The Giant Of Metropolis (1961)
On the one hand, you have to wonder how a movie that featured scenes of our hero being tormented by what looked like twigs from trees could take six credited writers to produce it, but on the other hand one of those writers would go on and pen the Terence Hill classic Super Fuzz. That reminds me of one of my favorite jokes: How many Italians does it take to write a really bad sword and sandal epic? Six - one to do the actual writing and five to oil up the guy named Gordon who will inevitably be starring in it. No wait, that wasn't the joke I was thinking of. Actually, I think it went something like this: What's an innuendo? An Italian suppository.
From now on, I'll be retiring that uppity term "peplum" that is usually used to describe this peculiarly hunky genre of Italian film and be henceforth referring to them by their more appropriate name, "innuendo." This particular innuendo features Gordon Mitchell who is probably a different person than Gordon Scott (Hercules Vs. The Moloch and Goliath And The Vampires) and his gasping effort will make you long for the muscular stylings of Mr. Scott.
Mitch looks a little rough around the edges in this movie and some of the reasons for that might be gleaned from the information he imparts in an interview included on the DVD. For one thing, he began making this movie a mere two days after he wrapped on Maciste In The Land Of The Cyclops and we can only imagine how much a vacation in the backyard of some cyclops will take out of you.
The other reason this dude might have looked like he was oiled up real good and put away wet is because he was thirty-eight years old when he made it! Eeek! Is there anything that makes you squirm more than having to see some guy's dad running around sucking his gigantic chest in and flashing his old man guns at you every five seconds? All of this may explain why there are some scenes where he has to walk around on rocky ground and looks like he's stumbling and about ready to fall over. Either that or it's really good acting that shows us the cumulative effects of all the torture he has endured.
Mitch plays a middle-aged behemoth named Obro (now you realize why he is referred to as a "giant" in the title - Obro In Metropolis just doesn't have the same ring to it) who is wandering around the mountains with his old man (That makes his dad, what? About seven hundred?) and some of dad's loyal subjects. They're looking for the city of Metropolis.
Dad suddenly realizes he's really old and croaks, but not before he gives some sort of dying declaration about how important it was that Obro go on to Metropolis and take care of business. Or he might have been saying something else. It just didn't seem all that important to me at the time. As soon as daddy goes tits up to the moon, his loyal subjects immediately call off the mission, leaving Obro and a few brown nosers (He's dead! And Obro's obvious abuse of steroids ensures that he won't be around long either, so there's no point in kissing up to that royal family anymore!) are still there and decide to go on to Metropolis. With the small force they no have, I'm assuming that Obro is going to be challenging their king to some kind of winner-take-all posedown.
The guy who runs Metropolis, a crazy cooter named Yotar, sees on his TV that Obro and his posse are still headed his way, so he unleashes the first of several bad special effects on them. At first I thought it was some sort of sandstorm or fog or something, but it turned out to be some type of force field that killed everyone, except Obro.
Somewhere around this time, Yotar reveals his long-running and terminally dull scheme to implant the brain cells of his dad into his son, thus making his son his dad and turning his grandfather into his grandson or some such nonsense. It goes without saying that this is all in an effort to cheat Death. Do you ever notice that in these types of movies, there's a lot of folks out there getting cheated, but Death usually isn't one of them?
As fans of these innuendo movies more than likely anticipated, Obro gets himself captured and brought before Yotar. The hero and/or his girlfriend and/or his male companion/life-partner are always getting themselves trussed up and strapped down in these innuendo movies. This one is different only in that Obro spends most of the film captured and when he finally does bust lose he promptly gets not only himself, but his brand new girlfriend captured as well.
Obro takes the opportunity of his capturing to tell Yotar that he must quit farting around with the laws of nature and spews forth all the expected anti-Dr. Moreau-style rhetoric you have memorized if you're a hero caught in this situation. Yotar indicates that he'll take all of Obro's concerns under advisement and by that I mean he has Obro dragged away to a dungeon.
In an effort to show us what a tyrannical ruler Yotar is, we have the distinct displeasure to witness their ritual mating dance. Because he is a real bad guy who exercises total control over everyone, he even dictates how they will hook up. Now, don't get too worked up, because it's mostly all implied, but the bad part of it is that the little dance ritual is not implied. Bad dancing sequences are not unheard of in these movies and seem to occur with frightening regularity when you start crunching the numbers (see Ulysses Against The Son Of Hercules and Hercules Vs. The Sons Of The Sun for example), but this one stands out as just plain embarrassing.
You've got two guys and one girl and of course there's a costume with really big feathers involved. They all do these really slow and heinous ballet-type moves and things end with all three kind of tangled up and one guy touching the other guy's leg! Maybe I'm not as progressive as this movie demands me to be, but I shuddered when they held that pose for an uncomfortable period of time. Uh, Obro, can you bust loose now and break this dance party up?
