Clash of the Titans

For some reason I've been thinking about Greek mythology lately, probably because of a desire to play the God of War games again with the third coming out next year, and this was available on Netflix streaming, so why the hell not. It's a pretty fun fantasy action film that refers to the myth of Perseus even if it isn't quite accurate, changing details to get away with huge impressive monsters when they want to. It also plays fast and loose with the definition of titan, which I think are one of the more interesting aspects of the myths and don't actually appear at all in the film. From what I can tell the Kraken isn't even originally an aspect of Greek myth, being a western European thing, and the one here certainly doesn't look like any interpretation of the beast I've ever seen.

Beyond that completely unimportant stuff though, the movie is an entertaining adventure. It comes from that special time in the early 80's when special effects were nearly acceptable but not quite there yet and you could get away with some blood and nudity in a PG movie because PG-13 hadn't been invented yet. Harryhausen was best known for his stop motion effects his whole career, and some of the creations here don't look too bad. The problem is whenever they have to be integrated with live action footage, the composite effect ends up looking terrible as one thing is clearly being pasted on top of another. It's the sort of movie that could really use a modern cleaning-up along the lines of the Star Wars special editions, or a remake next year as the case may be. Anyway, Harry Hamlin plays with some neat magical gifts from Olympus, fights some hideous monsters, meets a wacky robotic friend, and gets the girl in the end. Not a bad use of a couple of hours.