Fraser meets Nemo after Nemo’s men rescue him from a sinking ship along with a few other passengers. Fraser and company are taken to Nemo’s secret underwater city where Nemo advises that they will spend the rest of their lives there because he can’t risk one of them tattling on him to the surface dwellers about Templemere.

In perhaps the most fantastical moment in a movie filled with such things as a machine that produces breathable air for Nemo’s city and has as its by-product gold, Senator Fraser gives his solemn word that he won’t say anything and I think Nemo believed him!

I don’t know about you, but that just sounds like one of those campaign promises that’s promptly forgotten once the election is over and the anti-Nemo PACs start dumping truckloads of money off at the Senator’s office. Still, Nemo isn’t a crabby old genius for no reason and while he may stupidly believe Fraser is a man of his word, he rightly observes that Fraser can’t promise the silence of the others who were rescued.

You can’t really blame Nemo either. One of the survivors is a guy suffering post traumatic stress syndrome from sort type of mine collapse so he’s crazier than a rabid jellyfish when he realizes he’s cooped up with millions of gallons of water pressing down on him. Even the gold-obsessed schemers who were also rescued recognize that this guy isn’t someone you want to hatch an escape plan with!

The crazy guy does provide some of the only excitement in a surprisingly dull film, when he blows up one of the pumps in the city in a effort to do something that I’m not sure the guy even understood. All he gets for his trouble is drowned when Nemo simply orders the room sealed so that the entire city isn’t destroyed.

With crazy guy dispatched, the rest of the characters can get down to the serious business of trying to escape a place where there is no escape! After all, they’re 10,000 fathoms beneath the ocean and Nemo’s got the keys to the Nautilus, the only way out, right?

Sure, except for the top secret project in the part of the city labeled “Forbidden Area” which goes by the top secret code of Nautilus II!

But even if they could get their hands on the Nautilus II, there’s no way a Senator, a couple of budding Goldfingers, or the widow, her kid, and his pet kitty could possibly drive the thing! Except that as luck would have it, Senator Fraser has been taking submarine driving lessons with Captain Nemo!

Despite Nemo’s understanding of technology that doesn’t exist to this very day, he displays zero knowledge of human emotions. His second in command has the hots for fellow city dweller Mala, but in the movie’s singularly most realistic moment, as soon as the Senator sees her, he immediately makes a play for her and she reciprocates much to Joab’s dismay. Nemo’s response? Pretty much laughs it off.

Nemo though is determined to make things even worse when he shunts Joab aside and starts to groom the Senator as his main guy instead! So now Nemo has in his two most trusted guys, one who has stated plainly he will do whatever he can to escape and another who will do whatever he can to see that the other leaves the city! I smell a submarine hijacking! And it’s probably going to be an inside job!

But the joke is on everyone but Nemo because the Nautilus II has one vast improvement over the original Nautilus! And that improvement is a faulty engine that will surely blow up if someone starts trying to drive it!

And Nemo just found out about it the morning of the escape! And now he has to rush out in the old crappy Nautilus I and try to save everyone! And even worse, it’s on the day of some festival where he’s supposed to be watching little kids swim through obstacle courses! And the Templemere brass band (complete with strange instruments) is even making an appearance!

I admit that I swelled with pride as I watched a single American politician single-handedly screw up of all Nemo’s perfect plans in about a week.

While the movie looks like a decent amount of money was spent on sets and model submarines, the impressively mounted underwater city can’t hide how utterly dull life in the city actually is. So little happens that the film is forced to insert a giant stingray to harass the city a few times just to give us a break from Nemo’s blather about his future plans, the failed comic relief of the Goldfinger brothers, and the creepy burgeoning romance between Nemo and the rescued widow, who is surely young enough to be his great granddaughter!

The movie further suffers from a lack of a clearly defined villain as Nemo is nothing more than a dude with a dream that he wants to see succeed at all costs. He doesn’t do anything dastardly to our heroes and in fact, caters a pretty awesome meal for them when they first arrive!

The widow and the kid decide to stay, further dampening the drama, as all we are left with is rooting for the Senator and the goldbugs to escape, though the idea that I was supposed to care if the Senator got back in time to deal with some European arms issue was a bit silly since we have ended up with nothing but nonstop wars in the 20th and 21st centuries anyway.

By the time the surviving escapees somehow swim up 10,000 fathoms with no ill effects and emerge in the ocean right near a passing ship, this movie has left you with so much water on the brain, you don’t even stop to think about how blandly meaningless it all was.

© 2012 MonsterHunter

Of course the answer is normally, “fudge no!” What sort of pirate gets beat by his girlfriend and then mocked by her father and doesn’t come back later on and burn their entire freaking village to the ground and then salt the earth just to make sure they get the message? Some receipts just have to be issued in bloody triplicate!

But this isn’t a normal pirate love affair between a swarthy, lice-ridden, insecure brute and his barrel-chested, toothless 17th Century version of a used up biker mama!

