marcus Hearn and an American perspective from Joe Dante. The US didn't get the TV series so the name Quatermass didn't mean anything, so it was renamed Five Million Years to Earth (a title which I still confuse with Harryhausen's Twenty Million Miles to Earth).

Several of the commentators tease the idea that Arthur C. Clarke's 1954 novel Childhood's End (to which I'd also add his 1951 short story The Sentinel) may have influenced this Quatermass story. There are several echoes and parallels between The Pit and 2001: A Space Odyssey, but as Newman observes, Kneale deals with the immense ideas a lot less pretentiously!

SPOILER-FRENZY: AVOID THE U.S. TRAILER IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN THE FILM BEFORE! It's also included in the extras.

All six episodes of the original BBC TV series (from 1958) are also out on DVD - a low-budget TV production recorded as it went out live on air! The surviving episodes of The Quatermass Experiment and all of Quatermass II is also in this DVD set. The series expand on many of the ideas and scenes in the films. It maybe less distracting to read the TV scripts, which have also been re-published through the years (like the editions below).

  

Tristram Cary's scary electronic soundtrack offered in many scenes instead of an orchestral score were released on a couple of CDs (the best is pictured below, and includes a couple of surviving tracks from the first two films). The haunting closing track provides a fantastic end to the story, but was in fact a library track.

More great publicity photos and posters from the film are over at Coming Attractions Of The Past.

APPROPRIATE ADULT (2011) - Dominic West as Fred West

APPROPRIATE ADULT

(2011, UK, TV)

A horrendous true story that keeps on getting worse... 

The horrifying crimes of Fred and Rosemary West threatened to eclipse those of all previous British serial killers, with ghastly excesses that fuelled tabloid headlines for years. The Moors Murders, a couple that abducted and murdered children, still haunt England from the distant mists of the mid-1960s. These crimes at 25, Cromwell Street, uncovered in the mid-1990s, started with assault and murder in the family home... 

The case set a new low benchmark for inhumanity reported in this country. Not in a war zone. Not on the other side of the world. But in an ordinary street, that could easily have been next door.

The idea of adapting the Wests' story as a TV drama, even fifteen years later, sounded impossible. The amount of sexual violence would be hard to work around on mainstream TV.

I wasn't even going to watch Appropriate Adult until it was announced that Dominic West, star of the acclaimed TV series The Wire, was to play Fred West. This indicated a more serious approach than a lurid reconstruction. For the actor, it was potentially a gamble to play one of the most hated men of recent years.

There's a huge disparity in taste between approaches to true crime on TV. I was surprised by an ITV documentary about the Moors Murders which suffered indifferent acting and poor taste crime recreations. Yet the Channel 4 drama Longford (2006) found an intriguing angle to dramatise part of the story, pitting Jim Broadbent (Brazil) as Lord Longford against Samantha Morton (A.I.) as Myra Hindley. But I wasn't expecting such an intelligent drama about Fred and Rosemary from the more mainstream ITV.

The script cleverly follows an appropriate adult, a civilian (Emily Watson) invited into the case when Fred is arrested to ensure he's being understood by the police, as he's suspected of being mentally vulnerable (there's irony for you). Each time they discover a crime has been committed, the more victims there turn out to be. Sitting in on police interviews with Fred West (Dominic West), she also accompanies him and the police in the hunt for where he might have hidden the bodies. Without his cooperation, there'll be no evidence.

As an investigation, this isn't a barrage of flashy technology cracking the case, like in CSI. It's not built around violent flashbacks, like a horror film. We're simply faced with the suspect, trying to discover what and why he did. Is he as stupid as he looks? Is he lying? It starts with a missing person, but the more the police dig, the more crimes they unearth. 

Emily Watson (soon to be seen in War Horse) is excellent as the 'appropriate adult' brought in without any preparation to hear West's interrogations and confessions. Unfortunately, Fred starts confiding in her, placing her in increasingly difficult quandaries.

Dominic West is frighteningly convincing, all the more chilling because we're hearing some of the words and motivations of the original murderer in an eerie impersonation of him. The distinction between murders that he does or doesn't find upsetting, the casual way he admits to further crimes. Particularly chilling is the way the victims 'speak to him' as he gets closer to where they were buried.

Rosemary West (Monica Dolan) is a frightening figure who's mostly in the background, with an unconcealed violent attitude towards everyone around her. In contrast, the calm and usually relaxed Fred insists she has nothing to do with all of it.

Shown as two feature-length parts, the first was very tight dramatically, showing the short claustrophobic period of his early interrogations. The second part was less satisfying, because it had to match real events, her sporadic involvement struggles to keep the viewpoint inside the investigation to the end.
The whole story can't be told as completely as a work of fiction would, because of the lack of evidence and the labyrinthine legal process. But I wish the programme had been a little clearer about how some of obstacles to the case had been overcome.

This serves as a restrained reminder of what this pair did, without showing the gory details. But also focuses on how hard it is to establish the truth, even with so much circumstantial evidence and the criminals in custody. 

It's not just a situation where an ordinary person is in the same room with someone describing horror, but one where she gets the confidence of and insight into the mind of a psychotic multiple murderer. This took me as close as I wanted to get, and in as much detail as I could take. There are also hints that there were further, even nastier crimes...

It's available on region 2 DVD in the UK (pictured at the top).

GORGO (1961) - happy 50th birthday!

GORGO

(1961, UK)

Every country should have its own Godzilla...

