For his part, Marco is one of those kids with Italian parents who is very disturbed by stuff such as witnessing the murder of his dad. He “acts out” as they say by doing little childish pranks like hiding a razor blade between piano keys so that mommy gets sliced when she’s running her hands down the keys.

He also steals and cuts up her underwear, though I’m unsure what the point of that was since he hid them. Heck, if it was me, I’d chop’em up and give ‘em right back to her! Here you go sweetheart, you can wear these around your airline pilot boyfriend, since you’re just going to be letting him in there anyway! Dad’s only been dead for seven years, you tramp!

Dora’s new husband seems to be a decent guy though. He treats Dora well, he’s got a good job that allows him to hang around stewardesses, and he’s really trying to be a good father to that little crazy panty-slicing freak Marco. He even tries to cover for the kid when Pantygate first breaks out!

Marco is pretty much out of control most of the time, tormenting his mother and doing crazy stuff like lying down in the basement near a mysteriously bricked up wall. He’s really cold and is kind of playing dead and his mother gets him upstairs and into bed and then he pops right up and tells her that he was only fooling and runs out to go play on his swing.

Marco also seems to get himself a bunch of psychic powers (and later he even gets his very own set of Exorcist brand contact lenses!) and this leads him to do stuff like causing shutters to slam shut and the stunt where he taped a picture of Bruno’s head to a swing and swung it back and forth. While this was going on, Bruno was in the middle of a flight and the plane was experiencing mechanical difficulty and trying to crash. Dora comes out and interrupts Marco’s murderous plan by stopping the swing. For some reason Marco never uses his “voodoo-swing” super powers again.

Bruno begins drugging Dora and though it isn’t made clear what he’s up to, I assume that it is some kind of sedative because she is such a spaz. I don’t think he has any reason to complain though – he knew she was in the nut hut and had to have shock therapy when they met.

Dora finally gets fed up with Marco’s behavior and takes him to see the psychiatrist she has on retainer. He doesn’t specialize in children or anything, but this is the same guy that treated Dora for her breakdown once her husband croaked. He has Marco draw some pictures, but Marco doublecrosses them by drawing the pictures of a well adjusted kid!

Dora gets haunted by her dead husband toward the end of the film and he pops up to keep the audience awake (like Dora’s constant screeching would let anyone get the shuteye this movie eventually deserves) and soon she’s down in the basement to confront Bruno who is busily busting down a wall. A box cutter and pick axe liven their conversation up a bit.

Mario Bava’s final film is a half-baked mish-mash of the possession genre, the woman on the brink of madness genre, and the Damien Thorne genre. The result is this wildly uneven thing that careens back and forth with the kid being crazy, the kid being possessed, the mother being crazy and seeing things, the new husband sneaking around and plotting while none of it really makes any sense.

The dead husband’s ghost is apparently trying to get revenge on the mother, but he does a muddled job with it. Sometimes messing around with Bruno, sometimes with Dora, sometimes through Marco, and sometimes in her dreams. After awhile, it all just seemed like a random series of events designed to goose the viewer every so often.

Razor blading the piano, cutting up her undies, and slamming the shutter? Why bother? What’s the point? Just to taunt and play with her mind? Fine, then get on with it and plunge her into madness, but sometimes she gets plunged and then in the next scene she’s okay, and then she gets plunged again and it becomes obnoxiously repetitive.

As this was a Mario Bava film (in spite of him tricking his kid Lamberto to shoot some of it) you’re let down by the lack of any of his signature style. No trademark use of colors or lighting. No atmosphere, other than the whole “Amityville Horror haunted house in the seventies” motif that is workmanlike at best and TV movie bland at worst.

There’s some pretty violent episodes, some jarring and effective, but those scenes are the exception. By hewing too closely to the films he tried to copy, Bava sacrifices putting his own distinctive stamp on things all in an effort to cash in on the latest fad. Not truly awful, but maddening for what it might have been if it wasn’t so concerned with referencing other, better movies.

© 2010 MonsterHunter

Two spaceships, the Galliot and the Argus use their space TVs to contact one another regarding their mission. There has been a radio signal emanating from Aura. This means either one of two things – that there is intelligent life there or more probably, that there is intelligent life there that is laying a dastardly and nefarious trap to enslave the human race!

About this time the various crew members start blabbering about their supercool gizmo that protects them against meteors by detecting them and deflecting them. They have given this piece of hardware the scientific name of “the meteor rejector.” To further illustrate how important this is, one crew member states that if it wasn’t for the meteor rejector, they’d all be “Swiss cheese.” (As opposed to the Italian cheese they already are.)

I must note at this point that this life saving device when unhooked from its stand resembles a pair of very large binoculars. As you might guess, this meteor rejector is going to play a big part at the end of the movie.

Suddenly contact with the Galliot is lost! Then the problems aboard the Argus starts. The gravity on the ship increases dramatically. This forces the actors to make pained expressions with their faces and move with great difficulty. You can almost hear Bava saying, “okay, you’re really heavy! I mean really heavy! That’s it! Make love to the camera with your heavy and stretched out face!”

