I’m going to start this recap with a confession: I have no idea what this movie is about. I mean, from the title one would think it was a monster movie, with a Minotaur, but…no. The only Minotaur is a stone statue that the Greek villagers worship (I guess there wasn’t a lot to do in rural areas).
Donald Pleasence’s character, an Irish priest named Father Roche, thinks it’s about Satanism. That is, he thinks the pagan villagers are under the sway of an ancient evil older than mankind itself, or some such drivel. I can agree that murdering tourists and young archeologists is evil and all, but it does the plot no good to just casually conflate…everything, and hope the resulting jumble is scary. It’s not coherent enough to be scary.
Just to confuse things further, Peter Cushing’s character is Baron Corofax, a nobleman from Carpathia, and since one of his followers appears to come back to life after being hit and dragged by a car, I guess the director thought, “Vampires. Chicks dig vampires,” could take the place of a consistent mythology.
Confused yet? Good. Then we’ll begin.
- Script quality: I suspect they made it up as they went along.
- Acting quality: Horrible, although Pleasence does his best, bless him.
- Overall feeling afterwards: There was a lot of bull here, but alas, not the scary monstrous kind.
Warning: half-man half-beast does not appear in this film.
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