On 20 July 2022, my movie watch (screened this afternoon in Britain on Legend TV - formerly the Horror Channel) was the WW2/monster mash-up fantasy movie Reign of the Gargoyles.
Directed by Ayton Davis, co-produced by Phillip J. Roth, and released in 2007 by Syfy Original Movies, Reign of the Gargoyles opens with some WW2 Nazis utilising an ancient blood ritual to bring to life a huge stone statue of the horned 'king' gargoyle Vorthorn, located inside a ruined castle on the French/Belgian border. Moreover, Vorthorn's now-living state in turn brings to life a host of other gargoyle stone statues there too.
But instead of serving the Nazis, as was the latter's plan for these monsters, the gargoyles slaughter them all, and then fly away to inflict comparable carnage not only upon local villagers but also upon both American and German fighter planes in the skies overhead.
The only way to end these winged marauders' reign of terror is to locate the tomb of a soldier knight who had killed them when they had been brought to life once before, many centuries earlier during the Middle Ages, by harpooning Vorthorn with the Spear of Destiny, thereby transforming this unholy monster and, in turn, all of the other gargoyles as well, back into stone.
This spear is of course the very same one that a Roman centurion had wounded Jesus Christ with when He was crucified and which supposedly possessed magical properties thereafter.
As the legendary Spear had been buried with the knight, a group of American and British WW2 soldiers, aided by a local French woman named Sofie who relates to them the bizarre history of the gargoyles, set out to find the tomb and retrieve the Spear from it for slaying Vorthorn, but confronting gargoyles and Nazis alike en route.
As I'm not a big war movie fan, I tended to skip over in my mind the frequent warfare scenes between the Americans/British troops and the Nazis, so I no doubt missed the various factual WW2-related errors that others have commented about elsewhere. Conversely, regardless once again of criticism aimed at them by certain other reviewers, I personally found the CGI gargoyles sufficiently impressive to maintain my attention, especially for a non-Hollywood movie with a non-Hollywood budget.
So, notwithstanding Reign of the Gargoyles being a bargain-basement movie entry, with no major film stars appearing in it (the best known are probably Joe Penny as U.S. Major John 'Gus' Gustafson and Wes Ramsey as fellow American airman Will 'Ace' McCallister), its cast all provide creditable performances in my opinion, and the movie itself offers an interesting, undeniably novel twist on the standard creature feature theme, which I certainly appreciated and relished. It is well known that the Nazis, especially those under Himmler, dabbled in the occult, yet few films have pursued this aspect, so this one should be congratulated for forging an original path in its theme.
If like me you enjoy goggling at gargoyles on the big or small screen, and can understand German, be sure to click here to watch a German-language version of the entire Reign of the Gargoyles movie free of charge on YouTube (the version that I watched on TV was in English, but this is not presently available on YouTube).
To view a complete chronological listing of all of my Shuker In MovieLand blog's other film reviews and articles (each one instantly accessible via a direct clickable link), please click HERE, and please click HERE to view a complete fully-clickable alphabetical listing of them.
There was a similar movie set in the American West starring Cornel Wilde.
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