GORGO (1961)

Joe (Bill Travers) and Sam (William Sylvester), partners in a sea salvage business, are bringing up a lost treasure off the coast of Ireland when the sea starts bubbling. An undersea volcano erupts, damaging the ship and sending them to the shore of Nara Island for repairs. They get a frosty welcome from McCartin, the harbormaster, who has been illegally hoarding treasure and artifacts found nearby, but they hit it off with Sean, the orphan boy who helps McCartin. When a local diver is found dead, it's assumed that a shark got him, but as men hunt the shark, a 65-foot tall bellowing reptilian creature comes out of the sea and attacks. Joe and Sam lead the men in capturing the beast, which Sean calls Ogra after a sea creature artifact of McCartin's. The University of Dublin wants the beast so they can study it, but Joe makes a deal with the Dorkin Circus in London and they transport it there to be put on public display, naming it Gorgo, for Gorgon, the mythic entity that turned men to stone. What could go wrong? Well, the Dublin scientists somehow figure out that Gorgo is just an infant, and soon a mom twice as big as him follows his scent and comes looking for her baby. Watch out, Piccadilly Circus! Look out, Big Ben! What Godzilla did to Tokyo, mom does to London.

People tend to either love this B-monster movie or think of it as a big joke. My own history with this film: it was the first monster movie I saw in a theater, probably in 1963 when I was 7 and already a big Chiller Theater fan, and I was quite impressed with it. The folks at Mystery Science Theater 3000 riffed it on their show, and the print they used was panned and scanned and in bad shape so it seemed to deserve its mocking. But seen in widescreen and in clear and bright color, it's a different experience. Rather than use stop motion animation, the producers went the full Godzilla route and had a man dressed up in a rubber suit in the middle of a bunch of miniature sets, and for the era, it comes off pretty well. Motion speed is adjusted to make the monster's movements seem appropriately scaled. (The title monster, BTW, does not go on a rampage, it's the mom, but she is never given a name.) Matte and blue screen work is fairly good, if awfully obvious at times. The writing is rather weak—it rushes through some things, like the capture of Gorgo, and drags out other things, like the unnecessary amount of military stock footage in the last half which causes the narrative to lose some momentum. But generally, the movie does fairly well what "kiddie" monster movies were expected to do back then. I assume the character of Sean was present so kids would have someone to identify with, and to ultimately make Gorgo sorta cute.

Bill Travers and William Sylvester handle their lead roles seriously, with Sylvester coming off as the nice guy and Travers a bit of a hard ass—though in the end, it's Travers who saves Sean from possible trampling. There isn't even a hint of romance here; as far as I remember, there are no females in speaking parts. So of course, I want to read Travers and Sylvester as a couple, despite the absence of sexual tension, and a few shots near the end of the two with Sean does make them look like a gay-dad family. Certainly they have become his de facto caretakers, and the next step is adoption. Vincent Winter as Sean is good—not too cutesy and not too wooden. The way Sean acts when he first sees Gorgo seems to imply that Sean has seen or at least been aware of the beast's existence, though this does not become a plot thread. I suspect that Sean's relationship with Gorgo inspired Toho to put forth a similar plot point in the later Gamera movies. Busy character actor Martin Benson has a couple of nice moments as the slightly slimy Dorkin, though ultimately I don't think he deserves to be labeled as a bad guy. If your only experience with this movie is through MST3K, you owe it to yourself to see this on home video or streaming. Pictured at top right is Gorgo destroying Big Ben; at left are Winter, Travers, and Sylvester. [Blu-ray]