GARGOYLES

Cornel Wilde, Grayson Hall, Jennifer Salt

GARGOYLES (1972 telefilm). Director: Bill Norton. 

Dr. Mercer Boley (Cornel Wilde) and his daughter, Diana (Jennifer Salt), drive into the desert to seek out an old man (Woody Chambliss) who runs a museum of strange artifacts and has found a very weird skeleton. Just as Boley thinks the old man has put together a phony artifact, his home is attacked by a barely-seen creature that sets fire to the place and runs off. A motorcycle gang run by James Reeger (Scott Glenn) is accused of the crime, but Mercer and Diana know that there's something monstrous out there in the desert, or more to the point, in the caverns nearby. Boley has uncovered a nest of gargoyles, a demonic race that are intent on taking over the world. When Diana is kidnapped by the head gargoyle (a dubbed Bernie Casey), Mercer and the police track her to the caverns ... 

Scott Glenn protests his innocence

Gargoyles is pretty bad, which is a shame because it has some atmosphere in the beginning, as well as a workable plot, but it's just unconvincing and kind of cheapjack. Wilde and Salt do the best they can with the material, and Grayson Hall is fun as a slatternly motel owner who hopes to get a date with Wilde -- fat chance! Scott Glenn makes an impression as the motorbike guy who joins in the hunt for the gargoyles. The prologue to the film makes it sound as if this will be some kind of epic good vs. evil battle -- apparently the gargoyles were thrown down from Heaven and try to take over the world every several hundred years or so -- but this doesn't have the required budget to make it work. The overuse of slow-motion to depict action is a tiresome device that doesn't work at all. Director Bill Norton did a better job with False Arrest some years later.

Verdict: Another crappy 1970's made-for-TV horror flick that wastes its potential. **.