Samson And The 7Miracles Of The World (1961)
This is another one of those muscleman epics that seems alternately obsessed
with displaying the rippling back muscles of star Gordon Scott and with the
palace intrigue in old time China. The fact that the version I saw only ran 77
minutes was both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, everything seemed to
be happening in a rather hasty manner with entire sequences that could have
explained exactly how characters went from doing one thing to the next
mysteriously missing. On the other hand, since it was only 77 minutes and
Gordon was perpetually greased up and wasn't afraid to stand around posing in
this red diaper that looked like he raided Sean Connery's Zardoz wardrobe, you can understand that I wasn't terribly peeved that maybe I was
missing fifteen minutes of Gordo speaking variations of the line "this Cho
sounds as if he is a man of courage. I would like to meet him and lay with
him". Normally, I'd reset Gordo's credentials as beefy strongman, but we already did
that when we watched him run around undercover as a guy named Glauco in Hercules Vs. The Moloch. Suffice it to say that Gordon has all the skills he needs to carry off the
role of giant hero since he has a large hairless chest and an endless supply of
the muscle grease he glistens with throughout things. Since this is such a short movie, a narrator is employed at the beginning so
that we can jump right into things with a minimum of onscreen drama. He tells
us that the Mongols are bothering the Chinese in the 1200s and that only a
young giant named Samson can help out and that he will need to try and ring the
freedom bell which is the signal to all Chinamen that it's time to flip the
switch and run those Mongols right back to their mama's house! If you have any hope of enjoying this movie (aside from watching shiny hunks in
red Depends pose among a bunch of orientals) you'll need to just accept as a
fact that Samson is in China and actually has some reason for being there. The
movie doesn't really address the issues as to who this Samson is, why is he
there, how did he get there, or where in the world he keeps that tube of
bronzer in that little diaper, so you'll just have to gloss over all of that
and say, "since he's here, we may as well see how much crap he bust up".  He does a fair amount of busting stuff up, but before we can get to that, we
have to meet our hunk's foe. This time, it is the leader of the Mongols whose
name is Garak. Garak isn't content with merely being the supreme ruler of the
invading hoard but wants to become Emperor of China. I wasn't real clear on
what exactly this guy's position was, because at first I thought he was some
kind of foreign invader who was in charge of the Mongols, but during the entire
movie he seems to be living in the royal court, hanging around with the prince
and princess of the Emperor, all the while plotting their hunting accidents and
collateral damage status.
So I was stuck with some cognitive dissonance as to whether he was invading
from outside or an insider scheming his way to the top. I resolved this bit of
cognitive dissonance the way I usually do and took another swig of my Pabst,
burped a stinky mouth fart, shrugged my shoulders, and shouted "bring on the
damn beefcake!" Garak puts his schemes into action and the prince goes off on a tiger hunt, but
somehow it ends with him all tied up and dumped in a tiger pit. I don't know
what a tiger pit is, but more importantly I was thinking that they must have
had a different idea of what a "hunting accident" was than we do since I wasn't
sure how having your body be discovered all tied up in a tiger pit with tigers
gnawing on you would qualify as an "accident" but then again I'm no Bobby
Knight, so what do I know?  Luckily for this dopey prince, there just happens to be a really big white dude
standing around that part of China just looking to do a good deed where lots of
muscles are needed. Samson takes this opportunity to grip and grope a tree and
tear it out of the ground. Bad guys fall out of the tree and the next thing I
know Samson is going one on one with a stuffed tiger!
The director, Riccardo Freda (we remember him from when he wussed out on
directing I Vampiri, thus giving Mario Bava his start), at first interweaves blatant stock footage
of a tiger prowling around with his actors and then switches to the stuffed
animal once Samson has to try and pry the creature's jaws wide open so it don't
bite him and stuff. I will admit that once Samson had the thing in a chokehold and they went to
wide shots of him putting the sleeper on this beast that it did appear to be
real tiger, but I would add that it appeared to a really tranquilized tiger.
