Meet The New Gods, Same As The Old Gods

When you think about it, Clash of the Titans (the remake, 2010), is Greek mythology’s version of Christianity. You have God (Zeus), Satan (Hades) and Jesus (Perseus), all playing with the lives and minds of humanity. Kinda like beer.

In this case, Argos, a city of the unwashed, is fed up with the Gods not answering their prayers, and destroys all graven images. This, of course, angers the Gods, and they let Hades make them pay for their blasphemy.

The Gods call for the sacrifice of the queen’s supermodel hot daughter, Andromeda. If they don’t BBQ her alive in 10 days they will unleash the Kraken, a mega creature feared by the Gods themselves. Probably because the darn thing is twice the size of Argos and has a wide variety of long tentacles with which to crush and knock over stuff. Just looking at it will cause you to colorize your toga.

Giant scorpions, snake women, gargoyle harpies, flying horses, the Kraken… Christianity was never this cool or fun.

Tight Titans

Obscured fantasy/horror classic Clash of the Titans (1981) is one of those cheesy guilty pleasure viewing experiences, right up there with coin-fed adult video machines and looking through my neighbor’s window at night whilst standing on yon garbage can.

Unlike my “power to the peephole” dalliances, Clash doesn’t have boobies. But it does have giant monsters, a flying horse with pigeon wings the size of a really big newspaper opened wide, a reptile woman with snakes for hair (must be hard to comb them) whose glare can turn men to stone, skeletons with swords (that could be a cool metal band name) and the interfering gods from Mt. Olympus who make life a pain for the mortals who are starting to believe in science and technology over some invisible omnipotent overlord in the sky.

The illegitimate son of Zeus (the CEO of the Gods), studly Perseus has to chop off the hand of the swamp demon Calibos. And he has to get the head of the snake-haired Medusa to stop his supermodel princess girlfriend Andromeda from being sacrificed to the giant Kraken monster, which is being released to eat the princess and destroy the city of Joppa by the jealous and manipulative Mt. Olympus gods whom the mortals rightfully mocked.

Oh yeah, there’s an annoyingly cute mechanical owl named Bubo and the aforementioned flying horse Pegasus, who had many opportunities to drop some road apples all over Joppa’s fine chariots from above, but did not do so. Fun, action-packed fantasy movie. Stupid horse.