Now since the gravity has been drastically increased, some superduper button needs to be pushed to save everyone. I think I also heard the captain say that he needed to switch the ship to manual so that he could get all the credit if they somehow managed to survive this crisis.

The captain of the Argus makes a heroic effort to stretch his arm (and face) toward the control panel (I assumed it was a control panel because it had a bunch of blinking lights and switches) and punches a button and then the ship seems to be okay and they land, but the trouble is just beginning because the crew decides that now would be an excellent time to mutiny.

The captain’s name is Mark and he looks and sounds like the K-Mart version of Lloyd Bridges. The crew starts beating each other up and tries to ruin the ship’s equipment before everyone settles down and wonders why they were just trying mutiny on poor old Captain Mark. God only knows what that did to the Depends he wears under his space suit!

Once on the planet, Captain Mark sees the wreck of the Galliot and decides that something isn’t quite right about it, so he takes a squad of cannon fodder crew members and investigates, finding that everyone is dead.

Captain Mark’s crew members begin disappearing and there are weird sounds and lights all over the planet. Also some of the dead crew members have gotten up out of their graves, ripped their body bags off, and started to wander around to intimidate the crew members that are still alive.

Captain Mark knows his crew is looking to him for answers so when he spots another wrecked ship, he figures the heroic thing to do is head over there, check it out, and see if he can’t rustle himself up some more mysterious planet trouble.

Once inside the ship, Captain Mark manages to touch a glowing object that shocks him, accidentally hits some switches that gets he and his lady friend trapped (the doors close and the oxygen gets sucked out!) and then tries to escape using a tuning fork! (It didn’t work.) So he throws the tuning fork down and it hits something that eventually gets the door open and they escape. That’s the kind of leadership you can’t teach at Starfleet Academy.

Eventually things get really out of control as dead crew members keep showing up trying to lay the smack down of the living crew members and some of the live crew members try to sabotage the meteor rejector. Finally, one of the living dead crew members explains everything. More fighting follows, folks get themselves possessed, and a shock ending is unveiled.

This is a micro-budgeted affair that manages to generate a fair amount of chills and eerie alien atmosphere in spite of that fact. Bava does a good job with lighting as is usually the case and the film’s sets and costumes (which includes black leather space suits!) give it an odd sort of look. He uses the equipment in the space ship to good effect, adding in colored globes and various shaped equipment that emitted different colored lights along with the standard control panels of switches and dials.

The emphasis here isn’t on a ton of action (there’s a lot of Captain Mark babbling about what to do next), but there is a mounting sense of dread as the surviving crew members try to figure out what’s going on.

Yes, it can be argued that the sets are straight out of the original Star Trek TV show and the space ships aren’t too convincing when they fly around or land, but scenes like the one where the dead break out of their graves in slow motion are particularly effective and show Bava’s ability to wring as much as possible out of what he was given. It’s really a very effective and creepy film, with a memorable look that’s perfect for late night viewing and good warm up for some of its later (and more violent) imitators.

© 2010 MonsterHunter

Mario Bava, never one to miss a chance to jump into a low budget picture whose director quit (see I vampiri), grabbed his wife’s Ginsu knives, drove out to some part of Italy where people still lived like it was the year 800, got Cameron Mitchell to dye his hair yellow, yelled action and a week or so later you’ve got the greatest of all Italian Viking movies in the can!

To be fair, the film is intermittently entertaining and makes good use of the coastal locations, but things are hampered a bit in the middle when nothing much happens and it felt like they were just killing time before the final act could begin.

It all starts curiously enough with an old hag on the beach giving advice to Karin about the future along with the aid of some little diagrams drawn in the sand. I wasn’t really listening to what she was saying because generally it’s my policy to dismiss the dire predictions, the flashbacks, the curses, and the seizures these types go through as the ravings of a crazy old woman.

Karin is worried about her and her son (Moki) because she is the wife of King Harald and he’s been missing for three years. In the meantime, a warrior named Hagen has gotten it into to his head to capture both of them.

Later, Karin reluctantly hooks up with a stranger who suddenly appears at her cabin. Since Harald has been gone for three years and the child support checks haven’t exactly been rolling in she agrees to let him keep hanging out and to be a role model for her son.<>

The stranger and his new family get on famously. He’s teaching Moki things like how to shoot a bow and arrow, how to throw a knife and how a woman’s place should be in the kitchen. Karin just grins approvingly since before her son was just a yellow-haired sissy, but now is a full fledged Viking warrior!

It’s a happy time with day trips to the stream so that Moki can watch his new daddy go after a salmon with a knife and his bare hands and with Karin parading around in her snug fitting Viking outfit that shows us the Vikings were the inventors of the bullet bra.

Karin lets the stranger in on her secret origin with a dose of flashback containing the standard Viking elements of wedding-day beheadings, doublecrosses, and rape. As expected, Hagan was involved as was this new man in Karin’s life whose name we learn is Rurik.

