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

It is a testament to the greatness of both the film and Brescia (Cross Mission, Beast in Space) that such an event not only didn’t seem silly, but entirely necessary! After all, those jugglers carried clubs which could be used to clout unfriendly Roman guards to unconsciousness while storming the secret passage that ran underneath the palace!

It isn’t just little dudes pulling little dude stunts like squeezing through iron bars, riding around in a basket on a guy’s back, and hiding in the bushes tripping up Praetorians that makes the film required viewing for those of us who need lots of brawny bare man legs pistoning back and forth from the thrusting of their swords and daggers into other men. It’s also because the juicy jock at the center of all this, Velerio Rufo (Harrison), struts around during revolutionary activities in a mask made of a wolf’s head and is called the Red Wolf!

Red Wolf constantly confounds Domitian with his actions which include breaking free a lovely lass who was just about have her virginity sacrificed to Domination as well as freeing various enemies of the state the Emperor was going to have executed.

Red Wolf has such big balls that he doesn’t mind busting in on Domitian in his own palace when he’s surrounded by his elite Praetorian Guards and single-handedly beats them all up before escaping! Domitian is incensed and therefore intent on neutering this mutt and puts his best man on the case!

It’s an excellent plan since the Praetorian he puts on the case is smart, powerful, and his commitment to finding Red Wolf can’t be questioned since he’s always gone for long periods of time searching for the dastardly dog! The only real hitch in Domitian’s scheme is that the Praetorian he picked to do this is Velerio Rufo!

Everyone is fooled for the first hour of the film until they start to realize that Clark Kent and Superman, I mean Velerio Rufo and Red Wolf, are never together at the same time!

Rufo does attempt to throw Domitian off the scent by dumping the mask on a dead guy, but since Rufo suffered from a busted up arm and the body had no such injury, it is immediately recognized as a fake.

The midget tries to patch Rufo up, but the lame way Rufo has to tuck his cloak over his arm is a dead giveaway. Rufo is forced to flee and to leave his girlfriend in the Emperor’s clutches.

One botched rescue attempt later and Rufo and his girlfriend are scheduled for execution! And what an execution it promises to be! In order to double the awesome terribleness of Red Wolf’s execution, Domitian is first going have the girlfriend killed so that Red Wolf can watch before being killed himself! In a giant vat of molten lead! (Domitian is like the Red Skull in a tunic.)

Surrounded by guards, his hands tied, his old lady moments away from a scalding death, there is no chance for survival. For the Emperor! You don’t get a kick ass nickname like Red Wolf for pissing on the carpet when the chips are down! You get a kick ass nickname by kicking ass!

Red Wolf becomes a one man phalanx of death and destruction as he breaks free, pushes over the vat of molten lead, swings on a rope, kicks guys, catches a sword in the air and wades into all the bad guys with everything he’s got! All while his hands are still tied!

By the time the cavalry arrive, led by the midget and his juggling dirty dozen, Red Wolf is already sprinting after Domitian! And their title fight to close out the film does not disappoint with both guys going at it with sword and spear while Red Wolf’s fans look on anxiously!

Harrison (Killers Are Challenged) is perfect as Red Wolf as he is convincingly athletic in his action scenes and during his talking scenes, his hair is spectacular. Domitian makes a fine villain as he constantly ridicules the midget’s assertions that the midget has a love life (the joke’s on Domitian though since the midget is just using his “dates” as an excuse to help the rebels!) and he doesn’t even stop getting his regular rubdown just because Red Wolf is still out and about trying to ruin his empire!

Fast paced and with plenty of action, Revolt of the Praetorians, is a textbook example of how peplum movies focusing on palace intrigue should be handled – with midgets, underground passages, virgins being threatened, a rock throwing fight at a quarry, and a stud in a costume!

© 2011 MonsterHunter

For starters, Taur can’t even get his own name right! The VHS cover refers to him as Tor, the onscreen title of the film calls him Taur, but everyone in the movie including himself, says he is Thor!

Even with that identity crisis though, at least he didn’t have to suffer the indignity of Harry Baird’s character, Ubaratutu! As silly as Ubaratutu is as a name, it was the least offensive part of the character!

You see, Ubaratutu is a black dude. At first glance, it may appear that Thor is a pretty progressive guy, what with having a black sidekick and all. So often in peplum flicks, it’s a lily white world, with the exception of varying shades of natives depending on where a particular adventure was taking place.

A black dude who actually has dialogue and participates in the adventure and saves the hero every now and again surely had both Malcolm X and Martin Luther King saluting director Antonio Leonviola’s efforts at bringing civil rights to muscle stud movies, right?