William Scott is scrumptiously tan with statuesque piles of hair and only wants to prove his innocence to his old lady, even if that means surrendering the Santa Maria to her and putting his fate in her hands. For her part, Consuelo has the hottest poop deck in all the seven seas, smolderingly dark features and somehow even looks hotter when she dresses up for a ball, pretending to be a pirate, even though she really is a pirate!

The most important part of their relationship though, and frankly, the film itself, is that both William and Consuelo love wearing over the knee hooker boots!

That’s right boot boys! Your prayers have been answered! Especially if you’re the open-minded sort who doesn’t mind whether it’s a sexy babe or a tasty hunk prancing around in the boots! That the film is full of violence, big ass boats, and villainous dandies simply gives you an excuse to subject your non-boot obsessed friends to the film, too!

Our boot beauties find themselves in this mess because Consuelo’s father is old and feeble as a pirate captain and William calls him out on this. Old Timer finally acknowledges this and sets up the contest to see who will take over the ship. William easily bests a dude who turns traitor as soon as he gets the chance, though this should come as no surprise since he is a bald schlub, just as it should come as no surprise that he is really the one who killed Consuelo’s father and framed William for it.

William is only saved from being hanged by his fellow pirates by an invasion of Spanish soldiers. He ultimately escapes with the Santa Maria and embarks on a pirating career that regardless of how successful it is, is ultimately quite hollow, thus causing him to brood and not enjoy all the stuff he steals from other people. Consuelo tricks her way into stealing a Spanish ship of her own and becomes famous for her unrelenting pirating brutality which is clearly just a coping mechanism for her shattered heart!

Things turn a corner for these two once William gets information from a Spanish captain (the same one Consuelo stole her ship from) about the pirate who turned traitor and is currently being housed in the fortress of the local Spanish official. One ill-advised attempted invasion of the fort and kidnapping of the traitor later and William finds himself being tortured by the traitor for information on where Consuelo’s father hid all his treasure.

By this time, Consuelo has teamed up with William to get revenge and comes up with her own plan to free William and pay back the traitor – attend the gala ball dressed up as the sexiest mask-wearing pirate in all the Spanish territories!

After convincing the moron in charge of everything (he’s played for laughs throughout the film, obsessed with medals, awards and his image, more than anything else) to let her have a peek at real live pirate in a real live dungeon, he shows her where William is being held and the final battle begins in earnest.

Italian adventure film pro Luigi Capuano (Sword in the Shadows, Revenge of the Gladiators) does everything right in Tiger of the Seven Seas, populating his film with nice shots of the galleons, large chaotic battles, handsome leads, and villains who while they aren’t really threatening, are quite entertaining. He also keeps the humorous characters from devolving into outright goofiness and overpowering the seriousness of the plot. Yes, he includes the maddeningly obligatory dance sequence, but it moves the story forward and features the masked Consuelo, so even that works!

Even better, there’s a scene where the Spanish captain is talking to Consuelo without knowing her true identity and states that when he catches this lady pirate he’s going to spank her, while Consuelo laughs and says she’d like to see that! God, wouldn’t we all! Just please leave the boots on!

© 2012 MonsterHunter

But it wasn’t as if the transgendered appearance of one our great Tarzans was the only thing marring my enjoyment of what should have been an easy sell to someone as indiscriminate as me when it comes to Italian adventure films. There was the nasal and simpering voice used to dub Lex’s no doubt brawny real life voice, the fact that Lex fought sword fights while undercover with a blade that had his real name on it, and of course the pansified dance scene Lex and the audience were forced to endure during one of the movie’s numerous bouts of action anorexia.

Son of the Red Corsair at least attempted to mix in some action with all the talk of scheming to steal the long lost princess’ throne. Lex invaded a ship at the beginning of the film, engaged in some swordplay here and there and even swung on a rope during the climatic confrontation with the completely non-threatening old governor who, to his credit, was torturing Lex’s girlfriend. (At least these guys are making an effort!)

Sadly though, none of it had any real lasting impact on the viewer, mainly because the bad guys are a bland politically motivated wimpy lot, but also because the action scenes just don’t have that much zest to them. A couple of times I felt like I was watching dudes in customs fencing instead of nobles and soldiers battling for their lives at the point of a sword!

The story doesn’t manage to save the day either, being a combination of silly coincidence (the woman Lex encounters on the ship he invades just happens to have Lex’s long lost sister as her handmaiden?), uninteresting political intrigue (the long lost sister is the heir to the throne of something or other and governor wants it for himself), and extremely low level revenge seeking on Lex’s part (he seems more bemused by the fact he has to wear powdered wigs than anything else).

Lex plays a pirate out to avenge the deaths of his sister and father. He locates the man who betrayed his family 15 years ago and this man, in an effort to save himself, tells Lex that his sister is alive. Lex then follows up at the convent where she supposedly has been staying, but finds out she is gone and that other men were searching for her as well.