Rurik has returned after all these years to settle up with Hagan. Hagan tries to capture Rurik which allows Rurik to throw some of his daggers (that’s his gimmick – he can throw knives really well) and outsmart the traps that are laid out for him.

This is the part of the movie where things seem to drift about listlessly like a boat loaded with King Harald and his troops. There’s some running around in the wilderness between Rurik and Hagan’s men and there’s some hanging out at the local pub where Rurik sits in Hagan’s chair and tries to set up the title fight with Hagan.

After an indecisive battle with Hagan as well as a brawl with the returning Harald, word comes that Hagan has kidnapped Moki. About this time Harald and Karin also have their big encounter and Rurik can tell that he’s seen the last of that Viking bullet bra, so he says he’s going to go after Moki and everyone races off to the secret grotto where Hagan is holed up.

A reformed Viking rapist determined to be a good father and boyfriend combined with a husband finally coming home gives this story the flavor of the tragedies of the ancient Greeks or at least One Life To Live.

Frankly, I was on the edge of my seat wondering just how could it all possibly play out! As it turned out, barely at all! No one seemed too put out about the rape, Moki immediately forgot how cool Rurik was once Harald returned, and Rurik just kind of slunk off into the sunset with little more than patting Harald on the back.

The movie is still worth seeing for what it attempts and for the better-than-average result that Bava wrings from this material. The shots are well-staged – the location filming provides lots of nice scenery and the village is convincing in its primitiveness.

The dubbing has a tendency to remind you of the film’s cheesy origins and brings to mind all those silly-assed Hercules movies, but the emotion that Cameron Mitchell manages to give Rurik over his screwed up life puts it head and shoulder above the rest of its ilk, in spite of the cavalier wrap up the movie gives us.

© 2010 MonsterHunter

Director Mario Bava (Baron Blood, I vampiri) uses all his technical prowess behind the camera to prop up this mostly dull revenge tale of a supernatural tot forcing superstitious dummies into impaling themselves on spikes and cutting their own throats.

Spooky village sets are impressively lit, the camera swoops and swirls here and there in impressive fashion, and our squared jawed hero even ends up chasing himself repeatedly through the same room again and again for reasons that a spectral brat could only understand!

Dr. Paul Eswai’s nightmarish encounter with his equally hunky double only served to illustrate his genius as the guy investigating the mysterious deaths in the village.

Despite spending all of the film decrying the villager’s superstitious beliefs and being outraged at the bizarre home remedies provided by the local witch which they all favored over his fancy pants modern day medicine (which seemed to consist of him placing a wet rag on a chick’s head), Dr. Eswai has to have his ass saved by the local witch a couple of times, doesn’t debunk anything at all, but yet walks away with the only hot broad in the whole village! The benefits of a college education are obvious indeed!

Dr. Eswai is called to the village by his friend Inspector Kruger to help get to the bottom of things. His first task is to perform an autopsy on a gal who fell onto some sharp spikes. I wasn’t sure how the autopsy would dispel whether she accidentally fell, was pushed, or as was forced by a ghost to jump on them, but it allowed Dr. Eswai to meet the luscious Monica so Dr. Eswai clearly knew what he was doing!

Monica is a gal who used to live in the village, went away to school and then came back just in time to witness an autopsy.

Monica turns out to have a secret connection to the crazed baroness/medium who is also the mother of the dead child at the wormy center of this poop sandwich of a town crisis.

Monica’s relationship with the baroness and her return to town just in the nick of time to provide a sexy damsel in distress is so convenient for the story that it’s one of the spookiest elements of the film!

Even spookier though is Dr. Eswai’s hair! It maintains such an immovable, glazed look throughout the proceedings that it proves to be a sturdier hero than the largely ineffective Dr. Eswai himself! It’s also smartly colored with an oragnish hue that goes quite well with Dr. Eswai’s fashion don’t burnt umber suit!

It’s easy to run Dr. Eswai down though for his utter lack of involvement in successfully bringing the mystery to a successful conclusion, but really, isn’t he just a glorified coroner here? Can we really expect everyone to live up to legendary TV coroner Quincy, M.E.?

After all, it wasn’t like things didn’t get wrapped up, right? Once the medium unleashed her ghost on the town witch’s boyfriend, this caused an occult powered catfight between the two that ultimately settled everything.

And Dr. Eswai still ended up with Monica. And his hair still looked super suave. I’m pretty sure Quincy would’ve taken that result any day of the week!

© 2010 MonsterHunter

That might not seem like such a big deal, but Freda had made a bet with the money men behind the movie that he could shoot it in ten days! Mario swooped in and finished everything up in 48 hours, apparently “padding” the film to its anemic 78 minute running time by using stock footage and those swirling newspaper headline scenes that are mandatory in movies about a crazed killer stalking a city.

Someone or something is on the loose in Paris and it is killing off young hotties. Whenever their bodies turn up, they are drained of all their blood, which is pretty much the effect this movie had on me.

