Hercules vs. Moloch (1963)

Original title: Ercole contro Moloch

aka The Conquest of Mycene

Once, in semi-mythical ancient Greece. The second version of he city of Mycenae – the first one burned down because of some godly business between the Earth Goddess (never named anything else in the English dub of the film at hand) and the town’s other patron god, the evil Moloch – is striking fear into the hearts of the other city states of Greece. Ruled by the evil queen Demetra (Rosalba Neri with very fetching white streaks in her hair), Mycenae seems militarily unbeatable, pressing the rest of the Greek world for the delivery of hostages. Hostages, mind you, that tend to disappear completely never to be seen again, for Mycenae MKII houses the earthly incarnation of Moloch. It has taken form in Demetra’s son, and living gods need sacrifices, as you know. This particular living god dwells in a cave below the city with “his favourite slave girls”, is fond of Bava colours, torture, and disfiguring beautiful people who aren’t his slave girls. Moloch isn’t exactly well-loved by all of Mycenae's populace, however, and most of the commoners would really rather return to the worship of the less cruel and hands-on Earth Goddess. They’d also rather see young Medea (Alessandra Panaro), daughter of the old king who wanted a life without Moloch for his people and Demetra’s step daughter, sit on the throne, but since the military, the nobility and the priests are all under Demetra’s (and Moloch’s) thumb, there’s little hope for a successful revolution at the moment.

The last Greek town standing against Mycenae is Tyros. Alas, its king has taken rather too long with a policy of outward appeasement and secret attempts at building an alliance against Mycenae. Eventually, after Tyros’s best potential ally falls, there seems little hope of anything but to also deliver hostages to their enemies. Things aren’t quite as hopeless as they seem, though, for Tyros’s crown prince Glaucus (Gordon Scott) has a plan. It’s not a terribly good plan, mind you, for it mostly consists of him becoming an incognito hostage going by the name of Hercules (so we can get the proper, cash-grabbing name into the film’s title) and trying to see if he can’t find allies in Mycenae while attempting to gain the trust of Demetra.

Fortunately, the Earth Goddess is with the good guys.

I thought I had basically seen all the peplums worth seeing (and quite a few not), but along comes Giorgio Ferroni’s Hercules vs. Moloch to prove me wrong. Not that I’m complaining.

Anyhow, this one’s a pretty great little movie, even though its not-actually-Hercules main character doesn’t do random hearty manly belly laughs and generally leaves pillars in peace to do their thing. Well, at least one has to admire the chutzpa used to get Hercules into the movie’s title.

The film stands at what could be a somewhat awkward point between the more fantastically minded branch of the peplum concerning itself much with mythological beast (that is to say, guys in monster suits and sometimes dubious, sometimes wonderful bigger monsters), gods, and half-gods, and the more mundane business of palace politics and revolutions, spending certainly more time on the latter, less fun part of these films to boot. However, Ferroni actually integrates these elements well, finding reasons for the palace intrigues in the supernatural stuff, solving some of the problems arising during the course of the plot through a very cool moment of literal deus ex machina perfectly appropriate to ancient Greece, all the while making the film’s world convincing as one in which the Gods are actually real. Even though Moloch junior probably isn’t much of a god.

The film turns out to be genuinely good at both sides of the equation, with fights and battle scenes of a quality not always found in peplums. Ferroni must have had a rather high budget for the genre, too, for the battle scenes and fights actually feature a decent amount of combatants and horses (some of which may or may not come from library footage, but if so, it’s excellently integrated) involved in what looks like actual fight choreography. There’s a good amount of sets and locations, too, and while they aren’t exactly lavish, they also never feel cramped and too much like cardboard, the filmmakers demonstrating a good eye for filming around the holes in the illusion.

And even though the Moloch parts of the film are not quite as plenty as I would have liked, the guy is a perfectly creepy Gothic horror type villain, wearing an excellent creepy mask, cackling while he’s disfiguring women and ranting about wanting to destroy all beauty, and living in a most excellent multi-coloured cave full of women pressing themselves against walls looking intense.

At this point in his career, Gordon Scott had become a very capable leading man too, striking the correct righteous poses for the properly righteous dialogue he gets as the most righteous manly man around, going through the usual stylized romance (with Medea, as if I need to tell anyone who has seen even one of these films) with the proper stylized conviction. He’s also a pretty convincing fencer and screen fighter here, making up for the rather low-powered Hercules he is playing by doing the business of people who aren’t half gods with a nice degree of intensity. Rosalba Neri for her part makes a pretty great evil queen, doing the sexy evil glowering, the increased unhingement, and all the other expected bits of business with fun enthusiasm.