Instead of just killing off Obro, Yotar decides to put Obro in a series of speciality matches to test his something or other. First up, Obro must battle the monster who dwells underground. He is the most fearsome thing in Metropolis and frankly as I heard this thing talked up, I was thinking that maybe Yotar should have saved this particular match for last, because it was sounding like our boy Obro didn't have any hope of surviving this encounter. The monster then appeared and I looked on in awe as I saw a really tall, fat, hairy guy with a giant club that looked like a big bone made out of really tough foam.
Obro and Lardass had themselves the kind of slow, lumbering match you would expect, featuring punches that showed an awful lot of light before Obro finally punched Lardass out for good. Obro was taken back into custody after this big win, while Yotar went to work booking a tougher opponent for Obro.
It wasn't long before Obro was brought back to the arena where Yotar unleashed an even more diabolical foe for our valiant and super jacked-up hero. I don't think that Yotar actually said this when he started the match, but he was probably thinking something along these lines when he rang the bell: Cry havoc and let slip the pygmies of war!
Do I have to even report that Yotar Fieldhouse was positively rocking when the pygmies came out to fight Obro? And not just regular, crappy pygmies, but flesh eating pygmies! There was something like six of them (maybe they were they were the movie's writers) and they would be jumping on Obro's back and legs and biting him! Obro would periodically throw these guys through around like paper airplanes, but as anyone who's ever met a sixpack of pygmies in the parking lot of the local honkytonk on a Friday night can attest, the numbers soon overwhelmed our determined, but clearly very tasty warrior.
Obro ultimately suffers his first defeat to these little dudes, but Yotar orders them not to eat Obro, probably because he keeps selling out the Fieldhouse with his matches. To show you the dedication the film makers had toward continuity, Obro even sported some teeth marks on his arm later on, though I'm unsure if this was from the pygmies or perhaps from his new girlfriend.
Following that fairly humiliating loss, Obro never really recovers his momentum and ends up being further embarrassed when Yotar tries out a variety of torture rays on him. Obro finally passes out underneath the cold ray though they all just looked like different colored spotlights to me.
In between playing evil promoter in Obro's pro wrestling career, Yotar is still hell bent on doing stem cell research on his dad and son. While doing that, he periodically receives warnings from his underlings that the earth is rebelling against Metropolis and its use of natural resources for unnatural purposes and that there's a volcanic situation unseen since the days of Peter Brady which is threatening their very existence. Yotar shows us that he has all the qualifications to be mayor of Krypton by refusing to heed the warnings even as some Italian stagehands turn on the dry ice machines and flood the crappy sets with smoke, I mean volcanic vapors.
Did I mention that during all of this, Obro gets some help escaping, decides to accept a position as a terrorist and periodically shows up in Metropolis from his secret hideout to beat up soldiers? He does this when he isn't trying to turn his new girlfriend, the princess Mecede, onto his real passion in life which happens to be monotheism! Meanwhile, Yotar has it out with his wife, the queen, who is somehow named Texen, and she poisons herself rather than stand idly by while Yotar experiments on their son. His name by the way is Elmos. Come on volcano!
So when does Obro show up, tear up some pillars and throw a spear into Yotar's face? He doesn't! That's the beauty (and by beauty, I mean problem) of this movie. He gets captured with his gal pal and talks about how great his country is where people do what they want, when they want and that Yotar isn't really a bad sort. He's just kind of blinded by science. Mecede talks about how she just wants to have a baby and wishes that Elmos could see the sky or something and Yotar overhears this and decides to let them go.Yotar then goes out to let his citizens know that Metropolis is being destroyed, so they beat the piss out of him and we get five minutes of stuff blowing up and people flopping around in the water, before we see that somehow Mecede and Obro have washed up on a beach together.
As poorly constructed as the sets in this movie, The Giant Of Metropolis, shows us that "different" is worse when it comes to messing with the formula of these Italian innuendoes and that a tired out strongman who gets beat up by midgets can be just as boring as the usual Hercules, Samson, and Maciste movie. There's not enough good action here and there's lots of scenes of people in ridiculous costumes standing around these Spartan and vaguely sci-fi sets babbling about stuff that didn't make any sense. (Why would you want the brain of your dad inside of your son, especially when your dad is against it and doesn't share your views? Wouldn't he rebel against you, once he had a brand new, younger body?).
The picture quality of the DVD is horrible and even though Retromedia provided a disclaimer that the picture quality is in fact horrible, it doesn't alter the fact that at times, it's hard to tell whether this movie was really ever in color. The sound is just as bad which makes the sometimes incomprehensible plot hard to follow (I know they were thinking about using Obro's blood for something, but was that related in any way to the brain transplant?). This is one Italian suppository that felt like it went in sideways.