Lex continues to follow her trail and ends up at the palatial residence of the Marquise he encountered (and instantly fell in love with of course) on the ship he invaded at the beginning of the film. And not only is his sister there, but the Marquise’s brother is in love with her and they want to marry!

And not only that, but he’s the captain of the guard and ultimately has to try and hunt Lex down! (But in keeping with the film’s general ho-hum, yet moderately convoluted tone, nothing much comes of it except he gets shot and Lex is blamed for his death, even though Lex merely helped him fake his death!)

Despite how unsuccessful the film ultimately feels, it has all the trappings of the genre you would expect. In addition to the hoity-toity dance sequence with Lex in what any real modern man would call Renaissance Drag, there is also the more man-friendly gypsy dance that also serves to introduce the gypsy spy Lex relies on for information.

There’s periodic doses of ill-advised comic relief from some of Lex’s men (when Lex sends his black friend out on a nighttime mission, one of this other men remarks that it’s a good idea because no one will be able to see the black guy at night!). You even get a whipping scene where poor old Lex’s sister has to choose between marrying the grody old bad guy or watching her sexy friend, the Marquise, get whipped to death! (Thankfully for you kinky dudes out there, she takes her own sweet time deciding!)

The movie even ends in suitably lame fashion with the wedding of the sister and the captain of the guard where a few characters make wisecracks while Lex and the Marquise are just standing around silently watching like a couple of day rate extras!

Unremarkable in every way, those coming to Son of the Red Corsair for entertaining Lex Barker flavored Italian adventure before he moved on to his more famous roles in German films would be better served sampling something like Barker’s much more energetic and better costumed Robin Hood and the Pirates.

© 2011 MonsterHunter

The Sender is idiotic on an interstellar level and is so awful it doesn’t know when to end insisting instead to aimlessly ramble on for ten minutes after Area 51 has been blown to smithereens! You would think that director Richard Pepin would be itching to bail out since the movie’s story only putrefied more and more as it went along, but there he is giving us scenes of poorly realized aliens waving and endless reunion and goodbye moments like he was getting paid a bonus for surpassing the 90 minute mark!

Pepin really ought to know better since he also directed one of PM Entertainment’s great sci-fi/action hybrid flicks, Dark Breed as well as one its worst, The Silencers. Sadly, instead of the brawny-tough-as-nails-alien-invasion-thwarted-by-Jack-Scalia action of Dark Breed what we end up with in The Sender is closer to the nonsensical evil government/good guy alien mish-mash that sunk The Silencers.

The Sender was pretty much everything I hate in my earthbound science fiction movies, what with its super advanced aliens who never show much advancement, except when the plot dictates it.

For instance, The Sender features an alien that can produce fire balls, sense when people are after her, can cure cancer and bullet wounds, fly around in an advanced spaceship with cloaking features and other gizmos that our government desperately wants.

She can also shape shift into different people, generate whatever clothes she wants, and somehow was able to watch our main character (Michael Madsen in a role that requires him to do nothing more than to take off his sunglasses periodically) grow up and see every important event of his life without him ever knowing she existed! She can even apparently appear and disappear at will.

So why in the world is she spending most of the movie getting chased by R. Lee Ermey’s goons? Why is her spaceship able to be hit by a surface to air missile, but only to the extent that it disables the cloaking device and weapons systems? Why does it take Madsen half the movie to figure out that he and her are being tracked through his pager? And why doesn’t she do a better job of protecting Madsen’s child who is the object of all the car chases? (This is the sort of alien who is content to let a car chase go on for several miles before suddenly deciding to send a fire ball here or there to allow her and Madsen to temporarily escape.)

She and Madsen eventually allow themselves to be captured, presumably so that they would be taken to the facility where his daughter is being held at. This is another bit I never get in these movies. Why do the bad guys always take the people they capture to the same location as the person the good guys are searching for?

And in this particular case, why would you assume the bad guys would take you prisoner when they’ve spent the whole movie trying to kill you? Shoot, the blew up Madsen’s house and R. Lee personally pumped several bullets into Madsen at point blank range in an effort to kill him!

The story borders on being too dumb to even repeat but it involves some mumbo jumbo about an alien gene that Madsen’s daughter possesses that makes her capable of being a Sender which means she can generate a green ball that allows her to travel places, including outer space. The government naturally wants her for their own purposes while the aliens don’t think the earth governments are ready to have that power.

How did she get this alien gene? Don’t know. How did the aliens know one little girl on one little planet in the entire universe had it? Never explained. How does the government know she has it and what it means she is capable of? Who knows! This is a PM Entertainment movie so we’ve got an RV to crash into a truck loaded with hay bales!

And how come these smart ass aliens always send only one of them on these ultra important missions? There was a big mothership screwing around with Madsen’s fighter pilot father in the Bermuda Triangle back in the 1960s during that pointless prologue and the big mothership suddenly appears again at the end of the movie, but where were they when all the chasing and shooting were going on?