Since there are blood-drained bodies laying around all over town, a nosy reporter starts nosing around. His name is Pierre Lantin, a blonde guy prone to hunches, wild goose chases, and unfounded accusations that usually turn out to be correct.

Pierre runs into his old pal, Giselle. She is the niece of a duchess and she has the hots for Pierre? Surprisingly and rather unconvincingly, he rebuffs her advances and throughout the movie talks about how even though she wants him, he doesn’t want her.

The only reason for this is that way back in olden times, there was some problem with Giselle’s aunt, the duchess, trying to get her hooks into Pierre’s father, with no success. That’s the first time I ever heard of a guy rejecting a chance to get all hooked up just to impress his father!

Meanwhile, there’s a crazed doctor who injects another dude with something to give him a fix so that this guy will go round up more babes for the doctor’s blood-draining ER.

There’s a problem in this relationship at some point that requires the doctor to fake his own death which results in the headline, “A Great Loss For Mankind” because you know how hard it is to replace a mad scientist intent on keeping old women beautiful with the blood of young virgins.

Pierre’s boss eventually becomes irritated that since Pierre has begun this investigation, the only thing he’s managed to do is question pretty girls about the whereabouts of their pretty friends so he reassigns Pierre to the society beat.

Naturally, Pierre is miffed, especially since he’s going to have to cover a ball that the duchess is putting on. Apparently Paris only has one duchess and she just happens to be putting on a ball while she’s in the midst of some kind of blood-draining killing spree.

With his new beat of society puff pieces, Pierre heads off to the ball with his trusty photographer, Ronald, in tow. Ronald, unlike Pierre, has been bewitched by the beauty of Giselle and doesn’t mind being at the ball and you can tell that he’s not long for this world as he constantly asks Pierre to introduce him to her.

Pierre leaves and Ronald apparently decides that he’s got some unfinished business because the next thing I know, this dude is climbing up the trellis alongside the castle where this ball was being held! You can’t stop a French guy when his hormones are rumbling around in him like the six gallons of wine this guy must have consumed before he realized what a great idea breaking back into the castle would be.

Once he meets Giselle though, her secret reveals itself and Ronald does not fare too terribly well once it does.

While Pierre is off enjoying himself at the ball, one of the pretty young things he was flirting with during his investigation goes and gets herself kidnapped by the duchess’ henchmen. How could she be so dumb, you ask? Well, she’s walking down the street and falls for the old “blind guy needs letter delivered to old abandoned house” con. That gets the sexy babes every time!

Pierre’s investigation leads he and the police to the castle, but the cops find nothing and the captain threatens to run Pierre in for the fourth of fifth time. Just as they’re about to leave though they find something suspicious and the case is finally solved.

This movie has a significant boredom factor and you’re amazed that the Italians even bothered making any more horror films after this early one. There’s no gore, no interesting people, and a rather uneventful story that makes you appreciate the fact that later generations caught on to the fact that in lieu of story and/or three dimensional characters, audiences would accept drills through heads, guts puked out of mouths, and of course the standard maggot storm.

Bava does do a nice job behind the camera as usual, giving you shots that look a lot better than a movie of this caliber deserves and he is occasionally able to evoke the old Universal horror flicks of the thirties and forties with his shots of the old ratty castle the duchess inhabits.

Bava also does a remarkable job with the make up effects that age Giselle before our eyes, through a combination of creative lighting and greasepaint that will leave you straining to see how he did it without the time lapse stuff they used in movies like The Wolf Man.

You can see the beginnings of a guy that knows his way around the camera in this film, skills he would put to good use later in his career in much better films. An uninspired effort at best, but it’s not fair to blame Bava since he only was in charge of the movie for two days and was responsible for the film’s best aspects.

© 2009 MonsterHunter

And if things look a bit questionable with Herc and his posse all piled into a covered wagon like a bunch of Okies in search of some good Indian land to steal, that’s okay because that heartily dubbed laugh that reverberates whenever good times are being recalled from their all-male sailing days belongs to none other than Steve Reeves. Actually, the hearty laugh belongs to whatever nameless voice actor dubbed Steve in this movie, but those are Steve’s lips moving.

Steve had that unique combination of having both a mega-jacked body as well as a mega-jacked beard and hair. Too often, the wannabes will make the mistake of concentrating on one while neglecting the other.

You’ve got dudes who forgo the beard like Goliath did in Goliath and the Vampires and then you’ve got Ulysses from Ulysses Against the Son of Hercules who was under the mistaken belief that you could credibly cruise around the ancient world, monster fighting with a set of guns under thirty inches. All I can say is it’s a good thing this Ulysses was fighting Hercules’s wimp son, because if it had been pa he was battling, he would have ended up like one of those big pretzels they sell at the mall that I love so much.

