Review: Clash of the Titans

It remains one of the genre’s homelier entries, there’s no faulting a film this lovingly and aptly arcane.

Clash of the Titans
Photo: Warner Bros.

Any Gen-Xer who grew up watching TBS no doubt came across Clash of the Titans, Desmond Davis’s kitschy celebration of the legends of Greek mythology. In the film, Zeus (Laurence Olivier) angers Thetis (Maggie Smith) when he transforms her mortal son Calibos (Neil McCarthy) into a deformed beast. The almighty god’s own son, Perseus (Harry Hamlin), kills Calibos and marries Andromeda (Judi Bowker) but must fulfill his ultimate destiny by protecting the fair maiden from the sea monster Kraken.

Ray Harryhausen’s visual effects evoke sights unseen since Harry O. Hoyt’s The Lost World, but his stop-motion creations (Pegasus, Medusa, the adorable mechanic owl Bubo) are every bit as memorable as the casting. In addition to Olivier and Smith, Burgess Meredith stars as Perseus’s loyal mentor Ammon and Ursula Andress appears, of course, as Aphrodite. (Smith was then married to the film’s writer Beverley Cross, who had worked previously with Harryhausen on the legendary Jason and the Argonauts and Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger.)

More memorable than the film’s set pieces (prime here is Perseus dodging Medusa’s arrows), though, is its high camp value. Smith, in particular, stands apart from the all-star crowd when Thetis (here, a huge stone head collapsed from its body) threatens to destroy a mortal kingdom unless it sacrifices the virginal Andromeda to Kraken. These fantastical epics were common in the early ’80s (Legend, Conan the Barbarian, and The Beastmaster were all variations of the same chest-thumping themes), and while Clash of the Titans remains one of the genre’s homelier entries, there’s no faulting a film this lovingly and aptly arcane.

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Score: 
 Cast: Harry Hamlin, Judi Bowker, Burgess Meredith, Laurence Olivier, Claire Bloom, Maggie Smith, Ursula Andress, Sian Phillips, Flora Robson, Anna Manahan, Freda Jackson, Tim Pigott-Smith, Neil McCarthy, Jack Gwillim, Susan Fleetwood, Pat Roach, Donald Houston, Vida Taylor, Harry Jones  Director: Desmond Davis  Screenwriter: Beverley Cross  Distributor: Warner Bros.  Running Time: 118 min  Rating: PG  Year: 1981  Buy: Video, Soundtrack

Ed Gonzalez

Ed Gonzalez is the co-founder of Slant Magazine. A member of the New York Film Critics Circle, his writing has appeared in The Village Voice, The Los Angeles Times, and other publications.

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