And why did they save Madsen’s father from when his jet crashed into the ocean, but not return him to his family for thirty years? And when he finally was returned, he was the same age and wearing the exact same clothes as on the day when he crashed three decades before! What was all that about?

And then there’s whole self-destruct sequence at Area 51! Somehow, the head bad guy (The X-Files‘ Steven Williams wearing ridiculously spray-painted on white eyebrows, hair and mustache) causes the “core” to be breached or melt down or whatever. What kind of core does Area 51 have? And why can you punch a few buttons to make it blow up?

And then Steve tries to play the old “let me have your daughter or half of Nevada will be destroyed” card! Me and Madsen were pretty much, “so what – we don’t know anybody in Nevada and we’ve got a super powered alien on our side” and then Area 51 blows up anyway!

Completely abominable on an intergalactic scale, if I was The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Robert Vaughn, I’d be more embarrassed by this then by either Zombie 5: The Killing Birds or those commercials he does for law firms that always seem to air during daytime talk shows.

© 2011 MonsterHunter

That these della Rocca roaches were also the same family that cold-bloodedly wiped out the ruling Altavila family fifteen years before and that the dude who actually did the horse thieving was Fabrizio, the only surviving member of the Altavilla family, but who doesn’t know his true identity, only served to amp up the tension at the castle were so many people suffered from unrequited love when they weren’t out relieving that tension by burning down gypsy encampments!

I guess I was supposed to be sympathetic to the gypsies and Fabrizio. After all, they weren’t out murdering families, including little kids, but they did stupidly stir up a hornet’s nest when they went and stole those horses.

And they didn’t help matters any when Contessa Ottavia della Rocca sent her foster kid, the delightfully slimy and power-crazed Braccio, to get the horses back and the gypsies just smart off to him and force him to fight Fabrizio for the right to take the gypsy wench back to the castle as payment for the stolen horses. I mean, come on – this dude is just trying to get his horses back! Why can’t these gypsies get jobs instead of forcibly implementing their old world communism on these nobles? After all, they’ve got their own freaking soap opera back at the castle to deal with!

The relationships up at the castle are punctuated by longing looks and knowing comments, but also a nice layer of ick, too. The middle-aged Ottavia longs to feel the brawny young embrace of Braccio, whom she raised as her son!

To his credit, Braccio isn’t grossed out so much as sees it as an opportunity to work an angle to gain power and the respect of being a noble, instead of just being some crappy bastard son of the long dead Altavila duke.

While Ottavia entertains fantasies best suited for a really skeevy porn movie, perhaps the most sympathetic character in the film, Captain Mellina, hopelessly pines away for her. It’s a bit bizarre and a testament to director Luigi Capuano (The Mystery of Thug Island) and Livio Lorenzon (the creepy cripple from The Black Archer) who plays Mellina that you feel for this guy when he spends much of the film killing and brutalizing people including a nice scene where he is about to stab a very young Braccio until Ottavia steps in and stops him.

Mellina is a bad dude, but ultimately he does all these dirty deeds to impress his true love Ottavia. She acknowledges his efforts but never returns any affection to him and the fact that he spends at least 15 years in her employ as Captain of the castle’s military force in the vain hope of getting just a whiff of Contessa cooch makes the final scene between he and Ottavia more touching than any scene in a 1960s Italian adventure movie has a right to be!

If the emphasis here seems to be not on Fabrizio and his goody goody efforts to reclaim his rightful title and to lay Ottavia’s bland daughter Lavinia, but on all the broken freaks inhabiting the castle, you would be right. And it is (along with Capuano’s generous helping of a variety of energetic action scenes) why the film succeeds a lot more than its rote “guy discovers true identity, gets revenge, regains throne and pumps the head cheerleader” story normally would allow it to.

The film of course comes to dead stop whenever Fabrizio and Lavinia utter their junior high level pledges of undying love for one another. And when the gypsies ambush a coach carrying her and take her prisoner, threatening to hang her unless Fabrizio (who had unsurprisingly gotten himself captured) is released unharmed, you are simultaneously wishing things would shift back to the castle to see what Braccio and Mellina have cooked up amongst themselves as they scheme for their respective goals and a bit put off by how they gypsies are bullying this chick.

All’s well that ends awesome though once Braccio is left friendless and virtually alone in the castle while descending into a drunken MacBeth-inspired fugue just before being confronted by Fabrizio.

More than the sum of its parts, Sword in the Shadows merits a look because the castle intrigue is for once intriguing and if it all ends in a predictable manner, at least it was entertaining getting there.

Fairly violent, Capuano’s film delivers the brawls and frenetic sword fights with enough regularity that the required gypsy dance scene, the mostly annoying comic relief provided by a pair of poncy cousins who arrive with Lavinia and the mooning couple’s dimwitted romantic moments don’t sink all the tasty melodrama from the unexpected love triangle in the castle.

© 2011 MonsterHunter

And while no one can deny that trading Little John for a eye-patch wearing pirate called One Eye who actually has two good eyes is a monster upgrade, the movie would have been merely been solidly entertaining if it had stuck solely to its “pirates standing in for the Merry Men” angle.