Properly bronzed, his chest liberally spritzed with man-dew, Steve looks like he’s always mere seconds from picking up something gigantic and heaving it at something evil. Luckily for us and Hercules, he doesn’t have long to wait because the road to Thebes goes through the evil giant Anteo’s land. But first, Herc heads to the back of his covered wagon to get some shuteye.

Then his old lady starts playing with the lute she was given by one of Herc’s sailor friends at the beginning of movie. Next thing Herc and I know, she’s singing some awful ballad that probably made Herc wish he was back with the Argonauts beating down unspeakable creatures instead of having his old lady caterwauling while he was trying to rest his chiseled pecs.

Frankly, I suspected trouble as soon as I saw the lute because it looked remarkably like a toilet seat. I was thinking to myself, “why is someone giving Mrs. Herc the seat from a toilet? These ancient types still crap in the woods, right?” Could this perhaps be an enchanted toilet seat? Would Herc be shouting skywards, “by the Gods! My very bowels have deserted me! Is this to be my fate? To perish from Pluto’s Revenge? Pass me another roll of TP, Iole!”

After enduring his wife’s attempts at serenading him, it is understandable then that when Anteo appears and announces that he is taking Herc’s wife as his own, that Herc says go ahead and knock yourself out.

The old ball and chain isn’t too amused and eventually Herc has to get out of bed and beat up the giant. Only after Ulysses remembers some bit of trivia about Anteo does Herc realize how he must defeat him. This naturally involves Herc lifting the giant up and chucking him off a cliff into the ocean.

Fans of feats-of-strength scenes get plenty of reps in this one. Herc throws giant statues at guys. He battles an entire platoon of soldiers with a big table before hurling it at them. He’s knocking down enormous doors and bending iron bars.

It’s completely natural then that once he drinks from the Waters of Forgetfulness, loses his memory and ends up the husband of an evil witch in her faraway kingdom, that Ulysses (who still has his memory, but is pretending to be deaf and dumb for strategic purposes) has to give the big guy daily rubdowns.

If you’re wondering what all this has to do with the conflict between Oedipus’s two sons, Etocle and Polinice, over which one is going to govern Thebes, then you realize the genius of this movie.

While there is the element of generals bickering over who gets what piece of land that invariably afflicts the worst of the sword and sandal genre, thanks to Hercules getting himself kidnapped by Queen Onfale it never amounts to more than a background annoyance.

Though things do tend to get sluggish during Hercules’ protracted memory loss, it is fun to watch the new hedonistic Herc dole out advice to Ulysses such as to sleep during the day so that you don’t miss out on all the fun at night.

He also comments on how great it is to get up everyday and not have to do anything, but by the time his old sailing buddies rescue him and haul his butt back to Thebes, you better believe that the man-god, as well as the audience, is ready to rumble!

With special effects by Mario Bava (Hercules in the Haunted World), the movie is clearly a cut above most of its ilk in the looks department with big sets and fancy lighting.

And with Steve Reeves’ commanding presence (just look at the way he waves his gargantuan arms around whenever he’s shouting at the Gods!), the hilariously shrill performance of both Queen Onfale and Etocle, and a good dose of action, this is by far one of the best of all the “hunks and punks” pictures.

© 2009 MonsterHunter

Hercules has a buddy named Thesus who battles some bandits and does a pretty good job of taking care of business, but finally Herc tags in, picks up a giant cart and heaves it into this really big platform the bad guys are on. It was such a monstrous heave that the when the big cart was flying through the air, it looked like it was being pulled with wires!

Hercules tells Thesus that they need to get moving to the kingdom where Herc’s girlfriend, Princess Deianira resides. They discover that the queen has died and even though Deianira was supposed to assume the throne, her kindly uncle with the evil haircut (Lee) has taken over for her because she is sick.

With his bowl shaped hair and dark clothes, it doesn’t take a genius to see that this guy is up to no good and is in league with Pluto. Of course, Hercules’ smarts are all in his massive arms and not his head so doesn’t see this and is told that to lift the curse afflicting Deianira, all he has to do is go down to Hades and get a magic rock that Pluto has. Herc tells Thesus to fire up the magic ship and make for Hades.

So what’s so magic about this boat? It sails against the wind and can get them to this place where some cursed women live guarding a golden apple. He needs the golden apple to travel in Hades. I suppose it’s like an ancient GPS.

Even though this is one of those movies where Herc encounters obstacle after obstacle, he meets them all with gritty determination. I’m assuming that Reg Park’s emotional range (which vacillated from muscleman pose to sticking his jaw out to thrusting his pecs in my face) showed me a steely confidence in the face of a crazy suicide mission and not just the fact that his acting prowess came from being Mr. Universe three times.

You know, there was a lot stuff in this movie that was memorable. Christopher Lee being dubbed by someone that surely wasn’t him, Medea periodically intoning some vital bit of information in a voice that reminded me of Jean from the Freedom School in Billy Jack, and even Thesus wussing out and falling into a lava pit to his death, only to reappear unharmed moments later with his new girlfriend Persephone, but the part I will always remember is that time that Hercules fell out of a tree!