Maybe if Ubaratutu didn’t run around calling Thor “master” all the time. Or if Ubaratutu weren’t consistently portrayed as a cowardly dog so scared by the adventure that at one point his teeth were chattering so loudly that it alerted the guards and Thor had to clamp his mouth shut!

Then there was the time that he was caught sleeping under the bed while Thor and his evil queen girlfriend were trying to get it on. Sure, he ended up saving Thor from her kiss of death, but I can’t imagine that Sidney Poitier was giving Harry Baird high fives for his contribution to a new era of minorities in film that attempted to eschew the old wide-eyed shuck and jive stereotypes of the past.

It isn’t just Ubaratutu either that makes the modern viewer squirm uncomfortably either. Thor takes to the master role quite well, ordering Ubaratutu around, making fun of what a pussy he is, and leaving Ubaratutu in tight spots with only a vague explanation that it’s part of his plan.

At one point he frees his (white) foster son Syros from his chains in a cave prison and makes Ubaratutu take his place, telling him that he’ll be fine because the slaves only get whipped!

He and Thor are also forced to fight one another in the arena for the evil queen’s pleasure and while there are a few times that Ubaratutu throws Thor around, Thor pretty much has his way with and appears to take a good deal of pleasure in letting Ubaratutu’s wimpy punches do nothing before brutally slamming him to the ground and punching him in his gut!

And then Thor fakes getting knocked out, thus letting Ubaratutu win! Couldn’t he have done that about ten minutes of brutal ass whipping ago?

And just to prove that even when Ubaratutu appears to finally achieve something significant (even if wasn’t deserved), it turns out that the winners of these matches end up in giant stew pots so that the nasty Kixos tribe can eat them! And don’t think that Ubaratutu isn’t wailing like a baby about it either!

Even without the cringe worthy racism present in the film, Taur the Mighty would still stink like a slave in a cave with its repetitious plot of Taur, Ubaratutu, and Syros getting captured, escaping, and getting recaptured and scheming to escape some more from the Kixos tribe’s underground kingdom.

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Much of the film consisted of these three sneaking around caverns bonking guards on the head and Thor constantly being threatened with death for whatever latest transgression he committed.

A movie as tediously offensive as Taur though can’t help but contain some entertaining bits, too! Is there any guy who doesn’t want to see a pair of sisters blindfolded and gagged have a sword fight to the death in a ring of fire?

How about when Ubaratutu sneaks out of the bottom of a pig pile of about twenty guards to make his escape after being rescued by Thor from the stew pots?

And when Thor strains against the might of 24 horses who are trying to pull him apart or heaves a gargantuan block of gold on top of a box trapping the evil queen, you realize that even a racially insensitive muscle stud like Thor is a shredded thunder god first and a prejudiced asshole second.

And that’s progress. Or at least if isn’t, it’s all offensively entertaining enough that both Thor and Ubaratutu would team up again to have another adventure with Thor and the Amazon Women! Uh oh! Sounds like lesbians are up next for the Taurible treatment!

© 2011 MonsterHunter

Scotland?  As in Loch Ness Monster Scotland?  As in “on the other side of the continent from Italy and Greece” Scotland?  And in the Middle Ages, too?

Whatever happened to that oiled up stud who ran around liberating places like Thebes and Mycene, driving chariots, and going skin-on-chiseled-bronzed-skin with monsters like Antares and the Moloch?

Never fear because in spite of everyone else in Maciste’s Scottish village dressed up like extras from a Vincent Price-Roger Corman picture, Maciste is still decked out in skimpy brown loin cloth and isn’t afraid to heave stones and trees around when need be!

Those of you hoping for some type of explanation as to how it was that Maciste just happened to be wandering around the Scottish countryside at precisely the same time as a hot young thing was wrongfully accused of being a witch and in need of rescue are obviously new to this genre.

Usually, the best these flicks can offer in terms of explanation consists of some musclehead showing up at the troublespot, quickly uttering something along the lines of “I came as soon as I heard there was trouble” and immediately shifting back into “heave and throw” mode.

The Witch’s Curse doesn’t even bother with this!  Maciste shows up, the town doctor tells him that some crappy witch they torched last century put a curse on the town and only by getting the curse lifted can the girl be saved.

Maciste is one of those can-do kind of fellows and once the haunted tree is pointed out that’s giving the town so much trouble, he lowers his shoulder and tries to uproot it.  Then he pushes it.  Then he tries to lift it.  Just when it looked like Maciste had spent the last few months trying to pass a steroid test, he manages to make it budge enough so that a hole beneath it opens up.

Maciste hops on in and finds himself in hell!  Right there under a tree in Scotland!  Just like it says in The Bible!

