Reign of the Gargoyles

There is hardly anything left to say; the title says it all. Crappy CGI (a bit better than average for SciFi channel) meets silly cardboard characters. And cardboard wins because CGI is virtual! It's like one of those Santa Claus and a smart beautiful blonde jokes.

Anyway, with the limited, but larger than average budget they could have chosen one of the thousands of good scripts floating out there. No, they chose a story where German sadists try to kill brave Americans helped by the beautiful French resistance girl. Oh, and there are gargoyles around. Puh-lease!

Bottom line: total waste of time. Not bad enough to count. Not good enough... for anything ;)

Given the well documented interest of the Nazi party hierarchy in the occult -Hitler and Himmler especially -it is a minor pity that so few supernaturally themed movies or science fiction movies have taken this as a starting point ."The Keep" , a pretentious rambling Michael Mann movie and the altogether better if more modest Trancers apart it remains a relatively unexplored area for genre cinema.Reign of the Gargoyles does tackle this subject and makes a decent if somewhat undercooked stab at it Nazi scientists are able to resurrect stone demons and set them loose in an attempt to sabotage Allied attacks on the Central European heartland .An American aircrew is dispatched to try to discover what is going on ,and are brought down by an attack of these winged demons .They combine with a small local partisan band to destroy the creatures ,and this involves locating a sacred spear from the grave of a long dead knight who had originally imprisoned the demons some time in the Middle Ages The problem is a lack of quality in the special effects ,which are workmanlike rather than exceptional and a cast of unknowns whose talent is such they are likely to stay that way .The script is underpowered and allows for little or no character development The location photography is good however and makes good use of the bleak ,wintry landscape to give an eerie and edgy look to the picture

A bigger effects budget and sharper scripting would have made this a better movie .As it is ,what we have is an okay picture which just fails to do justice to its premise

I guess it could've have been worse. The straight-to-TV presentation 'Rein of the Gargoyles' mildly entertains, but artificially dodgy CGI effects and pompous dialogues really do shoot it down. Bad computer visuals are one thing, but that script had me giggling and groaning at the same time. Too many random inspirational speeches, than explanations about the topic at hand or that of the Nazi's involvement in the occult had me wincing. The concept behind the film (An American airborne crew involved in WW2 in Eastern Europe find out that they have more to worry about than Nazis when they encounter Gargoyles, and join forces with resistance fighters to achieve the sacred spear that vanquished these gargoyles centuries ago) has something strong to go on, but alas it's given weak treatment and slaps in a stew of war clichés. Soon the mythological side is drowned out, and the interest begins to peter out. I can't knock its spirit though, and the locations and time period was well-shaped in presenting a dreary, war-torn backdrop. Performances fair up with no-one really standing out or overplaying it. However those accents (namely the Germans) were terrible, as if they were straining too hard. Joe Penny was dependably stalwart and Wes Ramsey is fine as the go-getter. No one really takes it entirely serious (even the script), but it doesn't fall away for any cheap laughs or a lighter tone of self-consciousness. The action is slight, and small. Sadly the gargoyles cop the brunt of it. Too little screen time, same for those Nazis who brought them to life. Sometimes the vigorous activity felt like something out of a video game, as the camera bobbed up and down. Moments do work, like atmospheric imagery in a graveyard. But really it's non-effective and flaky, despite its efforts. An okay time-waster… nothing more.

Interesting to read comments about this film picking holes in the correct way for a WWII SAS officer to wear their beret when there are hundreds of (below average) CGI Gargoyles running around. A bit like having a go at Star Wars because Chewbacca does not have split ends. The film is straight to DVD/Sci-Fi Schlock and there are thousands of other similar movies out there which take themselves a lot more seriously and are more in need of being deflated. The film tries hard and does quite well considering it must be low budget. A more interesting goof is the comment that the holder of the Spear of Destiny was buried like a commoner and then watching the heroes breaking into his tomb - hardly the resting place of a commoner. Nice comment earlier about NAZI interest in the supernatural and mention of the excellent THE KEEP but add to the list RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK and HELLBOY.

Sci-Fi Pictures has such an incredibly bad track record that I am amazed that they are still churning out movies. This effort by them does nothing to break their long streak. In fairness, I will admit that not everything was badly done. The locations were pretty convincing, and some of the sets were okay. And... uh...

...well, that's about it for what's decent here. Everything else is REALLY badly done. I won't get into details like the uniforms, which were clearly wrong to this viewer who isn't an expert on World War II details like this. I will rip into the movie's really bad CGI special effects. These poor special effects may explain why the killer gargoyles stay absent for most of the movie - hard to build terror when you don't see what is causing the terror. The characters were also pretty weak. Maybe I could excuse the East European actors for not having convincing British accents, but I could not excuse the movie for having not one memorable character. They all seemed to blend together.

Must I go on? If you have seen one Sci-Fi Pictures movie, you can guess just how awful this one will be before watching it.