There he was climbing up this big, evil tree trying to get the golden apple when all of a sudden there’s sparks, lightning, explosions and all sorts of other stuff you usually see up in the tops of really, big, evil trees and the next thing I know, I’m watching this demi-god take a header toward the ground below!

He survives falling out of the tree (he is Hercules after all!) and secures the apple with an assist from Zeus. The women who were watching the apple tell him good job, but while you were flopping down the hunky tree and hitting every branch your friends were being harassed by a rock guy named Procrustes!

Procrustes likes to cut and stretch everyone to fit in his beds. Hercules confronts Procrustes and we get one of our many guffaws as we see a guy in a really soft, foamy, rock suit lurching around, his voice sounding like an old, sinister computer!

Hercules has seen lots of fake-looking monsters in his career and is thus unimpressed by this rocky dude and simply picks him up and hurls him into a wall of rocks, breaking open the doorway to Hades! (Is Hercules a master tactician or what?)

Hercules has to climb over lava pits, dive into fire and avoid chained up maidens as he makes his way to this glowing rock that Pluto has. Once he gets it, the action and fantastical adventure is only beginning!

He spends the rest of the film trying to save his woman from the clutches of Lico as Lico tries to use Deianira’s blood in his own body so that something diabolical will happen. It’s all because Pluto has cursed the place after Theseus has hooked up with Persephone, who is Pluto’s favorite daughter.

Director Mario Bava (Hatchet for the Honeymoon) manages to bring his signature style to a lot of this movie, especially regarding the use of colors in his lighting. He’s able to shoot scenes in reds and blues and that give things an eerie, otherworldly feel. His inventive use of lighting also allows him to mask the cheap sets to good effect.

The plot didn’t always make much sense as it charged from one action scene to another and the pacing of the movie was strange to say the least (characters stand around talking about what they have to go and do, then they do it, then they talk about what they have to do next and go and do that and so on throughout the film), but Bava smartly never gets bogged down in one location and the fast paced nature of things combined with the unique visuals triumph over the questionable story, the criminal acting, and the high school play sets.

© 2009 MonsterHunter

John Harrington needs to keep killing off brides until he can fit the last piece into the puzzle that has permeated his life: What happened to his mommy when he was a little? Who killed her? Why?

Um, you did. With a meat cleaver. Probably because you thought she was a slut or something. I would think that the killer’s perfectly feathered hair and saucer-sized sweat stains under his pits would have given that away.

John opens things up by taking a train ride with some newlyweds and his meat cleaver. In all the movies with meat cleavers that I’ve watched, I would have to say that John’s meat cleaver is definitely the shiniest. Whatever else you might say about him, you can’t really dispute that he does a really nice job keeping it polished.

When not slaughtering newlyweds, John spends his down time running his own business where sells bridal gowns! It’s like my guidance counselor always told me: get a job where you have easy access to victims.

But all is not peaches and cream for our young, hunky psycho. Somehow he is married. Even though his hobby is killing chicks that get married, his own bride has escaped his wrath.

This is sort of surprising when you see her since she’s a hard faced nag who is constantly putting our hero down, saying stuff like “I’ll never give you divorce!” and “til death do us part.” She punctuates this with a sneer and at one point crushes a grape with great glee!

As if all this weren’t enough to tattoo “insert meat cleaver here” on her forehead, she also reminds Johnny that it is her money that is behind the success of his business and oh by the way my dead first husband was much better in the sack then you, bridal gown boy!

About this time, we get our first nosy copper hassling Johnny. They engage in a little witty repartee that you see in these bogus cat and mouse scenes in movies like this. You know, where the cop says something like, “this guy who kills these women must be crazy and not know what he is doing and he also probably is a big smelly jerk!” Then the killer says something like this: “well, maybe he has his reasons for killing chicks and they might be really good reasons, and I do not smell, it’s just that my deodorant gave out in this dang hothouse where dead broads are definitely not buried!”

Johnny finally does what any rational person would and kills his wife. But just then there is a knock at the door! It’s the nosy cop and the nosy fiancee of some woman that Johnny planted in his hothouse!

They shake him down for awhile and we all hold our breath and hope that these two don’t notice the dead body upstairs (her arm is hanging through the banister) and the blood that is dripping from above onto the carpet.

Director Mario Bava (Black Sabath, Baron Blood) gets a good shot of Johnny noticing the reflection of his wife’s body in the coffee table they’re all standing around. They don’t notice and the cop leaves, but not before telling Johnny that it is a very cold night, but that Johnny seems to be sweating. Yeah, he knows about that little problem! Why do you have to keep shoving his handicap in his face?

With his wife finally dead, Johnny can go about the business of being a full fledged psycho. This involves him cremating his wife’s remains and hauling them around in a nice leather valise. He manages to get himself thrown out of a bar when he hits on a woman there with his briefcase and refers to it as his wife!

Johnny then imagines that everyone is talking to his wife and that they can all see her but him! He chucks the bag into the river, but the bag mysteriously returns!

