Medousa (1998)

Director: George Lazopoulos

Screenplay: George Lazopoulos

Cast: Eleni Filini as The Mother, Thanos Amorginos as Perseus, Vana Rambota as Katia, Haris Mihalogiannakis as Spyros, Dimitris Karageorgos as Mitsos, Mitsos Sioris as Archegos, Frosso Litra as Christina

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

The blues guitar licks on the score are unexpected for this film, but Medousa in general, as an obscure Greek film, is openly something out of the expected. This takes ancient Greek mythology in distinct modern direction with the prologue establishing the idiosyncratic tone: it starts with a teen boy named Perseus and his friendship with a professional knife thrower, saying goodbye to each other before the boy leaves with his mother. However, he catches the glimpse of a mysterious woman who wears sunglasses which leads to the disappearance of his mother, and ten years later as an adult, Perseus (Thanos Amorginos) finds himself tracking down this ageless figure. For obvious reasons, with the title of the film, George Lazopoulos' sole film as writer-director does not hide it is portraying a modernised take on the Medusa story.

Medusa, the most famous of the "Gorgons" in Greek myth, has her story told pretty accurately in this version. However, alongside the protagonist not being the Perseus of the past, but a young man who practices knife throwing with replicas of legendary paintings like the Mona Lisa, and with a taste in cool Batman t-shirts, Lazopoulos attempted to bring this mythological figure into nineties Greece and figure out how she would exist within the massive centuries long changes in human society. For a part of its form, rather than overt horror, this plays like a crime drama, only with the police presuming that it is not a petrified victim in a hotel room, but somehow a life sized statue that was managed to be hiked there for inexplicable reasons. The surrealism of Medusa's known aspect, petrifying her victims into stone when they gaze on her, is taken advantage of in how, whilst horrifying, there is a weirdness to the sight of all her male victims petrified in stone. This is a really idiosyncratic story because the horror is not overt gore or threat of mutilation but the fear of this permanence if in a form that can easily be destroyed. There is a sense of humour if a sick one, replicas of men still wearing their clothes which have not been petrified, all due to an older woman in sunglasses the police and eventually Perseus are pursuing. It is a nice way to portray this, with a sense a humour at first, where one case is seen as an art piece to protest environmental damage than a male victim in the park, but there is the sense of disconcertment with this as it goes along, with the missing people who are replicated by the statues. When we find ourselves in "Ms. Meda's" home, when being robbed, it offers an even more gruesome image with a room of statues, some with limbs broken off and placed together.

As people close in on "Ms. Medu", we see this mythological figure be drawn as a distinct take on this myth, a drifter who survives by stealing the money from petrified victims to live on. This is more so because I have explicitly only referred to male victims, the twist of what happens to women who see her without the sunglasses certainly idiosyncratic and a great conclusion for the film. Whilst we have a lick of synthesizer occasionally used in-between all the guitar licks, which feels of the decade before, this is definitely a nineties film slowly encroaching onto the Millennium. It still feels pre-web and pre-dominance of mobile phones, but we are still within modernised European metropolises and towns which this gorgon can still hide covertly inside.

As the plot has Perseus' group robbing her home, an ill advised decision which will be doomed for most of them, naturally this story starts to link to the country's past and culture whilst riffing on horror tropes from the universal language of the genre. It makes sense, for example, the exposition comes from an orthodox Greek priest, one who became involved due to his mistake of ego and wants to learn more of the gorgon from Perseus' upcoming quest. Matched against its central idea, of how if these figures of legends exist they would hide in among humans as wanderers, eking out lives, there is a lot to admire with Medousa especially in how small scale the narrative is. It is sad, as a result, this is George Lazopoulos' only film. I have come across this a few times now as a film viewer especially in horror, the one-offs or creators who did not follow up with a large filmography, and whilst a part of me hopes that this was a case George Lazopoulos at least got to make the one film in him he ever wanted to make, it feels tragic that this fascinating one-off was not followed with this director-writer taking this tone to other subjects.