Clash of the Titans was part of the brief, not fully explicable early-1980s fad for sword ‘n’ sorcery films–The Dark Crystal, Labyrinth, Dragonslayer, Legend, and the grandmaster Excalibur.  (My one attempt at explanation:  Dungeons and Dragons got underway in the mid-1970s, and by then it had created an audience for this stuff.)  It’s not the best but it has its own goofy charm, and a suitably godlike cast:  Laurence Olivier (as Zeus, road map, etc.), Ursula Andress, Claire Bloom, Burgess Meredith (wait, really?), Siân Phillips, and Maggie Smith.  Of course, none of them are the star–Harry “I love my trailer” Hamlin as Perseus plays the protagonist, but that’s not the same thing.  (The 2010 remake would have to make do with Sam Worthington, who gets called when producers can’t summon the energy to spell “Jai Courtney.”)

The real star of the film is Ray Harryhausen, whose career as an animator began in the 1950s with Mighty Joe Young and made his last feature film with this.  Harryhausen’s stop-motion, frame-by-frame animation doesn’t look real to our eyes, but I’d argue it was never meant to–exactly how realistic should Medusa be, anyway?  There was always something so tactile about his images, like the textured paintings of the Expressionists come to life and therefore best for this kind of mythic storytelling.  And the physicality of them–the fact that the images derived from real objects in a real space–gives them a feel that almost no one in the CGI era tries to do.  There’s a lot about this film that you just don’t see anymore.

Release your Kraken at Sunday 2pm Eastern on BBC America.