Following the killer as he goes through his daily routine (kill skank, hate wife, kill skank, kill skank wife I hate) allows the viewer to better connect with him and while not rooting for him (except for killing his wife) you are able to put all the killings into some kind of context so that the movie doesn’t just degenerate into a body count movie like Bava’s Bay of Blood.

Bava makes good use of changes in music as well as shooting everything from John’s subjective reality to illustrate the mess mental illness makes of people’s perceptions. Johnny believes that killing all these people will allow him some peace, but instead it plunges him into a new hell – a hell where he has to live with the fact that it was he that killed his mother. For this unredeemable act, he sentences himself to the worst kind of punishment possible – an eternity with the woman that he hates the most.

Mario succeeds in twisting the genre around, taking us inside the damaged brain of John, asking us not to unravel the crime, but to watch an unraveled man rage against his mental imbalance until he has spent his fury and is confined to the one rubber room he can never escape – that same damaged brain.

© 2009 MonsterHunter

As a guy who studiously avoids anything Olympic related since college football isn’t a medal sport, I wasn’t really that excited to see the Hammer Throw prelims between Sparta and Athens. I was also concerned by the rumor I had heard that these first Olympics were done commando-style. Put your concerns aside though because events such as the Man-Grab where two grown, sweaty, muscular men mount one another are conducted in rather conservative diapers.

Even though it should be obvious from his perfect hair, boyish smile and smooth, tan body, Phillipides dominated his competition at the games, even beating some highly touted Spartan. He even gets the ancient world equivalent of a Wheaties box when his buddy, Milziade, puts Phillipides in charge of the Sacred Guard! I didn’t know what that really was, but I was figuring that it must be something like the Delta Force because I always thought that if Bruce Jenner were in charge of our Delta Force, that those Americans in Iran would have been home inside a week instead of having to wait 444 days!

Phillipides takes his place along side the great heroes of cinema when we see him reject the city life and the responsibility of heading up the Sacred Guard for some good old fashioned mind-clearing farming. But there is some political maneuvering going on in Athens with Teocrito, Croesus, and a dark haired vixen named Karis. Teocrito is a power hungry guy who practices his knife throwing while telling Karis about his devious plan to corrupt Phillipides by having Karis seduce him.

What no one knows is that Phillipides has fallen in love with the blonde haired Andromeda who as luck would have it is set to marry Teocrito in a marriage arranged by her father Croesus. Once Karis tries to seduce Phillipides and is politely rebuffed that she actually falls for him and in the end provides vital information to the Athenians when the Persians are invading.

Karis even ends up getting full military honors for her funeral, though this is such an action packed affair, it’s merely ordered and we don’t get to see it. Well, heck who has time to watch some reformed whore get dumped on a funeral pyre when Phillipides is losing his horse in a raging river. (There is a hilarious scene of Phillipides swimming furiously in this river while his horse floats by in the opposite direction.)

The problems occur when Teocrito turns traitor and agrees to help the Persians take over Athens. Milziade travels to Phillipides’ farm in an effort to lure the great hero out of retirement for one more mission. These scenes thankfully play out just as you expect right down to Milziade making small talk about the fancy new bathes that just opened up in Athens before getting down to business about how his Greek city-state needs him and that its easy to hide out at his farm avoiding responsibility. Didn’t I see some Chuck Norris movie where someone came out to his farm to plead with him to enter the Octagon one more time to save something from somebody?

Once back in the game, Phillipides pretty much does the work of 300 Spartans when he goes to Sparta to beg them to join in the battle against the Persians, runs from Marathon back to Athens to round up the Sacred Guard, holds off thousands of Persians at Athens with just a handful of guys in diapers, and single-handedly destroys several Persian warships with his expert javelin throwing. It was the greatest Olympic performance ever next to Michael Phelps!

The last third of the movie is the best with lots of underwater action with the Sacred Guard acting as frogmen, planting giant pikes in the ocean waters to wreck the Persian fleet, throwing flaming spears at the ships, battling these invading punks from sea to land and holding off the bad guys until the Spartans can finally roll out of bed and get involved.

Mario Bava (Black Sunday) is an uncredited co-director and was the cinematographer and in charge of special effects. His distinctive style wasn’t terribly evident, but what is on screen looks a cut above what you would expect from this type of movie, particularly the underwater shots which look remarkably well done.

Steve Reeves may be the brand name in the Hercules biz, but that don’t mean he’s any good. He stands around awkwardly, his dubbed voice spewing forth the kind of stilted dialog that exists only in these movies and porn, but to his credit he doesn’t look old and creepy or overly beefy like some of these sword and sandal heroes.

No one else distinguishes themselves in this and there aren’t any monsters, but Phillipides does start a landslide by throwing giant boulders down on a bewildered Persian army. (They don’t seem to really know if they should just stand there and let the cascading rocks bowl them over or if they should move out of the way, but they probably didn’t train for man-made landslides).