Maciste spends the remainder of the film wandering around the cave, periodically battling Satan’s pets (lions and giants) and getting the wool pulled over his eyes by the witch in beautiful girl disguise. (It may take place in Scotland, but this is sword and sandal stuff right on down to the “hunk gets seduced into forgetting his mission” sequence all these movies contain.)

Maciste regains his memory by gazing into a pool of water that just happens to be playing highlights from some of his previous adventures.  And even though star Kirk Morris played Maciste something like seven times in his career, none of the flashbacks are from Maciste movies that he was in!

One of them, Samson And The 7 Miracles Of The World, starred Gordon Scott, but was at least directed by Ricarrdo Freda who also made this one.  The other movie, apparently Atlas In The Land Of The Cyclops, wasn’t even directed by Freda, but did star a guy named Gordon, but not Gordon Scott! That would be Gordon Mitchell of The Giant Of Metropolis fame.  Somehow, seeing clips from his colleagues’ past films jogs his memory and Maciste gets back on the case.

Morris (Colossus and the Headhunters) displays a pretty limited playbook in this movie when it comes to studly displays of superpowered he-man mayhem.  With him bopping around a big cave the entire movie, his moves consist mainly of chucking rocks, stone columns, and getting buried in landslides. He does bust out his top-secret ability to jump really far though after a giant wrecks his efforts to cross a chasm with a big log.

Morris’ dialogue is fairly minimal which is a good thing since the few times he opens his mouth to let the dubbed lines pour out, he looks half asleep. I think it says something important that someone could see Morris in action here and say to themselves, “here’s a guy we should put in eleven more films exactly like this one!” Something important like it was an awesome time for us muscle fetish guys to be alive!

Cruddy in both concept and execution, The Witch’s Curse nevertheless manages to evoke enough chuckles in its mercifully brief 75 minutes (the original version, Maciste in Hell, is several minutes longer) to make it a worthy second feature on Something Weird’s DVD of the entertaining Hercules Against The Moon Men. (Watch the scenes where Maciste is fighting the giant and try not to think that it isn’t just some little dude in a bad wig fighting a regular-sized guy.)

And if there’s  one moment in the flick that makes it all worthwhile, it has to be where Maciste is almost stampeded to death by a herd of steers thundering through the caves of hell. It’s beef vs. beef! Thank goodness he was able to fend them off with the big stalagmite he picked up just in the nick of time!

© 2011 MonsterHunter

Pericles immediately gets to work on his mission and the next thing we know he’s on a Phoenician pirate ship ramming Ulysses’ boat and taking him captive. I won’t lie to you. When I first I got a look at Ulysses, I was kind of put off by his short blonde hair, his old wore out look and his generally skeevy nature.

Ulysses though was a pretty smartly written character and didn’t come off as the meathead these movies usually feature. Luckily, we had Pericles for our lunkheaded dope character and his big, shiny, shaved chest adequately hefted rubber boulders and filled out his singlet well enough.

Ulysses was probably a little too smart for his good a number of times in this movie. He was smart in that he always had a cunning plan, but it was the type of plan that invariably involved unnecessary risk to himself. These were times of extraordinary manliness though!

For instance, there was the time he was all trussed up in the hull of the pirate ship and he finds himself a metal spike. Instead of trying to use the spike to cut his bonds, he somehow uses it to start a fire and then holds his tied-up wrists over the flames until the rope is burned enough to break. Well, either that or until his fingers are crispy enough to snap off.

Even when he’s free though, he has to hang around in the hull and try not to die of smoke inhalation until he can make his escape. Then once he does make it off the boat, he has to swim for shore. Keep in mind that he was somewhere in the ocean and since he had been in the hull, he theoretically would have no idea how far from land he was. Pericles orders everyone into the water to give chase and in the meantime the pirate ship burns up, screwing everyone in the process.

It all worked out though because everyone but Pericles and Ulysses drown and those two end up chasing each other over some beach that they manage to swim to. There are some funny scenes where we’re watching Ulysses stumble around the landscape while Pericles runs after him.

Pericles catches up with Ulysses giving them the long-awaited opportunity to roll around with each other. But their sweet moments of hunk contact are short-lived as they are captured by the bird men that inhabit this strange land!

The bird men are these silly-looking goofs in feathered-covered singlets and have beaks and feathers on their heads, but as is often times the case in strange and mysterious lands populated by bizarre and deadly creatures, they are ruled over by a comely queen.

In this case she shows up in her feather costume which is highlighted by its ten-foot long feather train. These bird people are also clearly an advanced race because it’s evident from her costume that they have somehow developed the very first underwire, feather bra.

