The Seven Magnificent Gladiators (1983)

Original title: I sette magnifici gladiatori

The narrative takes place in what I believe is supposed to be a fantasy version of Ancient Rome, though it could of course also be a very low effort secondary world. Evil bandit leader Nicerote (Dan Vadis) is making regularly raids on a small village, using the physical invulnerability somehow bestowed on him by his mother (whom he blinded as a thanks) with astonishingly little ambition and imagination. By now, the village is only populated by women, children, and the elderly. Fortunately, there’s a helpful prophecy concerning the village’s favourite relic, a magic sword only the true hero meant to save the place will be able to hold going around. So the rest populace put the sword in keeping of their most attractive women. They go to Rome and proceed to ask every random passers-by they meet to grab that sword. They do eschew any warnings that the weapons rather likes to burn the hands of the unworthy, because that’s village morality for you. Still, eventually, the blade ends up in the hands of gladiator-on-the run Han (Lou Ferrigno) who is apparently a proper hero and not burnable by sword. After some business with the crazy bug-eyes making emperor (Yehuda Efroni) I only mention because his performance is so spectacularly hammy, Han goes off to do some village rescuing, picking up enough gladiators, Sybil Dannings and rogues to make for the full titular complement of seven.

You really know the rest.

If you’re like me, you probably expect something mind-blowing and weird when going into an Italian 80s sword and sorcery movie that also wants to be a gladiator movie and Magnificent Seven rip-off, particularly one made by the terrifying/awe-inspiring duo of Bruno Mattei and Claudio Fragasso. Even better, one made on Cannon money, which must have felt like Marvel money to an indie filmmaker of today.

Alas, this is by far not as crack-brained as one would hope it to be. Sure, Fragasso’s script is as awkwardly structured as was his wont, and a lot of what happens is somewhat nonsensical, but there are only a few moments in the script that don’t feel comparatively competent and sane, at least for the kind of movie this is.

Mattei for his part even manages to create a series of perfectly okay looking scenes, though he is of course completely incapable of giving any of the copious character deaths any emotional weight, something certainly not helped by Fragasso’s messing up of the Magnificent formula by simply not spending enough time on creating characters with at least one discernible character trait. These Seven seem to consists of Sybil Danning, four beefcakes and three rogues, and that’s it. In general, one can’t help but think that Fragasso didn’t quite get why certain scenes like the training of the villagers are in practically all movies of this sort, including them just in case but trying to get through them as quickly as possible. This does rob the film of any of the emotional resonance it should have.

From time to time, the old, loveable, idiocy of the Mattei/Fragasso pairing does come through. I’m particularly fond of the fact that the magic sword isn’t actually, as you would think, magically able to get through Nicerote’s invulnerability the normal way when wielded by the proper hero, but really only kills him when he grips it himself. Which rather suggests that the whole rigmarole with finding the proper hero could have been avoided by simply presenting the sword to the guy as a treasure. But hey, what do I understand of these things?

Because many of the actors here are rather experienced in fake-hitting stuntmen with swords, most of the fights look rather more competent than you’d expect of a Mattei joint; I wouldn’t go so far as to call them exciting but they are certainly surprisingly watchable in a straightforward movie matinee way. The wagon race looks a bit as if Michael Bay had fashioned his car chases after it, though.

All of this makes for the more than a little confusing experience of watching a Mattei/Fragasso film that feels mostly competent – by the standards of Italian sword and sorcery fare - instead of insane. If you know the body of work of this duo, you’ll realize how mind-blowing the concept of competence is when applied to these filmmakers. Which does bring up the question who or what might have been responsible for this particular kind of insanity never before or after beheld in these men’s works. I, for one, blame Golan and Globus.

In short: The Stranger Returns (1967)

aka A Man, A Horse, A Gun

Original title: Un uomo, un cavallo, una pistola

The Stranger (Tony Anthony) rides into another spot of bother. This time around, he's trying to steal a coach full of gold that a group of bandits captained by a sadist known as En Plein (Dan Vadis) has set their own eyes on.

As always, the Stranger has a plan to steal the stolen gold that might look good in his mind but quickly collapses under the stress of reality, leading to his capture and torture. Of course, our dubious hero escapes and the usual hither and yon around the gold ensues; until it all ends in a grand finale in which the Stranger picks off his enemies one by one but loses his ultimate prize.