There’s lots of action, some of the sets are impressive, and there’s even a boat with spikes on it that opens and closes like a mouth. Go ahead and check out The Giant of Marathon and see exactly why I call Steve Reeves the Steve Reeves of off-brand Hercules movies!

© 2009 MonsterHunter

The tale is a Rashomon-style one of what happened between a guy and girl who were out on the town one night in the late 1960s. Gianni (Demonia‘s Brett Halsey) is an Italian playboy who hooks up with a young tart named Tina and they go out and then go back to his place and problems ensue. Those of you familiar with Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon already know the gimmick that’s central to this film. The events of the evening are relayed to the viewer by a variety of characters who had differing perceptions of what transpired. The title of the movie refers to the number of versions of the story you get. One version from Tina, one from Gianni, one from the perverted doorman, and a final one by some guy in a lab coat who plays with Hot Wheels.

The opening credits serve notice of the type of past-its-expiration-date antics we’re in for as they’re made up of a hodgepodge of trashy hippie music and pseudo-psychodelic animation. I will admit that as this annoying music kept playing I began to have the urge to break out my Nehru jacket, put on the granny glasses and just boogie-down until the fuzz comes to bust my chops.

As most of mod hipsters did in the Summer Of Love, Gianni is out cruising the park looking for hot mamas. He spies this leggy dish named Tina and convinces her to go out with him that evening. They go out to this club and it’s a real happening scene, dig? They dance like people who have no inkling how to dance are wont to do and eventually they head back to Gianni’s pad.

Okay, now this is for the ladies in the house. If you go to a guy’s bachelor pad and there’s a swing suspended from the ceiling, you should know that he just might be kind of groovy in a “player” kind of way. Also, if you go to a guy’s bachelor pad and he ends up wearing nothing but these gay little blue and black bikini briefs and starts leering at you then you have to expect a certain amount of what the gentlemen refer to as “slap and tickle.” Events deteriorate from there as he tries to force himself on her. Tina scratches him and gets her dress torn and manages to escape.

But is that how it really happened? Maybe there’s a different explanation. It seems that like all would-be rapists, Gianni has a different take on the events of the evening in question. The story he relates to his drinking buddies portrays himself as just a shy dude looking for a good time and he can’t help it if he’s irresistible to the fairer sex. In his version, when he goes to pick up Tina at her mom’s house, her mother is young and attractive is all over Gianni.

In this version of the story, Tina is quite the insatiable little hellcat and with Gianni is his little pair of panties, I mean bikini briefs, who can blame her? He explains how her dress was torn and how he got the scratches and it all stems from the fact that she just couldn’t keep her hands off of him.

Around this point in time the movie becomes a bit tiresome because I’m realizing that I am going to have to sit through the same basic story about the same shallow people a couple of more times. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. So does Gianni’s version sound like the real deal? You and I both know that that’s not what went down and that if anyone would have the straight dope it would be the doorman.

Ahh, our good friend the doorman. He is by far the most interesting character in the movie. First of all he has an office in the apartment building where Gianni lives and it’s decorated with pictures of naked ladies that he has cut out of some of the finer men’s magazines of the day. Secondly, he looks exactly like all the old, bald, sweaty, greasy, middle-aged fat losers that populated adult bookstores before the Internet made them obsolete.

He is also, as you may have surmised, a bit of a peeper. That’s how he gets in on all this action. The milkman shows up in the morning and the doorman tells the milkman what he saw last night in Gianni’s apartment. There was a classic scene where the doorman had to run up several flights of stairs to peep Gianni. He ran really fast and I had to smirk because I was reminded of British funnyman Benny Hill. We can never get enough of the whole dirty old man gimmick, right? Geezers leering at over-endowed tarts? Funny stuff! Anyway, the bottom line on the doorman’s version is that Gianni is gay and got it on with a guy that showed up while a woman who showed up with that guy tried to get in on with Tina. Hey, with those girly underpants Gianni was wearing, who knows?

The film winds up with some geek in a lab coat blathering about how this and that might have happened but that maybe it happened another way. Then we go back and see a fourth version of the story. When he’s finished he’s holding a toy car that’s supposed to be Gianni’s car. Then he puts down the car and we go to a clip of Gianni driving off into the sunrise. This was kind of like Mr. Rogers and the land of make believe. I was hoping that we’d get to hear King Friday XIII’s version of events.

Four Times That Night is hobbled by the fact we have to sit through the same boring story four different times. I suppose the movie is interesting from a curiosity standpoint. It’s a non-horror movie from Bava and it has dated terribly with the bad clothes, music, and social views. The mixture of comedy with an attempted rape was somewhat disconcerting. Maybe that kind of stuff was laughable back in the sixties, but it will probably turn off modern audiences. Put this one way down on the list of Bava films to see. If this film is indicative of the majority of 1960s Italian sex comedies, there’s a reason we haven’t seen hardly any turn up on English-friendly DVDs.

© 2009 MonsterHunter