After finally beating up the very sleepy tiger, he rescues the prince and ends
up heading into some town to meet up with Cho. Cho is the legendary leader of the rebels. He must be legendary for losing or
something because the guy is hiding out in the back room of a seedy bar and
just waiting for some jacked up bodybuilder to show up and ring his freedom
bell (ding and dong!). They exchange pleasantries and then some brute brings in
the princess who must have escaped Garak's henchman, but not some horny drunk. This guy is wanting a room for he and his lady even though it's clear she has
no interest in him and so he and Cho have a brief scuffle. Then this guy throws
sand in Cho's eyes. Guess who sees this and tags himself in? Samson responds by
doing what a guy named Samson does best. He completely tears up the bar! He
rips out beams, jumps off balconies, throws people around and clubs people with
pieces of wood! He even apologizes to the owner of the bar afterwards! He's
rough and ready and considerate! As is so often the case in these types of affairs, the princess goes and gets
herself captured by Garak. I think how she got captured was one of those scenes
that just didn't fit into the 77 minute running time, but they probably figured
that fans of the genre would understand that you're always getting rescued,
captured, and rescued again and that by skipping that, we could concentrate on
the important part of the process which is having Samson head off to the city
to rescue her. I think this is when he was at the public executions that Garak was holding,
but these movies are simply a series of going off somewhere to get someone so I
wouldn't be surprised if the details got mixed up a little. There was a scene
where Garak was proudly debuting his latest execution method which had
something to do with a big blade being dragged by a chariot. This was a really
neat execution method because it gave Samson an excuse to jump onto the chariot
and climb all over it while the horses thundered around the arena.  The best part of all this is watching Samson wandering around in the crowd
beforehand. You should be able to spot him - he's the only white guy wearing
just his underpants and a full foot taller than everyone else. It's probably a
good thing that they didn't try and have him skulking around the city
undercover or something (uh, I'm just a Buddhist monk that uses Stacker 2).
He gets help in rescuing the princess from Garak's girlfriend who is irked that
Garak's latest scheme is to marry the princess to become emperor instead of
just killing everyone to become emperor. That Garak is such a skunk. If he
promised his girlfriend that she'd be on the throne after everyone was wiped
out, then he should stick to it! It's funny business like that that gave the
Mongol hoard such a bad name. So she helps Samson and the princess escape, but
is found out and tortured for about fifteen seconds before giving them up. As far as the title goes, there was some talk by an old man at some point that
there were seven miracles that were to be performed, but I think I got the
version that only showed two of them. First of all, Samson was told to go and
ring the freedom bell. He goes and does this and as soon as everyone hears it,
they act like Hawk did in Over The Top whenever he turned his cap backwards for a big arm wrestling match. When this
bell rang, it was ON! Peasants immediately started whipping up on their Mongol
rulers and everything seemed to be going well for the rebels up until the time
that Samson got distracted by some bad guys and bumped his head on the big
metal dragon he was using to ring the bell with. I'll admit it - I rewound it
to watch him hit his head a couple of times. That kind of thing is American's Funniest Home Videos funny. The Mongols lock him in big stone tomb underground while upstairs in the town
square, Garak is ready to execute Cho. Samson suddenly wakes up from his nap
and starts pushing at his solid rock confines. The next thing you know the
entire town is beset by a monstrous earthquake. Buildings fall, people tumble
into lakes, and Garak gets speared in the chest by Cho. Watching scenes of
Samson straining against the rock intercut with scenes of the giant chasms
opening up in the ground is beefy-sized action at its finest! The drawbacks in this one include the hastily plotted and generally spotty
story, along with the fact that it slavishly follows the standard sword and
sandal plot conventions without any cheesy monsters to distract you from that
fact. Samson has little personality and doesn't speak more than ten lines of
dialogue throughout the film, though it's purely a judgment call whether that's
a drawback or just a good use of your slab of meat. The one thing that distinguishes itself from the competition is its location.
Like Hercules Vs. The Sons Of The Sun, they try to inject some life into things by taking their strongman and
putting him in a different geographic location far removed from ancient Rome or
Greece. Things aren't nearly as loopy as they were when Hercules went on his
South American vacation though, so you're actually better off seeking that one
out before this one. Nothing really memorable goes on in this one and the short
running time doesn't give anybody anytime to do anything stupefyingly bad. A
below average effort with minimal production values that makes you think
wearing that diaper was a much a financial decision as a artistic one.
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