She explains to Ulysses and Pericles that even though they have achieved great advancements in avian-inspired undergarments, they are still a race primitive enough to worship a giant vulture that demands a couple of beefy sacrifices.

Before Pericles and Ulysses do battle to decide who gets sacrificed, the bird men get scared off by a thunderstorm and our guys escape. Admittedly, it all made very little sense, but then again, it was a strange and mysterious land that had heretofore never been visited by bronzed mortal.

After they leave the bird men behind and encounter a hermit, Ulysses makes his escape in the movie’s most confusing sequence. He seems to have somehow drugged Pericles’ drinking water and when Pericles passes out, he runs off.

The next thing I know, we’re back in Pericles’ old lands where he’s talking to his ex-girlfriend about some cave dwellers who are laying the smack down on her land while her new boyfriend is out of town.

But whatever happened to Ulysses? It turns out that he’s in the land of the cave dwellers which is ruled by the insane despot Lagos!

Lagos asks him to invent him a pair of wings so that he can resume his attacks on Pericles’ old hometown, but when Ulysses (who’s obviously quite well-read) tries to refresh Lagos about what happened with Icarus and Daedalus, Lagos waves him off saying he doesn’t want to be bothered with such nonsense.

You probably won’t be surprised then when the guy testing the wings out, goes splat, but Ulysses tries to shirk responsibility by saying the guy didn’t flap the wings right!

Lots more action ensues, including a battle between Lagos’ and Pericles’ armies (about twenty guys or so for both), Ulysses getting himself crushed in some stone chamber, and a fight to the death between Ulysses and the guy that stole Pericles’ woman.

Maybe I’m just getting used to these cruddy sword and sandal movies, but I thought this went down easy enough. Georges Marchal is solid as Ulysses and Mike Lane who played Pericles, while obviously stinking up the joint, isn’t required to carry the movie, so his talentless presence won’t get on your nerves too badly.

The action and locales are varied enough so that things aren’t all bogged down in intricate political machinations as they were in muscle films like Hercules Vs. The Moloch. Yes, things are really cheap (I had classes in grade school with more people than these so-called armies) and the dubbing is predictably bad, but watching Ulysses shaking his head “no” repeatedly as Lagos asks if the poets will recount his exploits while trying on the wings Ulysses made for him is one of the great moments in peplum film history. The movie is a bit like Ulysses himself – skeevy, but okay.

© 2011 MonsterHunter

Some of you may be nodding your head in recognition as you surely recall Brad, Sybil, and Lou in the Italian sword and sandal classic of 1983, Hercules. Yes, it was a thrilling tale of bad special effects and bears being hurled into outer space, but why rehash that spectacularly sweaty piece of trash again?

I beseech thee to still thy fetid tongue! For as the Gods may have one adventure in 1983, if it be their will, they shall have another! Fetch me my leather gauntlets, dog! We are to ride once more into the mouth of he-man adventure, into the teeth of an evil characterized by maniacal laughter, bad haircuts, and abominable wigs, into bad Italian movie legend itself!

When Brad, Sybil, and Lou last strapped on the togas, it was Luigi Cozzi who put them through their paces. Luigi was so successful in this task, that the Gods tapped him again to make another movie with Lou called The Adventures Of Hercules!

But The Seven Magnificent Gladiators was a different beast than those films. There would be no cheesy special effects and monsters to distract the viewer from the movie’s shortcomings (story, acting, production values, direction, etc.). These seven warriors would be up against a script that harkened back to the very Golden Age of the Ancients! I’m of course referring to the early 1960s when a couple of Hercules, Maciste, Samson, and Goliath movies were released every week.

What we’ve got here is a version of the The Seven Samurai and The Magnificent Seven, but better because the Italians are involved. This is about their ancestors, after all. Better because a guy listed in the credits as Claude Fragass wrote it. And no, that’s not some French guy with the best last name ever. That’s Claudio Fragasso, an Italian guy with some of the best writing credits ever! Hell Of The Living Dead, Strike Commando, Troll II, and Interzone just to name a few of the many gems he was no doubt divinely inspired to write.

Funny thing though about Claudio Fragasso. He’s pretty much Italian cinema’s Robin to its Batman! When you’re staring at a Fragasso-scripted flick, you can be 95% certain that there’s only one guy who has the tools to put all of Claudio’s budget-conscious ideas onto the big screen! A guy named Mattei. Bruno Mattei.

Mattei, jack of all genres and master of none, gets his chance at the sword and sandal genre and has no problem emulating the best of the monster-less entries in the field. He’s helped of course by having a supremely jacked up Ferrigno, but even more than that is the presence of Harris and Don Vadis as the evil Nicerote.

