Gorgo

Russian-French émigré Eugène Lourié emulates the Japanese kaiju genre in this British film, shot partly in Ireland, that harks back to American monster movies such as King Kong (Merian C. Cooper, Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1933). A seafaring crew of treasure hunters led by Captain Joe Ryan (Bill Travers) and First Officer Sam Slade (William Sylvester) are nearly sunk by an unexpected volcanic eruption off the Irish coast. The shifting seabed also releases a huge prehistoric monster, captured by Ryan and his team and sold to a London circus for exhibition and exploitation. However, the creature, newly christened ‘Gorgo’, is just an infant, and his angry mother is about to come looking for him, leaving destruction in her wake. A fun and certainly unusual entry in the British cinema canon, the film also, bizarrely, spawned a ‘Gorgoverse’ of spin-off comic books and novels.