It's always nice when a film starts out with a fake history lesson. Gargoyles informs us that humanity isn't the only intelligent species living on our planet - Satan himself created a species of humanoid horned (sometimes winged) reptiles, who emerge every few hundred years to try and wrestle dominance over the world from humanity. Humanity - notoriously rational as it is - has suppressed the truth about the gargoyles and put them into the realm of legend, the medieval stone gargoyles left as a final warning.
In modern day America (well, it's 1972), Dr. Mercer Boley (Cornel Wilde) and his daughter Diana (Jennifer Salt) are making their way through the southwest of the USA to visit the owner of one these roadside attractions whose existence fills my European heart with intense jealousy.
The man, fittingly known as Uncle Willie (Woody Chambliss), has something to show to the Boleys, something he thinks the Doctor in his function as TV-famous book-writing anthropologist and professional debunker of myths should find very interesting.
Willie has in fact found the motherlode - the intact skeleton of a winged, horned and beaked humanoid creature. Boley is skeptical, but willing to examine the thing more closely. He is also going to listen to the Native American legends the old man has to tell about the skeleton.
Before the old drunk can get very far with his stories, the reason for a certain fearfulness in his demeanor and the strange security measures he takes with confining the skeleton to a locked and barred shack (small echoes of Lovecraft's Whisperer in the Dark here), become clear. Something winged, and worse, clawed, lands on the roof of the shack and shreds right through it.
In the ensuing chaos, poor Willie dies and the shack goes up in flames. Jennifer and Boley escape with the skeleton's skull to the safety of their car .
It is not as safe as they think, though, as the same creature which attacked the shack lands on their car roof and tries to get inside, obviously to get at the skull. They manage to escape, and, for some reason postponing a visit to the police until the next day, check into the nearest motel.
When they finally return to Willie's shack with the Sheriff (William Stevens), whom they of course haven't told anything about flying monsters, the next day, the lawman easily finds a group of dirtbikers (lead by a young Scott Glenn) who are his preferred scapegoats for everything out of order in the area. The bikers themselves aren't helping their case much by looking through the burnt out remains of Willie's place and trying to flee (leading to the mandatory dirtbike chase every film with dirtbikes is obliged to have), so the Sheriff arrests them.
Jennifer is rightfully irritated by her father's obvious unwillingness to protect the long(ish) haired ones from the ire of the cops. One could think that having found a scientific sensation is more important to him than some random people's lifes.
Dispositions like Boley's can of course change when one is confronted with further attacks of the gargoyles and their leader (Bernie Casey), but said changes might come to late to prevent the things that usually happen when a young woman and men in rubber monster suits meet.
Gargoyles is the first piece of TV direction Bill L. Norton did after making the Kris Kristofferson vehicle Cisco Pike, beginning a long career as a network television mercenary. Unlike many made for TV films, this is really quite good (and seems to have at least semi-legendary status among American genre fans), graced with a script that has an interesting premise told in an economical way and made by a director who isn't phoning it in like too many TV people did back then.
There are of course flaws in the plot logic - it is, for example quite difficult to understand why the Boley's don't get the hell out of Dodge at once - but the content and pacing are handled so gracefully and with a surprising amount of complexity (not depth, mind you, more like thematic broadness) that I found myself not caring all that much about boring things like correct motivations or logical behaviour.
I found the film's first half to be especially effective, yet even the opening up to elements that wouldn't have been out of place in Star Trek works surprisingly well, showing some knowledge of and respect for genre conventions as well as a considerable willingness to leave the movie's morals a little more open than one can usually expect from a film like this.
The only real problem some modern viewers might have will lie with the gargoyle rubber suits. Don't get me wrong, they are lovingly designed, even granting the gargoyles individuality through differences in the lay-out of their heads and bodies, but some people won't be able to look at them and see more than (probably cheap) rubber suits, instead of the strange creatures those rubber suits represent. (My short theory about rubber suits: rubber suit monsters aren't supposed to be realistic, they are representational.)
I for one welcome our rubbery overlords.
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