All in all, it’s a pretty wonderful achievement, Ferroni and company turning what could have been a complete dud in the wrong hands into a very fun peplum.

Past Misdeeds: Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure (1959)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only  basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

A gang of four white men wearing blackface raids a village somewhere in the jungles of Africa – a part of Africa that seems to still lie under British colonial rule. While stealing some crates of explosives, the assailants also show no compunction against killing two men.

The deed happened in the territory where Tarzan (Gordon Scott) makes his home, and the fur-shorted one follows the men upriver to enact the Law of the Jungle on them. To add a bit of piquancy, the leader of the criminals, Slade (Anthony Quayle), is an old enemy of Tarzan’s (“I would have killed him, if not for the Law of Man”), and a bit of a brutal crazy thrill-seeker. Tarzan’s hunting job is complicated when he saves tough-talking Angie (Sara Shane) from a plane crash she suffers when she’s trying to impress him, and while Angie isn’t exactly the proverbial damsel in distress, she’s also not Sheena. Though she does appreciate a good nearly naked barbarian like Tarzan when she meets him.

With Tarzan ever closing in behind him, Slade has his own problems. He needed the explosives he stole to work an illegal diamond mine he has discovered, but his men – Irish thug O’Bannion (Sean “The Irishman” Connery), river boat captain Dino (Al Mulock) and diamond miner Krieger (Niall McGinnis) – and his girlfriend Toni (Scilla Gabel) are a rather problematic bunch that does half of his work for Tarzan. Shouldn’t you start on the infighting only after you’ve actually acquired your loot? These people disagree, and it’s quite probable they’d kill each other off quite without Tarzan’s help.

I’ve not been seeking out any of the Tarzan movies during these last few decades, for in my memory, I had the films pegged as more or less exclusively family friendly fare containing more chimpanzee shenanigans than jungle variations of Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and seldom taking on the Lost Race stories and general strangeness of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s books. John Guillermin’s fifth film of the Gordon Scott-starring Tarzan series turns out to be a noirish adventure movie rather than chimpanzee action, however, and of highly doubtful family friendliness, particularly for the time it was made in. To drive the point home, there’s an early scene where Tarzan leaves Cheetah behind at home that is an early signal (well, after the murders) what kind of film this is going to be.

Tarzan here is less the noble savage than a man who spends his life living a particular style of barbarism by choice. The film seems not completely sure if Tarzan’s brand of barbarism is really all that much different from the more civilized forms of barbarism Slade and his men stand for. It does, at least, not seem very satisfied when Tarzan finally conquers Slade, and quite dubious about the act’s morals, and looks equally askance at his rejection (after they quite obviously had sex, though) of Angie.

It’s only fitting in a film that spends about half of its running time on Tarzan’s antagonists, sure-handedly and effectively hitting all the beats of hard-boiled movies about small groups of criminals coming to blows, until the jungle, or Tarzan (this is probably the only film I’ll ever see where Sean Connery is killed with bow and arrow by Tarzan), or one of their own partners kills them. The film is really rather ruthless in its set-ups here, repeatedly demonstrating a hard edge that makes it impossible to not see this as the hard-boiled adventure film it was meant to be.

Guillermin isn’t only particularly good at directing his very competent cast in their scenes of infighting, he also gives the action itself a much harder edge than I would have expected from a Tarzan film. It’s not just that people actually bleed here, but the violence seems more brutish than you’d expect from any late 50s adventure movie, with a handful of moments I found rather astonishing in their directness. Guillermin really understands how to stage the action too, keeping a film that takes place in a mix of actual location shots and obvious sound stages quite dynamic, with much more movement than you’d usually see in the often stiff low budget adventure movies of this time and age.

Angie’s role in the film also comes as a bit of a surprise. While she does need rescuing by Tarzan from time to time, she isn’t a helpless, whining doll, with most of the dangers she gets herself into being the kind of thing someone who isn’t used to jungle survival would believably wander into, the film never suggesting she gets in trouble because she’s a woman. For someone who is basically an “adventuress”, to keep with the parlance of the time, the film treats her quite sympathetic too, even subtly suggesting that a woman with actual experiences of life would make a good partner – in the actual meaning of the word – for Tarzan, and mildly shaking his head at him for pushing her away to continue a jungle life the film is already dubious about too.


