• Directed by Eugene Lourie
• Written by “John Loring” (Robert L. Richards) and “Daniel Hyatt” (Daniel James)
• Starring
  • Bill Travers
  • William Sylvester
  • Vincent Winter
  • Bruce Seton
  • Joseph O’Connor

What’s the greatest danger inherent in success? Aside from possible artistic paralysis due to a presumed inability to top one’s self (see also: Cameron, James), the darkest cloud to be found inside the silver lining is the possibility of being pigeon-holed in the field or genre in which one’s success took place. Especially if the pond in which one is now a big fish is very small, one might find one’s self crowned king of a domain whose potential for future growth has been soaked up by that initial success.

Director Eugene Lourie’s first movie was 1953’s The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, the now-classic Harryhausen monster movie which single-handedly spawned the “giant sea monster runs amuck on land” subgenre. In other words, he was Godzilla’s grandpappy. After directing the giant robot movie Colossus of New York (1958), Lourie then directed another movie in the same vein as his break-out hit: The Giant Behemoth (1959), with Harryhausen’s mentor Willis O’Brien stepping in to handle the stop-motion effects.

Then finally in 1961, Lourie was called upon to return to the same well yet again with his fourth and final feature film, Gorgo. In much the same way that John Carpenter’s Halloween 2 (1981) was forced to follow conventions established by the imitators of Carpenter’s own earlier movie Halloween (1978), Lourie found himself following in the (giant) footprints of a franchise that The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms inspired, as his previous stop-motion creatures are here replaced by a decidedly Godzilla-esque man in suit.

Quick — which one looks like he should be marketing his own energy drink?

Our story begins off the coast of Ireland, where a salvage ship captained by Americans Joe Ryan (Bill Travers) and his partner Sam Slade (William Sylvester) is exploring a sunken vessel. (Note: One of these men will end up being more sympathetic than the other. I won’t tell you which one quite yet, but I will give you a hint: Bill Travers bears a disturbing resemblance to the current past-his-prime Steven Seagal.) Their entry into the main plot is thus best described as “wrong place at the wrong time,” because practically a stone’s throw from their boat, an underwater volcano decides to erupt.

Their boat waterlogged and their engine in need of repair (though, miraculously, no men lost), they drift in to the bay of the small Irish island of Nara, where the Gaelic residents all treat them brusquely, except for Sean (Vincent Winter), a wee orphan boy and the self-elected goodwill ambassador of Nara Island. A feature that links this movie again to the mainstream of the giant monster movies that came hereafter is that Sean is pretty definitely the first example of a “Kenny,” the monster-loving child who is a staple character of later kaiju movies. (Though, owing to the North Atlantic climate, Sean does not wear a pair of yellow short-shorts.)

They also meet local harbormaster and archaeologist McCartin (Christopher Rhodes), who’s very guarded about the collection of artifacts he’s amassed, and tries to drive them off with talk of permit restrictions and such. The two salvageman take an interest in the local archaeology, especially when they see McCartin’s hired divers trying to look nonchalant while searching for a missing man. They decide to take a look beneath the water themselves, and there they discover — Gorgo! Having a nap!

Catch of the day.

Okay, it’s not the best ever introduction for a 65-foot-tall sea monster, but that soon changes; that night, the fishermen keep searching for the body of the missing diver, and one them harpoons a dark shape. That proves enough provocation for Gorgo to rise from the water and stomp into the village, in all of his stiff man-in-suit glory, complete with earfins that wiggle as he walks. Bullets and harpoons only enrage him, but torches flung in his face frighten him off, and he retreats to the depths.

The next day there’s much talk between Joe and Sam and McCartin about how the eruption might have disturbed the creature’s habitat, but the more urgent conversation revolves around money. McCartin wants the monster gone before its presence upsets his productive — and lucrative — archeological salvage operation. (You almost have to admire a man who adheres so closely to the baileywick of his own profession. “To hell with its biological novelty, I’m an archeologist! I only deal with dead things!”) Joe and Sam make him a deal to get rid of the beast in exchange for some of the gold artifacts in the safe. Then, in true American fashion, they start wondering how much such a creature would be worth alive.

Their plan to catch the beast is to dangle Jim in a lighted bathysphere beneath the surface and lure it to their nets. One step better than coating him in steak sauce, I suppose, and it works: Before you know it, they’ve got a prehistoric monstrosity in their nets, lashed to their deck, and ready for transport back to London and a life of fame.