UPDATE: March 2013 - GORGO has been released on blu-ray

Released in the UK fifty years ago today, Gorgo remains Britain's closest thing to a kaiju eiga, a giant suitmation monster movie. If vintage dinosaur movies are your thing, or if you love seeing London in even more chaos than usual, this is absolutely for you. It was fantastic to see a clip from the film recently appear in Joe Dante's 3D teen-chiller The Hole (2009). Gorgo lives!

In 1961, Godzilla had yet to appear in colour (in King Kong vs Godzilla the following year). Director Eugene Lourié recycled the plot of his The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953) and the London setting of Behemoth the Sea Monster (1959), but this time used a man in a monster suit rather than stop-motion animation.

Photo-montage with a shadowy demonic monster. Like the Japanese Godzilla, Gorgo doesn't walk around buildings...

In fact it was Lourié's The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, together with a re-release of King Kong (1933), that inspired Toho Studios to make the very first Godzilla movie. So I'm reluctant to label Gorgo as a rip-off of Godzilla. Lourié got there earlier, along with Ray Harryhausen's stop-motion animation and Ray Bradbury's story, of course.

Two salvage experts limp into harbour on a remote Irish island after a volcanic eruption damages their freighter. Before they can make repairs, a dinosaur emerges from the sea terrifying the local fisherman. They decide to capture the creature, load it onboard and sail it to London to make their fortune. After a few fatal accidents, Gorgo is installed as an attraction in Battersea Funfair (just next to the famous power station).

Hand-tinted lobby card - Tower Bridge is falling down...

But just as it's making a huge splash with London's thrillseekers, a gigantic and angry mother Gorgo emerges from the sea looking for her baby. She heads for London and nothing's going to get in her way, though the army, navy and air force are going to try...

Gorgo attacks a rollercoaster in Battersea Funfair, just like The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms at Coney Island

Gorgo is made very like an early Godzilla movie, (a man in a suit amongst detailed miniatures) making it a peculiarly unique British monster film. The modelwork and special effects are from some of the finest technicians of the time, some of whom went onto work on 2001: A Space Odyssey, but obviously with a much bigger budget. Gorgo's special effects are hit and miss, but easily on a par with the Japanese monsters of the time. The almost excessive use of Technicolor borders on the surreal, especially when the night sky is lit up with red smoke as London burns. I particularly love this great optical composite of Gorgo stomping through Soho towards (and through) Piccadilly Circus.

Screengrab: Gorgo enjoys a night on the town

The monster suit looks fantastic on film, the creature's actions are suitably 'undercranked' to make it look huge (a technique often underused in the Japanese films), and the modelwork is just as detailed, laid out as a huge cityscape of central London. They even use a fullscale Gorgo to transport around London on a flatbed lorry,  (to publicise the new attraction) with a full-size prop of its claw to smash unwary fishermen in their boats.

The head is quite animated, with a convincing jaw movement, glowing red eyes and wiggling ears! The feet and claws are huge and look lethal. The only weak point of the suit is the belly which looks and acts like wrinkled material. However, unlike the heavy latex Godzilla suits, this allows the stuntman inside to twist dramatically, to pose and move more dynamically. The suit also had to move in the water and not catch fire too easily - pity the poor guys inside, including jockeys-turned-stuntmen Dave Wilding and Mick Dillon.

The story has humans too. The stars are William Sylvester (2001: A Space Odyssey, The Hand of Night) and Bill Travers (Born Free, Ring of Bright Water, The Smallest Show on Earth) as the two greedy bastards who cause all the trouble in the first place. They sort of a adopt a boy from the island, which is rather progressive for the time. He's played by Vincent Winter, an Oscar-winning child star who went on to work as production manager on Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, The Color Purple and Superman II.

Gorgo certainly isn't low-budget, with some impressive sets (like the war room and the flooded London Underground) and with extensive crowd work to show London's citizens fleeing in panic. Indeed, cinematographer Freddie Young's next picture would be Lawrence of Arabia. He certainly knew how to make flamethrowers look good.

But it's not high budget either, relying too heavily on a mish-mash of stock footage of destroyers and jets before Gorgo hits London. While the modelwork holds up well during the night-time, the early daytime scenes of the boat in a tidal wave are unconvincing. There was certainly enough to fuel a particularly funny Mystery Science Theater 3000 (MST3K season 10, 1998).

I enthused about Gorgo in an extensive article for G-Fan magazine (issue 49, January 2001). I still think it's entertaining as an action-packed monster movie, or as a far-fetched tale with nutty logic and oldschool special effects. It's also an evocative trip around London in 1960. So I'm annoyed that Gorgo still isn't on DVD in the country where it was made.

The sexed-up Monarch novelisation

So far, the DVD and laserdisc releases have been disappointing because of the quality of their source materials - a lot of visible film damage and washed-out colours. The DVD compression has also struggled with the grain, darkness, sea spray and smoke. I've seen it look far better, with vivid technicolor on British TV, transferred from a clean print with a sharp image. That's the version that I'd like to see represent Gorgo worldwide.

The more recent Japanese DVD (pictured) appears to be a close duplicate of the American VCI DVD and has the same extras. The quality of the film transfer is again slightly soft and the edges of block colours are blurry. It's accurately presented in 1.66 aspect, non-anamorphic.

Director Eugene Lourié later provided the extensive special effects for Crack In The World which recently warranted a Blu-ray release. Gorgo is jealous!

Here's a faded trailer for Gorgo...

Happily, a short sequel was made recently, Waiting For Gorgo. Here's the trailer...

(This is a hugely expanded rewrite of my earlier review from 2009.)

Some interesting thoughts on Gorgo's production from WTF Film.

A review and screengrabs of a German DVD release from a WTF review.