I may not be devoting
all of my time and effort to covering bad movies these days, but that doesn’t
mean I stopped loving them. So once a month, I’ll spread a little bit of that
love…
We’re recording the final
episode of The Lair of the Unwanted this week, concluding what will for me have
been an eleven-year odyssey into bad movies (though I'll still run the occasional review here). But before I hang up my bad movie reviewin’ spurs, I do have one
last bit of business: a movie I’ve long promised a good friend that I’d cover.
How did you stumble upon this
particular bit of cinema, Brian? Was it on the Sci-Fi Channel? Yeah, I’m
guessing the Sci-Fi Channel…
Gargoyle:
Wings of Darkness (a.k.a. Gargoyle’s Revenge, though I don’t know what the
gargoyle is seeking revenge over) is a 2004 film starring Michael Pare (who you
might remember from Eddie and the
Cruisers and Streets of Fire) and
the lady who played Sonya Blade in Mortal
Kombat: Annihilation. More interesting to me – something that would have
gotten me off my ass to review this sooner if I had known – is that this was
directed by Jim Wynorski, who directed a couple of my all-time favorite bad
movies: Chopping Mall and Deathstalker II.
I’ve just derailed myself checking out Wynorski’s IMDB page, and while he’s been awfully prolific, it
seems like he’s gotten into a bit of a rut:
- The Bare Wench Project
- The Bare Wench Project 2: Scared Topless
- Bare Wench Project: Uncensored
- Busty Cops
- Busty Cops Go Hawaiian
- The Devil Wears Nada
- Lust Connection
- The Witches of Breastwick
- The Breastford Wives
- House on Hooter Hill
- Alabama Jones and the Busty Crusade
And that’s just a sample of the booby-centric titles. I’d
get it if these were all ‘80s movies, but every film listed there is from 2000
or later. Did anyone tell Wynorski about the Internet?
Anyway, Gargoyles:
Wings of Darkness…
The movie opens in 1500s Romania, where a woman I believe was wearing Converse All-Stars under her period dress is driving a wagon post
haste through a forest. We soon see why: she’s being chased by a CGI gargoyle.
She makes it to her destination and whips out a crossbow, ready for action.
Suddenly, an entire mob of torch n’ pitchfork wielding villagers are on hand (I
guess they were hiding, surprise party-style), and a priest shoots the CGI
gargoyle out of the sky. The villagers roll a Styrofoam boulder over the hole
the CGI gargoyle fell into, the priest applies a curse to the burial site (as priests do),
the end.
Oh, no, sorry. That just takes us to the opening credits.
We’re now in 2004 Romania, where Secret Agents Michael Pare
and Sonya Blade are attempting to negotiate the return of a guy with an
explosive collar from the car trunk of some baddies, and this is the point of the film where I
experienced a unique challenge: The only of this film I could find
online happened to be dubbed in French. And I don’t speak French. At all. After some
deliberation, I decided to forge on and fulfill the promise I made. Besides,
film is a visual medium, right?
So the secret agents and the baddies are talking, and they’re
talking, and uh… everyone’s tense, the music tells me that much. Suddenly
shooting! And a car chase! It’s a European car chase, too, which means tiny
cars zipping along tiny alleys, and that's something I always find a lot of fun. Secret Agent
Michael Pare chances the baddie to the roof of a building, but the baddie gets
scooped up and eaten by the CGI gargoyle. So he’s escaped his cursed Styrofoam boulder, I guess.
Meanwhile, there are some college types doing some kind of research
at a church, and there’s a local priest and a priest sent in from the home
office and that’s a thing, perhaps they resent each other or they have past beef? Uh... Maybe the trailer can help.
Look, the whole movie was in French, so I’m
really taking wild guesses at the actual plot points. What’s important is that
much of the film is structured like a shark movie, alternating between scenes
of our main characters sorting things out and scenes of random people getting
eaten. And some of those random death scenes are a thing of beauty.
Take the zoo scene, where a woman is soooo into taking
pictures of animals at the zoo that she doesn’t notice that hours have passed,
the sun has gone down and the zoo is now closed. She tries to hide from the CGI
gargoyle in a monkey cage that had been left open (?), but gets eaten anyway.
Helpfully, she leaves her camera behind for Secret Agent Michael Pare to find.
And then there’s this, my favorite scene in the whole movie:
A brow-beaten schoolmaster (?) is taking a gaggle of young private schoolboys
to a carnival at night (odd time for a field trip). They all hector him to go
on the Ferris wheel except for one lad who is clearly afraid of heights. So
what does the schoolmaster do with the one kid who does not want to go on the
ride? Drags him on with himself, then mocks him while drinking from a hip
flask, of course! Naturally they get stuck on the top, and naturally the CGI
gargoyle swoops in for some arbitrary justice.
I suppose we should talk about this gargoyle… I keep calling
it a CGI gargoyle, but it really appears to be a strange blend of CGI and
Claymation. Clearly a lot of work went into it, and had this film come out in
1984 instead of 2004, it would have been amazing. Sadly, for all the work put
into the CGI gargoyle, absolutely no work was put into how it was inserted into
the film. The end result is weightlessness and disconnected. It’s not quite as
bad as Birdemic, but it’s in the same
ballpark.
 |
| Yep, that gargoyle is definitely there... |
Is this movie worth you checking
out? I don’t know, the whole thing was in French. But in addition to what I described, the film features a gargoyle hitting power lines like a big bug zapper and reveals that the CIA brings flame throwers with them on missions, so there's that. Even in a foreign
language, I could tell there was enough for me to consider circling back on it when it’s available
for streaming in English.
Congratulations, Gargoyle: Wings of Darkness: You are the Bad Movie of the Month.
Congratulations, Gargoyle: Wings of Darkness: You are the Bad Movie of the Month.
