GORGO (1961)
Article #561 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing date: 9-27-2002
Posting date: 2-20-2003

When English fishermen discover a giant monster off the coast of Ireland, they bring it to London and put it in a circus, only to discover it is a child, and its mother shows up to rescue it.

Those of you who have found the Japanese man-in-a-monster-suit movies too alien for your tastes may well prefer this English attempt at the same sort of thing; its story may be somewhat more accessible to western audiences. If, however, you love the Japanese movies (as I do), this one may come off as a bit of a disappointment, as it does for me. The special effects are quite good (except for the falling rubble effect which is used repeatedly in the last half of the movie), but I find there’s kind of a dull, drab feel to the whole movie that leaves me somewhat bored. The lack of really interesting characters is another problem; the child is the most interesting, but he’s also somewhat annoying. And the lack of music for a good deal of the movie is also a problem; they try to compensate by having the monster roar repeatedly during its attack on London, and I got bored with the call long before the movie did. Granted, my copy of the movie is none too good, but I don’t sense a better print will really make it a lot more interesting to me. It does capture a good sense of the destruction of human life that a beast of this size would cause, though.