For how different is Tarzan truly from a violent thrill seeker like Quayle, once you get to counting the bodies either man leaves behind? Guillermin emphasises this question with some interesting variations on classical Tarzan elements. Here, Tarzan’s trademark yodel is not a quaint gimmick, but an expression of the wildness that lies at the core of the character, used just once at a dramatic moment that makes it that much more memorable and, if you think about it, even rather horrifying. Which, come to think of it, is not something I ever expected to write about a yodel, or in the context of a Tarzan movie.

On ExB: Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure (1959)

I had the Tarzan movies down as a bit too family friendly to really hold the interest of decadent and cynical old me. This next-to-last of the Gordon Scott Tarzan films turned out to be something quite different than I expected, however, suggesting some curious cinematic precursors and offering a rather thoughtful approach to the question of civilization and barbarism.

Read more in my column at Exploder Button!

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,reviews,adventure,noir,john guillermin,gordon scott,sara shane,anthony quayle,sean connery

Goliath versus The Vampires (1961)

Maciste (this time dubbed to "Goliath", showing the well-oiled muscles of Gordon Scott) lives somewhere and sometime in a little village. There, he has a peroxided fiancé Giulia (Leonora Ruffo), a mother, and his usual hobby of being incredibly heroic. While he is taking care of a child rescue situation, his home village is attacked by a band of raiders, wearing no armor but some silly black helmets. Even stranger is that they don't steal anything. It seems to be more fun to kill as many men as possible, burn the place down and get away with the women (including Maciste's Giulia).

We'll soon see that they actually didn't even want all women. Once onboard their ship, the elderly and middle-aged meet their destiny as shark-munch.

When Maciste returns and learns about this, he swears to get the people back and avenge the dead. One of the survivors even knows where the kidnapped are brought to, a place I like to call nearly-Baghdad.

Nearly-Baghdad's ruler is the mopiest Sultan around, nothing is fun for him anymore, not even mass belly-dances. This is less surprising when one keeps in my that he isn't the true ruler of the place anymore. Instead, the true power behind the throne is Kobrak (Guido Celani), a masked, blood-drinking fiend who usually appears with his own private supply of Bava-light. Kobrak plans don't end with the possession of nearly-Baghdad - he has started to use his power base there to build an army of featureless and mindless automatons that will someday conquer the world. For this, he needs the bodies of slaves.

Fortunately Maciste and his child sidekick soon arrive in town to set things right.

From now on the film is a cornucopia of fun things: Maciste throwing more pillars than can be good for his back, an early oriental surf instrumental band, said mindless automatons, distrust, treason, two women but only one Maciste, kidnappings, the battle of the two Macistes, the helpful kingdom of the Blue Men (who might be the least effective fighting force on the planet) and many more beautiful nonsense. Oh, and just to prove the script was written by Sergio Corbucci and Duccio Tessari, the death of the kid sidekick. Not that anyone would care afterwards or would at least mention Maciste's responsibility for his death.

Goliath versus The Vampires (who are in truth one vampire) is a fun peplum with many earnestly played moments of utter silliness and a handful of atmospheric sequences. Script and direction never forget the most important things in the genre and incessantly throw lots of strange stuff at the viewer like the hero throws with anything he can put his hands on. (And after one has seen the arm-flaying that is his other combat routine, one is thankful to see him throw things).

Some of those things are even original. The kingdom of the Blue Men, with their blue mask-like faces and their blue bread and wine for example is a nice variation of the underground kingdoms no good film should go without. The torture sequence is also quite singular. Maciste isn't stretched or tied with ropes or chains to show his physique off, instead he's thrown into a hole in the ground. The automaton then place a bell over the hole and start hitting the bell with large hammers. See, the soundwaves will destroy his brain and make him the prototype of an even better warrior for Kobrak. The vampire doesn't take the fact into account that our hero hasn't got a brain anyway. Well, truthfully Maciste's brain (such as it is) is saved thanks to a heroic deed done earlier in the film - a nice deviation from the norm.

If you like this kind of film, you'll like this one a lot. If not, I can't imagine it will change your mind about the peplum.

 

Technorati-Tags: italian movies,peplum,sergio corbucci,duccio tessari,gordon scott,reviews,giacomo gentilomo