Unlike the first Stranger movie I talked about yesterday, this second adventure of Tony Anthony's weird-faced wearer of blankets is already half on the way to the bizarre comedy stylings of the later entries in the series. Some of the film's humour is even funny.

Unfortunately, the silly parts collide with the usual Spaghetti Western scenes of sadism that are part of the film to prove the bad guys are even worse than the anti-hero in rather unpleasant ways, leaving behind an aftertaste of unnecessary and ill-considered mean-spiritedness. That this mean-spiritedness is especially directed at women might be par for the course for the Spaghetti Western genre, but shoe-horning scenes of female suffering between comedic scenes really pushes the film towards outright misogyny.

As it is, The Stranger Returns is not light-hearted enough to exclude the nasty parts, and not interested enough in the unpleasant depths of humanity to make effective use of its lighter moments as a good contrast. It just hangs somewhere in the middle.

Luigi Vanzi's direction is less interesting than his work on the first film. It's all very routine, watchable Spaghetti Western by numbers, without even a single scene as tense or spirited as the nearly dialogue-less middle part of the first film.

The Stranger Returns certainly is an alright Spaghetti Western (aka "I've seen worse"), but its transitional position just before the Stranger series becomes really silly and imaginative makes it a less successful film than I'd hoped for.

 

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The Science!? 18: Sons of Hercules: In The Land of Darkness (1963)

The Peplum-Plot-O-Matic 2000 produced one of its most generic scripts when activated to write SoH: ITLoD.

To make a short story shorter and less boring, Hercules (Dan Vadis) just happens to be around when Telca (Spela Rozin), daughter of "King" Tedaeo (Ugo Sasso) is attacked by a lion, whose incredible dangerousness is more than proven by the necessity of being played by two different lions, one male, the other female. After a short round of wrestling and rock-throwing, the lion is dead and Hercules falls into unconsciousness(!). When he awakes, he is greeted by the people of the kingdom known as Whatever-its-name-may-be, all twenty of them.

Herc is of course absolutely delighted to hear that the local way of rewarding the rescuer of an unmarried woman is marriage (the Greek shotgun wedding). To Herc's and Telca's regret, this rule does not apply to the King's daughter, probably because it's a prince's duty to count all eight of the village's huts, and you never know if your prospective son-in-law is clever enough to count at all. But, since Hercules is soo heroic and soo strong, there might be a way for him to marry the woman he doesn't know at all - he just has to kill one little dragon.

So off the hero goes, meets an oracle, kills a dinosaur, returns to the village only to find it burned to the ground by the Demulus, a race of at least thirty people who live in an underground city and lighten up their diets by eating the flesh of their slain enemies. The only living soul he finds is Babar (John Simons), an odious comic relief so unfunny, even the Demulus didn't dare killing him.

With his new friend Hercules ventures into the land of the Demulus, wrestles a bear, fights some soldiers, gets caught, is nearly quartered by elephants (the thing that saves him is not his brawn or his brains, but an appeal to "the Lord of the Sun" to break his chain), saves the evil queen of the Demulus from her own elephants and blah-dee-blah.

Later on we see treachery, a slave revolt, the underground city destroyed by lava and a happy end.

Nothing of this is the least bit entertaining.

There are many puzzling things about this movie, but the most puzzling of them all may well be the decision of its American distributors to change its original hero from Hercules into a certain Argoles, Son of Hercules. Although, the longer I think about it, the less puzzling it gets: Do we really want the glorious epitome of manliest manliness we know as Hercules to be presented as a wimp, someone who wins his battles by whining to the Gods?

But the doubtful character of its hero is just one of the movies problems. I have seldom seen a peplum featuring a less charismatic or appealing cast. I don't expect all that much from actors in these films but Dan Vadis is a charisma-free zone and only comes to life in the melee combat scenes against human enemies, his love interest is utterly forgettable, the comedic relief someone I try very hard to forget and the villains much too laid back to be of any interest.

The special effects are as dire as usual and filmed with real talent for showing off all their shortcomings.

The direction is especially disappointing anyway - where most peplums get their energy from creatively designed sets and strangely colored lighting as well as from absurd feats of strength, this movie just sits there not even trying do something, anything interesting or strange or entertaining.

 

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