“As progenitor of a long line of Kennys, I solemnly swear…”

With them as a stowaway is young Sean, fulfilling his Kenny obligations as they closest thing this movie has to a conscience. Sean identifies the creature with the Irish demigod Ogra, and thus declares, “it’s a bad thing you’re doing!” Sam takes Sean under his wing, which explains why Sam eventually starts having second thoughts about their capitalist enterprise.

But before such thoughts can reach fruition, they reach London, where, above the objections of a couple of Irish university professors, they hook up with a sleazy exhibitor (Martin Benson) and, over the bodies of a couple of dead laborers, they settle the beast into his new home in an electrified pit in Battersea Park. It’s here that Gorgo finally gets named; the exhibitor avers that it’s a reference to the Gorgon of Greek mythology, but that sounds too ex post facto to me. And anyway, would it have hurt them to somehow reference his Irish origins? If not “Ogra”, couldn’t they have gone with something more familiar, like Paddy O’Gorgo?

The money starts rolling in, and Sam can keep his niggling conscience in check with the judicious application of alcohol, but the Irish scientists have made a discovery, through their catch-as-catch-can observation: Gorgo isn’t an adult specimen. In fact, he’s pretty much an infant, and by their best estimates an adult would be something in the neighborhood of 200 feet tall. Coincidentally, just off the coast of Nara, the sea starts bubbling again, and there emerges from the deep — Gorgo’s mom! Or dad. They never do reference gender; I guess in the ensuing mayhem nobody thought to check for dangly bits. (If only Gorgo had been found off the coast of Denmark instead of Ireland, I could theorize that the whole thing’s a sly updating of Grendel and his mother!) I’m going to go with “she,” just so there’ll be a female character somewhere in the movie.

“We’re screwed.”

Now, the parts coming up are the true visual meat of the movie, as Mama Gorgo, following a chemical trail left in the ocean by the water sprayed on Wee Gorgo to keep him moist on his sea voyage, fights off an embarrassingly mismatched assortment of military stock footage. She then wades up the Thames to spend the night crunching London beneath her flippered feet in classic kaiju style. The problem is that from a story standpoint, there’s really nothing more to discuss. Joe and Sam run around London (as do most Londoners) as a general evacuation is ordered, trying to keep Sean from getting trampled, and a newscaster provides a helpful commentary as the Big Lady swings into town, but all efforts by the British military to fend off the beast make the tactics of the Japanese peacekeeping forces look effective by comparison. In fact, humans simply don’t figure in the story from this point on; Mama Gorgo wades in, smashes things up, finds her young’un, frees him, and together they wade back into the sea. The people can simply watch and try not to be trodden upon.

Along the way it seems that Mrs. Gorgo goes out of her way to inflict revenge on London’s postcard industry, by destroying as many picturesque landmarks as possible. In fact, she may have gotten a little carried away. Consult the following map to see the order in which she destroyed the Tower Bridge (1), Big Ben (2), and Piccadilly Circus (3) before finally meandering over to Battersea Park (4) to rescue her abducted tot.

And really, that’s where the movie ends, with the ineffectual humans watching as mother and child wade back out to the open water. The characters we’ve been watching up until now — our exploitative salvage captains, the self-serving archeologist, the wise-beyond-his-years Kenny — all have no bearing on the action that is the climax of the movie. Sure, city-stomping is fun in and of itself, but it’s something of a letdown to find that the time we’ve spent with the human characters up until now has been mostly filler, rather than a necessary dramatic preamble.

At the very least, someone could have mentioned that the final conflict was as much the fault of Mama Gorgo as of any of the self-serving human characters. I mean, jeez, your child wanders off during a volcanic eruption; how many days are you going to let him go before you finally start looking for him? But the Londoners were, I guess, too devastated by the destruction around them to send Mrs. Gorgo packing with catcalls of, “Your parenting sucks!”

“Well! I’ll NOT let my son’s name be put up in lights before he’s out of nappies!”

And with the dinosauric duo, Eugene Lourie’s directorial career waded out to see as well, never to be seen again. The big-screen end of the city-destroying monster genre was both established and played out; anything more which needed to be seen in the same vein was either made on the cheap for the drive-in circuit, or imported from a certain foreign country in the Pacific Rim. Lourie spent the rest of his long career as an art director and production designer, but nothing he accomplished even in that role drew on his brief directorial success except possibly for his work on the 1978 TV-movie The Return of Captain Nemo. He had done his job well enough, perhaps, that no further efforts in that subgenre were needed.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 30, plus the full crew of a naval destroyer, and the usual unspecified collateral damage
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 135
• ominous thunderstorms: 1
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0