Gorgo from 1961 is your standard giant monster creature-feature that the studios had been dishing out for quite some time, before and after.  The great thing about this movie is that, in the end, the creature lives.  A bit of a spoiler yes, but this is a movie you have seen many times over if you have enjoyed films about said subject previously.  While it would not go on to break new ground in any respect, it still had that air of mystery, suspense and horror about it which makes for a good monster movie.  It would have been nice if Robert L. Richards, Daniel Jame and Eugène Lourié had been a little bolder and daring with their script, but such as it is, it turned out fairly good.

The film takes place in Ireland, where off the coast it is discovered a dinosaur-like monster is discovered.  It may have gone unnoticed if a bunch of treasure-hunters had not started turning up dead.  Thus it is that Joe Ryan is commissioned to go out and kill the creature, but instead decides to capture it as having it alive will bring in a lot more money.  Before the sale, some scientists inspect the creature and surmise that it must be just a child and that if his mother is still in the picture, she will absolutely huge, possibly two to three times the size of creature before them.  Selling Gorgo to a zoo, as he has since been named, Joe Ryan and all of London will pay the price for interfering in nature when the mother of Gorgo, named Ogra, comes calling.

As one is probably able to guess, there is a lot of destruction and spectacle to be found in the movie though it does not really happen until the latter half of the film.  Director Eugène Lourié does a great job of handling the movie and taking it through its paces.  The opening scene with the ship on the ocean is fairly exciting and the film moves to more dramatic scenes and character building through most of the film until the final climactic events take place.  While it is a fairly standard film, seeing giant monsters tear cities apart is always a fun time to be had, this one with the added bonus of little bodies flying here and there to give it an air of authenticity.

Being the standard and clichéd monster movie that it is, it also hurts the film as you can almost choreograph what is about to happen.  If the film does not let you leave some things up to the imagination it takes some of the magic away and that is sadly what happened with this movie.  Another problem with the film, specifically the script, was the story itself.  As previously stated, it could have been a lot smarter than it was.  The writers could have taken some chances.  Obviously when mama Ogra came along to rescue her son, the smart thing would have been to just let the child go.  Instead what follows is an insurmountable and unwinnable battle that destroys the majority of London as mankind tries to destroy the creature.  Secondly, if you knew that a creature existed that was as big as that, and the little baby creature you had in captivity was going to grow that big, why keep it?  So yes, a few script problems, but in the end forgivable as the finished product was fairly enjoyable.

As far as acting goes, being a solid little B movie there were no recognizable names which is a shame, though Bill Travers as Joe Ryan stood out above the rest.  The creature effects were all right, being a giant rubber-suit monster, but it looked fantastic as London Bridge and Big Ben were getting demolished.  A highlight of the film was the score by Angelo Francesco Lavagnino.  The opening sequence was dramatic and had that adventurous flair that signified you were about to watch a giant monster movie before settling down to a nice orchestral lull that suggested an epic film was about to take place before your very eyes.  Of course, that would not be the case but all in all; the film turned out to be quite decent in most respects and makes for a really good matinee feature.

3 out of 5