Harris and Vadis are legitimate peplum legends from the 1960s with Harris starring in films like Samson, Goliath Against The Giants, and The Fury Of Hercules while Vadis brawled his way through The Ten Gladiators, Ursus, the Rebel Gladiator, and The Triumph Of Hercules among others. It’s a nice torch passing that goes on in this movie with these two guys symbolically handing over the sweaty jockstrap to Ferrigno. That nothing other than those two Luigi Cozzi Hercules movies ever followed is immaterial. The whims of the film Gods are not for us to question.

The movie itself gives off the expected whiff of Lou’s armpits after a particularly strenuous battle in the midday Italian sun. A village is being harassed by Nicerote who is invulnerable thanks to some kind of voodoo laid on him by his witch mother. The men have been killed and things are only going to go further downhill now that a couple of punks try to assassinate Nicerote when he’s trying to demand tribute from this village. Even worse is that the village only offered Nicerote four chickens and a piece of cheese in tribute! Hell, I’ve got more than that in my refrigerator!

Some of the village broads take the magic sword hidden in the witch’s temple to Rome to find the guy who can wield it and defeat Nicerote. He turns out to be a barbarian named Han (Ferrigno) who is fresh of a big chariot race with another gladiator named Scipio (Harris). Han refused to kill Scipio following his victory and now both are on the run from the emperor. They run into the women being attacked by a variety of Rome’s finer citizens – hunchbacks, lepers, retards, and amputees and waste little time wading into them to clean house. You’ve haven’t lived until you’ve seen Lou punch out a hunchback!

The magic sword works for Han, so he, Scipio, and a bunch of other gladiators including Danning ride off to rid the village of Nicerote. There’s a battle and Nicerote’s forces are run off. A celebration at the temple turns sour when the gladiators are attacked again and informed that Nicerote is back at the village. The villagers tell the gladiators to get lost and Nicerote orders the gladiators to leave in shame!

Outnumbered, they have no choice and do so. But then they come back and kick ass! Sure, it doesn’t make any sense, but these are gladiators and they don’t know from sense, but they know about kick ass!

That’s all there is to the movie. What more do you need, want, or expect? Vadis is great as Nicerote, decked out in his leather daddy outfit, throwing guys off walls, killing his blind mother, and being burned alive by Han’s sword. And yes, I am trying very hard not to read too much into that, but it is difficult, especially when you see how Lou holds his sword out in front of him when he first gets it!

For his part, Lou acquits himself in the manner expected of a living muscle god! Lou heaves people and rocks! He swings swords and sticks with ripped authority! Most importantly of all, he has the beard and bod to easily dominate all the past cinema strongmen!

While not as flashily terrible as some of his more famous efforts, Bruno finds success in the small touches such as the poorly shot chariot race scene that seemed to have an audience of about five spectators, the fruity emperor, the casting of a fat guy as Goliath, and outfitting Lou’s character with a belt that has the letter “H” on it, presumably standing for his first name, Han. And just to make sure that even as he pays homage to the great musclehead movies of the past, Bruno still puts his stamp on things by featuring an overlong, pointless scene of two greased up girls wrestling one another! A very sturdy and studly, if second-tier Bruno/Claudio collaboration, but only because they set the standard so freaking high!

© 2010 MonsterHunter

The Mongols (led by Garek) are bothering the Chinese in the 1200s. Only a young giant named Samson can help out by ringing the freedom bell which is the signal to all Chinamen that it’s time to flip the switch on those dirty Mongols!

If you have any hope of enjoying this movie, you’ll need to just accept as a fact that Samson is in China and actually has some reason for being there. The movie doesn’t really address the issues as to who this Samson is, why is he there, how did he get there, or where in the world he keeps that tube of bronzer in that little diaper he wears.

Garak isn’t content with merely being the supreme ruler of the invading hoard of Mongols but wants to become Emperor of China. I wasn’t real clear on what exactly this guy’s position was though because at first I thought he was some kind of foreign invader who was in charge of the Mongols, but during the entire movie he seems to be living in the royal court, hanging around with the prince and princess of the Emperor, all the while plotting their hunting accidents.

Garak puts his schemes into action and the prince goes off on a tiger hunt, but somehow it ends with him all tied up and dumped in a tiger pit. I was thinking that they must have had a different idea of what a “hunting accident” was than we do since I wasn’t sure how having your body be discovered all tied up in a tiger pit with tigers gnawing on you would qualify as an accident.

Luckily for this dopey prince, there just happens to be a really big white dude standing around that part of China just looking to do a good deed where lots of muscles are needed. Samson takes this opportunity to grip and grope a tree and tear it out of the ground. Bad guys fall out of the tree and the next thing I know Samson is going one on one with a stuffed tiger!