But it in a stroke of either genius or complete tastelessness, this Italian version of Robin Hood (with German film legend and former Tarzan Lex Barker) adds a bit of sauce to the mix by giving us Sweet Pea, a sassy full-figured black woman, prone to singing spirituals and alternately beating on One Eye and declaring her love for him!

All of this craziness is easily explained though. Robin was kidnapped on his way to fight in the Crusades by the pirates and was being held for ransom. A big storm blew up and sank the pirate ship allowing Robin to escape. Everyone washes up on shore in Sherwood (Robin immediately knows this due to the sign in Italian announcing the location), including Sweat Pea and the rest of the female captives the pirates were holding. (Though referred to as Saracens, Sweet Pea especially didn’t look like any Saracen I’ve ever seen. She did remind me of Nell Carter from TV’s Gimme a Break though!)

While the pirates and Sweat Pea squabble on the shore, Robin heads back home to find exactly what anyone who has ever seen an early 1960s Italian costume adventure would expect: good guys dead or imprisoned, effeminate scum bag on the throne, the hero’s hottie girlfriend (Kareen) being forced to marry the ugly mug now in charge (Brooks), and an evil sexy babe (Lizbeth) who hates the good hot chick and wants Robin for himself! Which way to the shipwreck again?

Robin stops an execution, complains about how everything has gone to crap, gets into a fight with some soldiers and ends up diving off the castle into the ocean to make his escape in thrilling fashion! This is only an example of how super cool this Robin Hood is. He follows it up by waltzing on into the pirates camp to enlist their help even though he is an escaped hostage of theirs! He sensibly explains that with his dad dead, there isn’t anyone to pay the ransom, but if they help, they can have the bad guy’s stuff instead!

One of the things that makes this movie so great is that a lot stuff that might have been settled by talking instead gets settled by frequent bouts of violence! For instance, instead of just signing on and going straight to plotting an attack on Brooks, One Eye starts fighting with Robin for the leadership of the gang! And with Sweet Pea and everyone else laughing as they brawl in the surf while Robin repeatedly kicks One Eye in the ass! I bet you didn’t get that from Kevin Costner or Russell Crowe!

Robin, One-Eye, and another pirate with a hook for a hand called Hook invade the castle to rescue Kareen from Banks. Robin interrupts Banks’ dinner and fights him all over the dining room, while Hook and One-Eye help themselves to some grub!

Obviously the movie isn’t deadly serious about all this business (Hook uses his hook to stroke One-Eye’s hair while they both watch Robin and Kareen make out), but the comic relief is never so overwhelming as to turn obnoxious. Even a character like Sweet Pea who could have very easily been unimaginably annoying or offensive comes off, not as a shuck and jive nitwit, but as a strong woman with more guts then the pirates when she is the only one who won’t quit on Robin Hood at the end of things!

In a final desperate bid to put down the rebellion that always backfires, Brooks captures Kareen and sentences her to be executed for treason. The idea is that Robin will be forced to come back to town to save his beloved and that’s when Brooks will get him! And it works! Except that once Robin comes back, just as he gives himself up, the pirates appear to join the battle! You just knew that One-Eye wasn’t going to sacrifice his access to Sweet Pea’s sweet booty by letting down Robin!

Plenty of action including a catfight between Kareen and Lizabeth that has slapping, whipping, and rolling around on the ground, a healthy dose of humor (there’s even a parrot who isn’t used nearly enough!), and the good looking, self assured Lex Barker doing his best to somehow look like a strong leader while standing around in his silly-looking Robin Hood hat and costume, make Robin Hood and the Pirates that rarest of all Italian adventure films with kick ass titles – one that actually delivers on the kick ass title’s promise.

© 2011 MonsterHunter

A toss up in the culinary department to be sure, so I would have wait and actually watch the movie, though that wasn’t much help since the good guy was a simpering blonde Polish dude played by Mel Ferrer named Andre while the barbarians (specifically identified as the Kyrgyz) are ruled by an evil queen who somehow is so unpleasant she makes Andre’s scuzzy traitor brother Sergei seem not so bad.

Sergei is easily the greatest thing in the movie. He’s the power hungry dark haired bad Polish brother who wants to marry the sexy blonde Mascia because her father is an important dude in the Polish leadership.

He also wants nothing more than to get named as the commander of the Polish army. But this is olden times! That means it’s not all about how high your score on some civil service exam is or whether your father-in-law is head of the country club that gets you that super sweet gig as General Bad Ass! It’s settled by a Polish version of trial by combat!

This combat is sort of a Middle Ages Triathlon. A bunch of hopefuls vie in three events. First up is the slow motion fights with monstrously sized swords. That’s followed by the crowd-pleasing flaming mace competition. And the teeth rattling conclusion sees the final two combatants swing big metal shields at each other’s heads! Surely, you would end up with the toughest guy after that, even if you do permanently maim every other capable high level officer in your army in the process!

