Thought I'd take a brief break from reviewing science fiction like Severance, which will break your brain if you watch it too much and try to understand. The Gorge, though the story takes place in the present, harkens back to Creature from the Black Lagoon and Them -- simple stories with clear-cut heros and monstrous monsters, the pride and joy of the theaters in the boroughs in the 1950s, where in the case of The Allerton Theater on Allerton Avenue in The Bronx, you could get in for a double feature with a quarter. And if you somehow missed one of these movies and the popcorn and the candy, you had a good chance seeing it a few years later on Million Dollar Movie, I think on Channel 9 in New York City -- where they shoulda been if they weren't there.
the Allerton Theater in the 1950s
The Gorge's story actually goes back just a few years before the 1950s, and the horrors it reveals -- mutants ranging from everything, including human-and-tree combos -- are the result of science gone awry at the end of World War II, with Oppenheimer and the atom-bomb specifically mentioned as a parallel development.
[Ok, here's an advisory about some spoilers ahead ... ]
And The Gorge is also a love story, with a male and a female sharp-shooter on both sides of the gorge. When they're not fighting off villains of the worst kind, he writes poetry and she loves it. They start off communicating with pen-on-paper viewed through binoculars across the gorge, and, of course eventually get together and fight the monsters in all kinds of ways.
By the way, when I say villains of the worst kind, I'm referring not only to the monsters who are partially human, but the monsters who are completely human, and try to exterminate our heroes with the latest in drones and weaponry. Sigourney Weaver makes an appearance as one of the evil people, and Miles Teller (who looks familiar but I can't remember where I saw him) and Anya-Taylor Joy (who looks familiar because she starred in The Queen's Gambit) play our two loving commando heroes.
So, hey, if you're in the mood for a bit of adrenalin and true love in an insane life-and-death pressure cooker of a situation, you can't go wrong with The Gorge.
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