Hey kids, I gotta plan that's sure to cheer you up today. Let's say we sneak on over to that SHOUT FACTORY TV joint and watch us some GARGOYLES (HERE)! It's only one of the best TV movies ever to grace the small screen and, where I come from, it has a long history of hitting the spot on a Sunday afternoon. Heck, I could even write a traumafession on this slick flick as it always gave me an acute case of the heebie jeebies! It's not the titular monsters so much (although they are impressively unnerving) as it is the general uncanny atmosphere. I don't know why but the opening narration relaying the history of Satan, the multiple aerial gargoyle-eye views of pesky humans crawling about on Earth and the sinister simplicity of the perfectly captured pre-CGI, ominous slate gray skies all add up to me wanting my blanky. Plus JENNIFER SALT is in it! Unless you've just finished watching BRAIAN DE PALMA's SISTERS (1973) or a SOAP marathon (like me) there's surely not enough SALT in your diet!
Now this is THE film to start off the new year. I remeber watching this bad boy on Saturday afternoon as a kid. I loved it then and I love it now and I'll love it in the future.
When it first came out on DVD, I didn't waste a second buying it. Then, it went out of print only to come back for sale with a new cover many years later.
I can still hear it now in my head . . . Die-AH-nuh
The head Gargoyle is going to have to talk to HR about slapping his female coworkers on their butts. lol
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I had to have seen "Gargoyles" on broadcast TV sometime in, around, or after 1977, because that's how I can fix in time this particular TRAUMAFESSION! After watching just a snippet from early on in the movie, the scene where just a neutral shadow of a figure on a hillside spreads unseen wings, I NOPEd my elementary-school ass out of the living room and spent the night-times of the next few months leaning close to the glass of the kitchen window of our new house to look up just to make sure that there weren't any gargoyles hanging out from over the eaves. So simple an effect! So effective a result! They could have done that shot with a broken umbrella for all I know, and had I stuck around to see the practical makeup FX, the result may have been different, shockingly perhaps less impacting, to my developing psyche. So: Good On You, those working with a tight made-for-TV budget!
Another treasure I had to wait for until it finally became available (first as a bootleg on Ebay, and finally more widespread.)
IIRC the SFX costumes won an Emmy.
The scene in the hotel room where the gargoyle peeks up over the edge of the bed ensured that I wouldn't look at the edge of the bed for the next oh, 20 years or so. And then they try to escape through the bathroom, only to run right into another one climbing in the window!
As a 7 year old I didn't appreciate how hard the lead gargoyle was hitting on Jennifer Salt.
I also didn't appreciate what a HUGE D*CK Cornel Wilde was – he didn't try to rescue the old man who was burning to death but made damn sure to grab that gragoyle skull, and later was perfectly willing to let a biker (a very young Scott Glenn) rot in county jail rather than try to get him sprung.