Andre of course wins, much to the chagrin of Sergei. Andre being the pansified brother that he is, graciously offers to let Sergei be the commander anyway, but there’s no time to figure all that out because Mascia has gone and got herself kidnapped by the Kyrgyz!

Besides being pissed that they just lost the war to the Poles, the Kyrgyz also have their furry hats in a tizzy because Sergei had earlier captured their queen and treated her like the common Mongol trash she most definitely was!

Sergei demands to be sent to the frontier to get Mascia back and is allowed to do so, but is instructed not to cause a whole bunch of trouble by massacring a bunch of Kyrgyz. Really? A guy who looked like he was ready to kill his saintly brother when he lost the commander competition is expected to show some restraint against a bunch of barbarians who stole his woman? The dudes he spears and the village he burns on his way? The moronic king who sent Sergei definitely owns all that!

After being told Mascia is dead by the barbarian queen, Sergei battles to the death with the queen’s rival which he wins because the queen gave him a poisoned dagger.

When he finds out later the dagger was poisoned, Sergei becomes outraged in one of the film’s far too few laughable and entertaining moments as he whines that he may killed some people on the way there and burned a village, but now she has turned him into a murderer!

It was almost as good a speech as when he reacted to the queen telling him to kill his brother by shouting that he may be willing to invade his own country, betray his king, and enslave his people, but that he wasn’t going to kill his own brother! Good God woman, do you take him for some sort of amoral psychopath?

Sergei turns traitor as soon as he hears that Andre has been chosen to be commander of the army. He agrees to team up with the Queen to invade Krakow and take what he believes is his by force. Andre meanwhile shows that his blondeness runs straight to the bone as he volunteers to go and talk to Sergei and see if he’ll come back home peacefully.

The much too predictable capture and escape plotline promptly ensues and results in both brothers leading their respective armies against one another to conclude things.

More often dull than not, the film is marked by long stretches where the leadership of both groups are just standing around talking. The beginning of the movie telegraphs this with an unnecessarily lengthy scene of people presenting themselves in front of the king immediately causing the audience’s interest to wander. Just to make sure the point isn’t lost on us that this is a talk-filled Italian costume snoozer, there is a pointless dancing scene as well.

If you can make it to the end of things, you are at least rewarded with a decent battle between both armies including towers being burned and toppled. Likewise, the final sword fight between the brothers is nicely played inside the burning Kyrgyz palace. Still, the largely uninspired dramatization of an obscure conflict featuring a doormat for a hero is as much a chore to sit through as the Polish vs. Barbarian storyline would lead you to believe it was.

© 2011 MonsterHunter

With his faithful (and decidedly white) sidekick Yanez, the Tiger of Malaya as Sandy was known, has proven, like Robin Hood, Tarzan, and Starbuck from the original Battlestar Galactica to be one of the great enduring characters beloved the world over. At least that’s what the Internet tells me. I’ve never heard of the guy. I thought he was Yanez’s sidekick!

But just because you’re some minor league local yokel action hero doesn’t mean you still can’t kick all kinds of ass! And that’s exactly what Sandokan (Ray Danton in nicely intense performance) does in his battle against the Leopard of Sarawak!

Now, many movies will have titles that claim a guy is battling a leopard, but then have the “leopard” turn out to be some punk who just calls himself a leopard because it sounds cool! If the title of your movie says you’re fighting a leopard, I’m going to need to see a guy playing grab ass with a large orange and black jungle cat!

But Sandy didn’t get four movies made about him in a year and half by not delivering the goods, so it should come as no surprise that he’s almost immediately gunning down a leopard while trekking through the jungle. Don’t worry animal lovers! If you think he’s a pussy for doing that and are daring him to throw his gun down and battle wild animals in hand to hand combat, Sandy is your hero, too!

Right after wasting one leopard, another rolls in! Despite his obviously smarter (but much wimpier) companions urging him not to, Sandy ditches his gun and starts wrestling around with the leopard!

It was touch and go for awhile, but ultimately the battle ends gloriously with Sandy stabbing the hapless beast with his dagger again and again!

Having wiped out a nice portion of the indigenous wildlife in about thirty seconds Sandy gets back to the business of dealing with the all too human Leopard of Sarawak.

As expected, this human “leopard” is just some silly-looking white guy intent on overthrowing Sandy and reclaiming Sarawak for his own. As the narrator explained in the way too detail oriented voiceover that opened the film, Sandy and Yanez previously teamed up to vanquish the father of the Leopard of Sarawak, Sandy is about to marry his true love Samoa, and now Charles Druk (also called Brooks in some sources), is keen on revenge.

But just how far will Druk go in his mad quest for power? He’s even willing to employ the use of foreigners in his scheme! Though he himself looked a bit foreign to the jungle, the guy he called in to help him is even more foreignish than he!

The Indian super villain Rajani comes to assist based on the promise that he’ll get to build a big ass temple and he brings with him the most awesome super power I have ever seen – the ability to hypnotize alligators!

