Démons de pierre

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 ;)

You know the sort of thing in which they have Fred Astaire dancing with a vacuum cleaner? I mean, when you've got Nazis, World War Two Pilots and supernatural creatures and they're referring to UFOs at least three years before the term was coined.... well, it seems that someone has written a script by channeling the spirit of Raymond Shaver, then edited the text while hitting himself on the head.

There is some interesting casting. The actors playing the pilots are as young as they actually were. There is also some fine cinematography by Lorenzo Senatore, who needs to be noticed by a real film maker far, far away from the Sci Fi Channel. These strengths cannot begin to make up for the overemoting actors and insane High Concept script. Next time, guys, make sure you add in the gladiators.

I'll admit it and say that I dislike, even hate, most of the movies from the Sci-Fi Channel, with a couple of exceptions. If you're wondering why I keep watching them, it is mainly because there is something compulsively watchable about them in how awful they are. I also try and watch any movie of any genre and age regardless of the critical and audience consensus. I was expecting very little from Reign of the Gargoyles, and in the end I got very little. It does have a good idea, and the acting from Joe Penny, John Ashton and Wes Ramsey is alright but not great. However, that is it for any redeeming qualities. The editing is very choppy, the lighting dull and the sets too scaled-down. But on a visual front it was the special effects that fared the worst, the movements of the gargoyles are very stiff and in their design they look very crude. Considering that they do feature prominently in the movie, that is a major issue. The dialogue is as unnatural as the effects with a lot of talk but no flow, and apart from Penny, Ashton and Ramsey the rest of the acting stinks with the accents laughably fake. The story is energetically told I suppose, but much of it is unsurprising and veers into the face-palm-inducing ridiculous far too much. True, there is some conflict here but executed in a very clichéd way. The flying sequences have a great concept and not so bad in the action, but I would have enjoyed them more if the editing was better than it was. The characters are little more than walking cardboard cut-outs, in particular we learn absolutely nothing about the gargoyles. Overall, I have seen worse from the Sci-Fi Channel, but that doesn't stop Reign of the Gargoyles from being very bad. 3/10 Bethany Cox

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'm afraid that like most Sci Fi original series this movie is mediocre at best. It just doesn't have any spark. I wish that I could point out some major flaw, but there really isn't any. Stock characters; evil Nazis's,nasty monsters, valiant ally soldiers and partisans. Whee! But the characters just spin their wheels. They practically have labels stamped on them. The VALIANT FLYING FORTRESS PILOT mouths a few words about how he idolizes Lindberg thereby establishing that he's a good egg and an all American joe. I'd love to see Sci Fi channel try to have subtle, nuanced characters for once. There's so much unbelievably good Sci Fi out there. Heinlein, Brin, Asimov, LeGuin, Niven, I could go on. Still, I hope that they keep trying.