Gargantua: El hijo de Godzilla

This movie was pretty awful but I must say that I've seen many movies that were much, much worse. Remember Jaws 4 where the shark actually ROARED?

After reaing some of these reviews I was half expecting to see Bela Lugosi pop up and say "pull da string!" I'll give it a 4 out of 10.

This was a movie?

I'm really not sure what's worse....a hyped-up film that turns out to be a major flop or a TV movie that was quickly made to cash in on a hyped-up film that turned out to be a major flop.

GARGANTUA is in the latter category, created as the FOX network's answer to GODZILLA, and there's really nothing good I can say about it. The acting was bad (save Baldwin....no relation to the Baldwin brothers), the special effects were bad (it was a good thing that daddy dragon was only in it for about twenty seconds of screentime....he was a joke), the storyline was miserably cliched and boring (even down to the Australian villian...oooooh....), and even the music by J. Peter Robinson, who's usually pretty good, is disappointing.

The plot...about a small son finding a baby dinosaur and its increasingly bigger family who searching for it....is probably the worst TV movie idea ever established for the nineties. In fact, the premise sets itself up as a [bad] episode of the Twilight Zone, and keeps going for an hour and a half. It even ends up rooting for the monsters and defending their actions, even after they thrash some cities and eat some people (I'm sorry...but if a giant dinosaur was stepping on my house, I'D shoot him with a rocket launcher....Was there a Greenpeace member behind this thing?). By the time the film was over, I was ready to quit the film-reviewing business, and I couldn't figure out how in the world they ever allowed this thing to be made.

All in all, terrible. Go rent King Kong vs. Godzilla if you want some real, smashing-buildings fun.

1/2 out of ****

I was guilty of a gross error of judgement when I tuned in to 'Gargantua' (on satellite television) in an unguarded moment. I viewed with increasing disbelief as this cinematic aberration unfolded, unmatched in sheer awfulness by any contemporary sci-fi film which I have seen over the last two years. The 'design' of the 'monsters' must surely have been the product of individuals who suffered from a combination of colour-blindess and acute myopia and were in obvious need of psychiatric help. Add to this a generous helping of acting in a style which would make a cigar-store Indian seem animated,a storyline consisting of sentimentalised nonsense, a script which gives a whole new meaning to the word 'mediocre', together with special effects which appeared to pre-date Harryhausen on a bad day, then the sum total constitutes an experience never to be repeated ! I cannot believe that any rational person would be prepared to pay money to see this junk - certainly this is one to miss.

It sounds like the long-lost sequel to WAR OF THE GARGANTUAS (1967) and comes in an ALIEN-style video box, but this is actually a lame kiddie-style tele-movie that debuted on Fox.

Adam Baldwin is a widowed scientist on the Australian island of Malau with his depressed young son, where illegal DDT dumping results in a variety of mutant creatures. A cute baby salamander monster with big goo-goo eyes makes friends with the son after he feeds him cheese balls. A not-so-nice medium sized one with sharp teeth and horns follows, and a really mean giant mama monster comes searching for her babies and terrorizes the city. Naturally, the military shows up, act as dense as they usually do in these movies and blast the big one. THEN the father shows up!

I suppose that kids may like it, but the lousy dialogue and nauseating family dramatics will be a bit much for adults to stomach. FX give new meaning to the term "uneven"--the two smaller monsters (either animatronics or CG) aren't bad, but the larger ones are almost on the same level of those old Saturday Matinée GODZILLA flicks.

And the moral of the story hasn't changed--be nice to giant lizard monsters or they will stomp on you!

I gave this piece of garbage 1 because that is the lowest there was. It deserved less.

The "creature" effects were terrible. The "baby" moved like a cheap shop dummy badly in need of lubrication. About the only good thing I can say for the effect of the adult creatures is that at least you couldn't see through them. I would suggest that next time the "script writers" come up with a cause for the mutation, they show some logic in the way they show it on screen. Hint: I would very much suspect that DDT does not glow luminescent green a few thousand feet under the water!

There was at faint glow of hope. At one point in the movie the Internet gets mentioned. When they showed someone using a computer to look at something, they didn't have one of those ridiculously pathetic GUIs where every key press was accompanied with loud clicking.

To paraphrase Monty Pythons The Holy Grail, when you see this one coming "RUN AWAY!"