The director, Riccardo Freda (I Vampiri), at first interweaves blatant stock footage of a tiger prowling around with his actors and then switches to the stuffed animal once Samson has to try and pry the creature’s jaws wide open.

I will admit that once Samson had the thing in a chokehold and they went to wide shots of him putting the sleeper on this beast that it did appear to be real tiger, but I would add that it appeared to a really tranquilized tiger.

After finally beating up the very sleepy tiger, he rescues the prince and ends up heading into some town to meet up with rebel leader Cho where he gets mixed with rescuing a princess Garek has captured, but only after busting up a bar of course!

He gets help in rescuing the princess from Garak’s girlfriend who is irked that Garak’s latest scheme is to marry the princess to become emperor instead of just killing everyone to become emperor. That Garak is such a skunk. If he promised his girlfriend that she’d be on the throne after everyone was wiped out, then he should stick to it! It’s funny business like that that gave the Mongol hoard such a bad name.

As far as the title goes, there was some talk by an old man at some point that there were seven miracles that were to be performed, but I think I got the version that only showed two of them.

First of all, Samson was told to go and ring the freedom bell. He goes and does this and as soon as everyone hears it, they act like Hawk did in Over The Top whenever he turned his cap backwards for a big arm wrestling match.

When this bell rang, it was ON! Peasants immediately started whipping up on their Mongol rulers and everything seemed to be going well for the rebels up until the time that Samson got distracted by some bad guys and bumped his head on the big metal dragon he was using to ring the bell with!

The Mongols lock him in big stone tomb underground while upstairs in the town square, Garak is ready to execute Cho. Samson suddenly wakes up from his nap and starts pushing at his solid rock confines and miracle number two is on!

The next thing you know the entire town is beset by a monstrous earthquake! Buildings fall, people tumble into lakes, and Garak gets speared in the chest by Cho. Watching scenes of Samson straining against the rock interspersed with scenes of the giant chasms opening up in the ground is beefy-sized action at its finest!

The one thing that distinguishes this film from its sweat-stained competition is its location. Like Hercules Against the Sons of the Sun, it tries to inject some life into things by taking Samson and putting him in a different geographic location far removed from ancient Rome or Greece. Things aren’t nearly as loopy as they were when Hercules went on his South American vacation though, so you’re actually better off seeking that one out before this one.

Samson himself has little personality and doesn’t speak more than ten lines of dialogue throughout the film, though it’s purely a judgment call whether that’s a drawback or just a good use of your slab of meat.

Nothing really memorable goes on and the short running time doesn’t give anybody anytime to do anything stupefyingly bad. A below average effort with minimal production values that makes you think that having Samson wear that diaper was as much a financial decision as a artistic one.

© 2010 MonsterHunter

Truly a sobering experience, though Hargitay couldn’t resist tapping into that natural goofiness that was so much in evidence in Bloody Pit of Horror by telling the barbarians while they were torturing him that their women smelled like sheep!

Valentinian III is the emperor whose incompetence in political machinations and ruling Rome is only exceeded by his ability to make strange faces while indulging in watching imported Greek dancers performing an embarrassingly fey number for his court.

While his super stud general, who’s been out in the field beating back the Vandals, is pleading with him to provide his men food and support, Valentinian is only concerned with the two gladiators roped up to each other and brawling for his pleasure! Add in the fact that Valentinian periodically advises one of his aids how he wishes to be written about in history and his not being brutally murdered onscreen comes as a major disappointment!

But that would be the only disappointment for Revenge of the Gladiators! Beginning with all-out barbarian vs. Roman action and swiftly shifting back to Rome for the introduction of the gladiators themselves, the film delivers all the action and pathos one would expect from a film where Hargitay is tied up to a cross while wearing only a diaper and forced to watch his girlfriend marry an ugly barbarian with a hideous mullet! And then he was going to be shot full of arrows as soon as the marriage was complete! And you thought Catholic weddings were torturous!

The gladiators the film purports to follow (in truth, the movie ends up being about Hargitay more than the gladiators) are the six best gladiators in all of Rome! They’re so good, they even have their own superhero team nickname, The Six Invincibles, and they come into the arena as a group to fight bunches of other gladiators. But these guys aren’t just bloodthirsty thugs who enjoy all-male slap fights. They also have hardcore political views!

Perhaps teaching me more than I ever wanted to know about the political problems facing Rome a couple of thousand years ago, the film shows us that the common soldiers (of which the Six Invincibles used to be) had no use for the Praetorian Guard, who were viewed as the emperor’s corrupt henchmen. The ex-soldiers meanwhile complained that once out of the service they were given a little bit of land and then taxed into oblivion!