In what is a great film’s sole misstep, the gators are never unleashed on anyone, but Rajani luckily can also use his powers to hypnotize weak willed broads like Samoa! His power is so great that she doesn’t even have to see him for it to work!

But truly greater than that is his ability to mess with her mind enough so that she claims she hates Sandy and loves the yucky Druk – who is also her cousin! That might explain why after the spell is broken and she and Sandy are pinned down behind enemy lines and their ammo is dwindling, she has saved a single bullet for herself! Cousin-loving or death? Not a tough choice at all! After all, these people live in the jungle, not Arkansas!

There aren’t any real surprises going on in this film, but who needs surprises when guys are dying in quicksand? And swinging from vines? And launching balls of flames from catapults?

You could complain that Sandy was a moron for heading into the enemy camp with only his traitorous guide, but I admired him since he did it because he just knew he could handle whatever was coming. He probably figured he’d just have to run a few hundred guys through with his sword before rescuing his old lady. Hell, he just killed two tigers before lunch earlier, so how hard could that be?

The movie abounds in entertaining moments such as when Sandy is trapped in the cave of snakes that no one has ever survived! Except the guy that built the stairs that lead directly to the back entrance of the cave! But Sandy still had to pretend to wrestle with an either very sleepy or just plain dead giant snake!

For his part Yanez shines in his role as the prototype of the CIA adviser who helps his native pals out by employing his advanced torture techniques, all the while maintaining his good humor.

And despite much of the film being afflicted with what sounded like really bad, stock melodramatic music, director Luigi Capuano (Revenge of the Gladiators) must be credited for how he handled the final, suspenseful chase through the jungle between Sandy and Druk. As the camera tracks Sandy (who is wielding a really scary-looking scimitar) rushing through the trees, while a desperate Druk is looking for an escape, only the piercing cries of the jungle birds can be heard! It’s all a very unsettling and effective way to conclude a rock solid jungle adventure that easily encourages the viewer to seek out Sandokan’s other efforts of the period (Sandokan the Great, Sandokan – The Pirate of Malaya, and Sandokan Fights Back).

© 2011 MonsterHunter

It is understandable that in many of these sword and sandal epics from the 1960s that our bronzed babe of beef would probably be lacking in the smiles department. Invariably, the home village was burned, family and/or wife killed or kidnapped, lots of straining to lift, tear up and throw assorted ancient world items, and even some good old fashioned torture really don’t provide much of a “turn that frown upside down” opportunity.

This Hercules (Mark Forest actually playing a prince named Attalus, but even his pals call him Hercules so what are you going to do, right?) though is more of a glass half full sort of muscle hunk.

So it is that once the Romans have defeated his countrymen and taken him prisoner (but he surrenders only to spare the lives of his men), Herc finds himself chucked into the gladiator arena for a classic handicap match where the odds are stacked against him four against one while the Roman emperor (Gallienus) and his toadies look on!

A lot of your regular leather skirt wearing studs would knuckle down and get their game faces on, ready to battle to the death, determined not to let anyone have the pleasure of seeing anything other than a clenched jawed hero prepared to inflict as much violence as possible before the numbers inevitably overwhelm them!

The Attalus approach to insurmountable odds in a foreign land? A wide, vapid beauty queen smile! As Attalus gazed out at the assembled crowds in the arena stands, he looked like he was glad to be there! Four vicious warriors waiting to take him apart with nets, tridents and swords? No problem! Just let me put on my fetish gladiator helmet and have a go with them! Be done in a jif!

It’s not all happy times of man-on-man grappling though. In the five minutes he’s been a prisoner of the Roman Empire, he’s also managed to fall in love with the Emperor’s sexy daughter and earned the everlasting enmity of Zullo, the guy with the evil facial hair who commands the Praetorians and who also wants the Emperor’s daughter!

The Emperor is a fair and just one, so he quickly tires of Zullo’s machinations and whining about how he wants to pump his daughter (and rightly so as she appears in a succession of low cut bosom enhancing Third Century fashions!), so he sends him off to the front far from Rome. Meanwhile, in a potentially exciting development that never realizes its potential, Attalus is put in charge of training a guerilla force to go back to his homeland to fight the invading Huns.

These men would be culled from the prisons of Rome which brought to mind a Dirty Dozen-style team of ragtag misanthropes each with some particular skill that would be showcased on their adventures. Sadly, these guys would spend more time getting captured and killed in a raid than doing anything else and only end up being rescued by the unceasingly annoying comic relief character who makes out with his sheep.

The film does have one of those outlandish twists that is just too coincidental and unlikely to ever really play very well in these sorts of films. This is the “guy captured on the battlefield looks exactly like the emperor so the bad guy will kidnap the real emperor and put this guy in his place to force the girl to marry him and then he can get rid of the real and fake emperor and become emperor himself” plot device.

