Just what I expected

How sad is this?

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

Very cheap to look at and some of the characters decisions were really wrong feeling. The effects used on the Gargoyles were terrible. Sound was weak at best. It wasn't very original. I slightly liked the idea but the execution was totally wrong. The monsters looked and acted ridiculous. It didn't manage to achieve what it set out to do - scare. I managed to watch it. I didn't think that it was very good. It had a slight seventies b-movie charm but was painfully bad with very few redeeming features.

Gargoyle creatures are living in a small American town in 1972.Generally speaking, I don't review horror films, but by today's standards the horror element here is very mild, in fact this reads more like an episode of The Outer Limits (1963-65) complete with the same narrator at the start.This low budget gem proves that so much can be done without CGI and violence, maybe today's film makers should watch this film and learn from it. I am told this movie has a few obvious errors, such as wires holding up the creatures in flight, but my small YouTube screen could not pick up on these things.

The Gargoyles of legend hatch en masse every 600 years or so, and their time has come again. Dedicated to wiping out mankind in order to ensure their own survival, they start attacking the residents of a small desert community. An anthropology professor named Mercer Boley (Cornel Wilde) and his perky daughter Diana (Jennifer Hall) come to this place to meet with a curiosity shop proprietor, Uncle Willie (Woody Chambliss), and soon realize the nature of the situation when the shop is attacked and Uncle Willie is killed. The local police chief (William Stevens) rounds up a gang of dirt bikers who he assumes are the ones who killed Willie, only to end up needing their services in order to combat the winged creatures.'Gargoyles' is never really scary, but it is suitably eerie in spots and has a touch of style to it, with director Bill L. Norton employing some slow motion in the Gargoyle action scenes. The use of locations and the photography (by Earl Rath) is excellent, and the music score by Robert Prince is quite enjoyable as well. Certainly you can't go wrong with this top notch cast that also includes Grayson Hall as a motel owner, Bernie Casey as the head Gargoyle (this man sure has a presence on screen), Scott Glenn as heroic biker James Reeger, and Vic Perrin supplying the voice of Casey's character. This being a TV movie of the era, it has a short & sweet running time, with a story (concocted by Steven & Elinor Karpf) that moves along quite nicely, although that brief running time also means a rather rushed conclusion. The superb makeup (which earned an Emmy) was supervised by Del Armstrong and executed by Ellis Burman Jr. & a young Stan Winston.Recommended to all fans of the made-for-TV horror films of the 1970s.Eight out of 10.

Released to TV in 1972, "Gargoyles" is just simply grand entertainment of the highest order. Yes, it's a Grade B cartoony TV flick, the precursor to notorious modern SyFy flicks, but imagination and legend are about good versus evil and the power of selfless courage against impossible odds. In other words, there's nothing more heroic, suspenseful and spooky than man against monster, and "Gargoyles" delivers the goods.THE PLOT: A professor/writer and his daughter (Cornel Wilde & Jennifer Salt) come across a bunch of recently re-birthed gargoyles in the desert and mayhem ensues.Highlights include: An excellent and mysterious beginning (the first 20 minutes or so where some desert rat shows the professor and his daughter a gargoyle skeleton in some dark shack out in the middle of nowhere; night comes down and then the gargoyles attack), nice spooky atmosphere, haunting soundtrack, excellent gargoyle costumes for that era (and considering it was a TV movie), good cast, dirt bikers (led by a young Scott Glenn), chases, hellish cave sets, cool gargoyle voices, grisly gargoyle murders, etc. Hey, there's a reason for all these high ratings. The majority of the reviewers probably saw it when they were kids and were totally spooked-out.Bottom Line: "Gargoyles" is proof that you don't need a big budget to make a great, engrossing, creepy, adventurous flick.The film doesn't overstay its welcome at 74 minutes and was shot in Carlsbad, NM, and Laredo, TX.GRADE: A