Normally, this is the sort of Wall Street Journal talk I would loath in my sweaty hunk movies, but it lead to a big bar fight so it was obviously vital to the story that we have that background.

Hargitay plays Fabius, the son of the general doing all the barbarian ass kicking. Fabius has been presumed dead, but manages to make his way back to Rome and hooks up with his old buddies, the Six Invincibles.

The Six Invincibles, when not doing their gladiator bit or getting in fights, do what they can for the common man by working with some sort of resistance group. To this end they help a couple of guys escape being executed and Fabius who is not in on the plan sees them and assists anyway causing him a great deal of trouble with his general father.

While visiting the emperor to apologize and swear his allegiance, he sees the emperor’s daughter and they fall in love. The Vandal leader though sees an opportunity to grab the Roman throne by having his homely son marry the emperor’s daughter and this leads to Fabius’ capture and provides the impetus for a final assault on the barbarians by the Six Invincibles and leads to a bittersweet victory.

An air of inevitable defeat permeates most of the second half of the film, from when Fabius’s father lies on his deathbed and uses his final words to say that “tomorrow Rome will disappear in a sea of fire” to Fabius announcing that they will defend the fort against the barbarians despite having no chance of winning to the news that Rome is destroyed. It is all very effective and sort of sneaks of up on you since you expect that Hargitay and his gladiator pals will somehow make everything right.

A welcome change from the usual over-the-top pumped up antics of these types of films, it even manages to throw in some religion here and there! The end of an empire has never been this entertaining!

© 2010 MonsterHunter

And lest you think this some artless attempt at being obtusely droll, all I’m saying that if they can give this movie five Oscars when it came out again in 2000, then it was a shame that the participants in the first one languish in obscurity.

Yes, for those of you who thought that Emperor Commodus’ reign as a nutcase Roman emperor who liked to hit the gladiator arena for a little R&R was strictly an invention of the Ridley Scott/Russell Crowe movie, Gladiator, I’m happy to report that it was done many years before and with much more authenticity.

Okay, I don’t really have the faintest idea how authentic Ursus, the Rebel Gladiator is, but at least it was made by people from the country were it all actually happened centuries before. In any case, Ursus, the Rebel Gladiator is easily the superior film of the two for any number of reasons including the fact that in this version you get two beefsticks for the price of one!

That’s right, whereas you usually are stuck with one hunked up guy who’s badly dubbed and can’t act, in this one you get two! And they don’t skimp on the quality of the beef either.

First of all, you’re getting Don Vadis in the role of Ursus (this is Crowe’s Maximus). Vadis appeared in a number of these sword and sandal movies then migrated over to spaghetti westerns, before staging a homecoming of sorts with his final feature in 1983, The Seven Magnificent Gladiators.

Then you’ve got a smirking Alan Steel (Hercules Against The Moon Men) ruling over all of Rome! Obviously his Commodus is much more manly then Joaquin Phoenix’s was. Joaquin’s version of Commodus shows what’s wrong with Hollywood and how little respect they have for the movie-going public.

It isn’t enough that Commodus is a crazy emperor who likes to take part in gladiator matches and kills Maximus’ family, but even worse, he’s a big sissy! So instead of a clash of two real he-men, all you end up with is some cheating pansy trying outlast Maximus. Ursus, the Rebel Gladiator though knows that we want to see our hero give a good beat down to a guy just as jacked up as he is. I don’t want to see my Hercules clone beat up a guy that I could whip!

Commodus has a thing for fighting guys and likes to mix it up on the field of battle with folks his troops have captured. I was a little concerned though that in his first fight, he had such a tough time dispatching an older, out of shape barbarian. I think a lot of the smart money moved over to Ursus after that lackluster performance.

For his part, our introduction to Ursus is more impressive as he battles legions of Roman scum, chucking giant logs at them, heaving them into barrels, hurtling the barrels with them still inside down the hill into more Roman scum, and generally dominating the scene like you would expect him to. But this Ursus has a secret weapon, too. He’s a Jesus freak!

It’s one of the things that sets this movie apart from a lot of its brethren and Ursus isn’t one of those shy Christians when it comes time to foist his beliefs on some pagan dirtbag. When he corrected some chick about defying the gods or challenging the gods, he snidely correctly her by saying “God.” Okay, you big hunk of Jesus love, you can quit shoving your monotheism down my throat and go out and kick some Roman scum ass!