Everything you would expect from such a scheme occurs as Attalus sees a sudden reversal of fortune until it all unravels just as stupidly and coincidentally as it began – with the sheep loving comic relief just happening to be in the same area where the real emperor is being held prisoner (there was some lame reason why the real emperor wasn’t just killed like any real such scheme would entail to precisely avoid what happened here) so that he can warn Attalus and his warrior pals.

The Magnificent Gladiator is a rather tediously generic sword and sandal epic with its routine emphasis on the bad guy gaining the throne and forcing the daughter to marry him, while Attalus spends the movie brawling with various elements of the Roman military controlled by Zullo or plotting attacks and escapes.

That there is very little that plays to his muscle prowess (he lifts some jailhouse bars and pulls on a rope to rip bars out a window – and he does both of these things with help!) and no monsters or interesting sets (it all plays out in the countryside or in the palace and arena) only serve to make more impressive that Attalus could keep that goofy grin plastered across his face periodically during his mind-numbing adventures.

© 2011 MonsterHunter

Not to worry though because Pierotti didn’t go on to direct such memorably forgotten Italian adventure films as Giant of Evil Island by hosing its audience out of what was promised in the title despite that there wasn’t any giant in Giant of Evil Island. So it is that instead of The Black Archer, we get… The Avenging Arrow!

Yeah, frigging upgrade, I know! This Avenger Arrow guy has it all over whatever the hell a Black Archer would have been – lame dude in cheesy black domino mask no doubt – which Pierotti instead used for the bad guys! With the Avenging Arrow though you get, hold on to your quivers you bow slinging studs, a freaking wanted poster!

And if that doesn’t hit the entertainment bull’s eye, there’s even a couple of guys talking up our hero, Corrado, and his abilities with the bow and arrow and that people might be suspecting he’s the Avenging Arrow!

But if he’s already the best shot in Europe, how is he ever going to maintain his secret identity as the mild mannered son of a guy who was just murdered and is now thirsting for bloody vengeance?

You don’t get to become a dude with a superhero nickname that merits its own Robin Hood-style wanted poster by not being several steps ahead of the corrupt authorities who when they aren’t busy killing your dad are trying to pump your sexy girlfriend, who just happens to be their own cousin!

Taking a page out of a playbook that no one but a director of disappointingly dull Italian adventures knows about, Corrado evades detection by never once assuming his awesomely avengeful alter ego!

Remember all those Batman films where you only got to see Bruce Wayne punch guys? Or how about that one Spider-Man movie where Peter Parker’s costume got stolen at the airport by Transportation Security Administration airport screeners so he just spent all movie kicking and choking dudes while wearing chinos? That’s the sort of Everyman superhero spectacle that The Black Archer is!

Most bizarrely of all, Pierotti even expertly plays the moment of self-doubt all heroes are hit with when it seems as if Corrado’s blown up love life is affecting his archery megapowers! My God, will he be able to hit that one in a quadrillion shot to save his country, rescue the haughtily sexy princess and kill the bastards who killed his father?

Hell, anyone who’s ever seen even one movie knows how this one ends up. It’s not exactly a spoiler to say that he never ever uses his archery powers again, one bad guy is stabbed in the back by the henchmen of another bad guy during a sword fight with Corrado, while that bad guy ends up being dragged off into the sunset by his crazed horse, to suffer, if not death, a most heinous case of road rash! (Shockingly, this was the least idiotic part of the film’s finale which involved the sudden appearance of a prince who had been disguised as a monk earlier for no reason except to set up the anti-climatic finish of the film.)

Pierotti also manages to adhere to the old maxim that a boring and stodgy dimwit hero (Corrado spends half the movie teamed up with the evil cousins because he moronically believes they are rebelling with him against their doddering old uncle and only sporadically seems to remember he’s supposed to be hunting his father’s killer) is only as cool as the delightfully deviant and cartoonishly creepy villains he battles. So it is that Corrado finds himself locked in a war with the crazed cousins, Lodovico and Lodrosio, with each bringing to the table his own evil abilities.

Lodovico uses his smarmy charm and low level Pompadour to get information from a Gypsy wench on Corrado’s whereabouts as well as to try and marry his other cousin (and Corrado’s girlfriend), Ginevra.

Lodrosio ups the ante though by being a completely amoral, sacrilegious, and violent cripple with a rotten self image! Gimped up like you wouldn’t believe, when Lodrosio isn’t comparing his love of Giverva to worshiping the Madonna or threatening to burn Ginerva’s eyes out so she will love him, he’s barely even able to stand up with his bum leg and twisted up arm. At one point he even falls to the floor and throws a tantrum because of how sucky he is!

Decked out with his murderous girl sidekick who isn’t adverse to torturing Gypsy wenches with her spurs, Lodrosio is the best thing in a mostly pedestrian movie afflicted with a colorless hero and few action scenes (marked only by half-hearted and unconvincing lunging with swords). It all adds up to an experience akin to having an arrow broken off in your nut sack.

© 2011 MonsterHunter