According to WordPress internal tracking, this is my 100th post! Huzzah! Sure, a number of those are “basic information” posts, but still! I’ve been at this for almost half a year now, so I think we can say this has been a successful experiment. And with that, we’re done! Thanks for coming, see you on my next flight of fancy!
…kidding, of course. I’m just stalling because there’s not a whole lot worth saying about the very middle of the road The Gorgon from Hammer Horror.
A small village, residing in the shadow of a spooky castle, has had a string of unsolved murders over the years. And by “murders” I mean “the victims are turned to stone and the local officials are covering it up.” An artist is found hanged after his girlfriend gets stoned, which brings his father to town, who promptly turns to stone as well. A second son now comes to town to investigate, falling in love rather quickly for Mr. Peter Cushing’s assistant. Rumors circulate that a Gorgon named Megaera is responsible, which is a little odd because that wasn’t one of Medusa’s sisters and was instead one of the Erinyes/Furies. Anyway, the remaining son survives an encounter with the Gorgon and calls on Mr. Christopher Lee to help investigate. Turns out the assistant was actually the Gorgon and didn’t realize it! But Peter Cushing did and covered it up. Cushing and the son are turned to stone, the Gorgon is decapitated, and Christopher Lee is the only one left standing.
While it was nice to see Cushing and Lee together again–last seen here in Hammer’s The Mummy–this is a mostly forgettable movie. I really watched it because the amazing front page art I had commissioned for the site (seriously, I love it so much) featured a Gorgon, so I felt the need to watch a movie with one. It’s a strange little film, introducing the idea that the Gorgon was possessing someone about halfway through. Why did the assistant need to be the reincarnation of the mythological creature? Why couldn’t it just be the actual Gorgon of legend who had moved to somewhere in England, as the movie suggested early on? Why introduce–and then kill off–two members of a family when we could have just started with the third member as our main character? The 60’s were a hell of a drug, and that’s the best answer I’ve got.
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