That’s another thing they use his born again status to play up: his aversion to violence. In fact, even as he is punching out the guy running the gladiator training camp that he’s been forced to enroll in because a Roman senator has kidnapped his girlfriend and wants to use Ursus in his plot to assassinate Commodus, he’s shouting “I detest violence!”

Does anything else that goes on in this movie really matter once you read the phrase “gladiator school?” Big dopes getting all trained up on a variety of weapons while our reluctant hero shows all those wimps how it’s done is always a sure fire way to maintain interest.

You get not one, but two fights between Ursus and Commodus, a rather impressive-sized battle between rival armies, and Ursus and his old gladiator school teacher teaming up to destroy a bridge of vital military importance! Even the political scheming that was sprinkled throughout wasn’t too boring and provided us with a nice scene of the emperor of Rome strangling a Roman senator in a prison cell! A sword and sandal must for its loads of violence, muscle, hand to hand combat, and the funny looking fur singlet that Ursus sometimes wears.

© 2010 MonsterHunter

Some muscular missions though were tougher than others. For instance, a subterranean kingdom populated by hundreds of leopard men and ruled by an evil sexy queen who enslaved regular guys sure sounds like it has all the makings of a 10.0 magnitude beefquake! And it does! Times two!

It’s understandable if you just juiced your jockstrap because all the stops are pulled out for the 24th of 25 Maciste films produced in the early 1960s! It’s an underground adventure so vast that it will take not one, but two Macistes to handle the deltoid-destroying duties!

And not just any two Macistes, but Macistes who are brothers! And who are both named Maciste! But each with his own unique superpower!

One of the brothers has the power of having a beard! And the other brother exhibits all the abilities of the clean-shaven! How can we ever thank the Gods for showering us with this bounty of brawn?

It all starts just as you would fantasize, with the Macistes working their dream job: temple construction! Lugging around giant blocks of white stone in service of their wimpy prince who is building a temple to suck up to the gods prior to his wedding to his fairly average looking princess, the Macistes are on scene when a mysterious cave in jump starts all the strange goings on at the Waterfall of the Gods!

The good princess is ambushed, kidnapped by the Leopard Men and taken through the secret entrance to the underground world where the crazed, lonely, and by looking at the tubby piece of crap boyfriend she’s sporting, surely quite horny queen is waiting with a terrifying scheme to get a brand new man! She puts the princess under her spell and then sends her back to the surface to do her bidding!

Meanwhile Bearded Maciste is conducting an investigation at the Waterfall of the Gods by beating the spots off these Leopard Men! This particular Maciste (sometimes known as Rod Flash in films such as Ali Baba and the Sacred Crown, Vulcan Son of Jupiter and as Richard Lloyd in the terrific toga three way Hercules, Samson & Ulysses) sets the standard early on with his relentless pummeling of these pathetic pussycat pansies.

Guys get heaved off waterfalls, punched, clubbed, thrown and impaled with the tridents they foolishly try to wield in Maciste’s presence. And they get no respite when they turn tail and run off into their cave hideout because Maciste just follows and uses his bicep bazookas to open up the giant stone door!

At least fifty more extras clad in silly-assed leopard masks, gloves, trunks, and boots earn a days pay the hard way as they’re slammed here and there in the caves before Bearded Maciste gets himself trapped, drugged and put under the queen’s spell!

Never fear though because we’ve a Maciste in reserve, right? Well, kind of. Clean-Shaven Maciste almost immediately falls prey to a drugged drink he’s given by the princess topside!

He spends the middle part of the movie sleeping it off, while his brother becomes the evil queen’s plaything and most humiliatingly of all, is forced to fight the queen’s flabby old boyfriend. (Sure Maciste wins, but lard ass gets in some shots, and really, should a super sculpted stud like Maciste even have to do more than flex in the guy’s direction to be triumphant?)

When the Maciste brothers aren’t smacking the taste out of costumed scums’ mouths, the movie settles into the supremely sucky sword and sandal flick it truly is. The queen babbles about being cursed by the gods, how the giant water wheel has to keep being turned or all the oxygen in her kingdom will disappear, and pointlessly tries to marry the good prince when she’s got more man then she could ever hope to handle with Bearded Maciste!

Those with the fortitude of a drugged Clean Shaven Maciste (though hopefully without his dimwitted looks) are rewarded as Maciste fights Maciste before the spell is broken and allows both Macistes to beat up everyone else as the kingdom is destroyed!

While admittedly limited in every aspect of acting with the exception of throwing an exaggerated punch, each Maciste does do a good job of not damaging the colorful but chintzy-looking sets during their scenes. For peplum purists, there is also a scene of a guy and girl in leopard outfits doing some acrobatic dirty dancing.

© 2010 MonsterHunter