In short: Sansone Contro I Pirati (1963)

aka Samson Against the Pirates

aka Samson Against the Sea Beast(s) (liars!)

The Carribean (Lake Garda), 1630. Shirt-hating trouser-sceptical hero Samson (Kirk Morris; relations to other half naked musclemen named Samson are never explained) fishes Amanda (Margaret Lee) out of the sea. Amanda, the daughter of a Spanish governor, has barely escaped capture and slavery by the pirate Murad (Daniele Vargas), the terror of the easily frightened Spanish Main. Amanda's lady friends haven't been so lucky and are now awaiting to be sold off to slave traders on Murad's - stolen - main base, a place with the more exciting-than-it-actually-is sounding name of Devil's Island.

Samson, being a hero and all, can't help himself and goes to the rescue. He, two friends of no import and Amanda rescue the maidens quite easily, but actually escaping Devil's Island with them turns out to be slightly more difficult. That's for the better, too, for Manuel (Aldo Bufi Landi), the leader of the local resistance against Murad, sure could use a shirtless guy to help him out against the piratical oppressor.

On paper, Tanio Boccia's Sansone contro i pirati sounds like a sure-fire win, seeing as it combines the pirate adventure movie with elements and shirtlessness of the peplum. Alas, what should be a blast is a mostly uninvolving, plodding affair.

The film's problems are easily spotted: its villain is a pudgy alcoholic who is about as threatening as (but less cute than) a puppy. Said villains only way to escape complete lameness is to possess even lamer henchmen, which turns out to be a problem once the film attempts to prove Samson's mythical awesomeness by having him throw a handful of said henchmen around. It's the sort of thing that doesn't really make a hero look so much heroic as like the kind of guy who'd probably win a fight against a bunny rabbit. That impression of Morris's Samson isn't exactly helped when he wrestles a fake crocodile that is unmoving even for a fake peplum crocodile; poor Morris even has to move the creature's mouth while wrestling it. Having a lame villain being fought by a lame hero is ruining any possibility of dramatic or melodramatic weight.

As if to add insult to injury, Boccia's direction lacks in charm and verve. Even the movie's two good ideas - the heroine actually rescuing the hero for once and a boat-and-spears variation of drawing and quartering for Samson to struggle against - are wasted by letting Amanda getting captured in a particularly lame way right when Samson is free, and filming it in the lamest way possible, respectively.

Sansone contro i pirati is one of those films where one can't help but think that nobody involved was actually even trying.

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,in short,adventure,peplum,tanio boccia,kirk morris,margaret lee,daniele vargas

In short: Colossus And The Headhunters (1963)

Original title: Maciste contro i cacciatori di teste

An island tribe of people who seem to stand culturally and technologically somewhere between ancient Greece and the stone age is nearly eradicated when the local volcano erupts. Fortunately for them, Maciste (Kirk Morris) has just arrived on a raft that's improbably large for one person to travel on and evacuates a raft-full of survivors, among them the new king Ariel (Demeter Bitenc). Because there's neither food nor water on board, our heroes naturally decide to follow an old myth and travel to a country a long journey away.

Somehow, the raft and its passengers arrive at their goal without having become cannibals. And they just might have discovered America. Or not.

Once arrived in Peplomerica, our heroes (or whatever they are) soon meet the rather rude people of Queen Amoa (Laura Brown), who have fled from the machinations of a cruel tribe of headhunters (which, in the language of this film, means "people who supposedly love decapitation, but only decapitate someone once during the course of the movie and have no interest at all in shrunken heads or, you know, headhunting"). Amoa thinks Maciste is their prophesied saviour, but our rather jerky hero decides that helping her would endanger his volcano survivors and trots away with them, only to return after Amoa and her people have been attacked and killed or kidnapped by the bad guys. If Maciste had only known that Amoa loves/hates/loves him! Suddenly all heroic, Maciste decides to find the survivors. Will he be able to save Amoa from the main bad guy's (Frank Leroy) attempts to marry her?

Colossus and the Headhunters might be the, well, outright lamest peplum I have ever had the dubious honour of watching. Usually, films in this blessed genre put all their energy into presenting themselves as exciting spectacles, full of manly belly-laughter, toppling of pillars, homoerotic torture and silly monsters. And if the budget can't pay for a mechanical giant snake, then the typical peplum will at least try and pretend that a piece of painted cardboard is a giant snake. Not so, Colossus: Maciste doesn't laugh and he never is tortured - although Kirk Morris' facial expression suggests that acting in the movie was quite painful for him. The only things Maciste topples are a rope bridge and parts of a brick wall, and even this he does with about as much enthusiasm as a child pressed into eating spinach by malevolent parents. Monsters aren't in the movie at all. The latter would be perfectly alright with me if Maciste would spend his time throwing guards around while laughing uproariously, but alas, this version of the hero spends most of his time walking around or running away.

And the "walking around" bit brings me to Headhunter's main problem: nothing ever happens in this movie, and when something happens, it's realized in as anticlimactic a way as possible. The film's big moment is probably the climactic battle in front of four grass huts (one of them even burning!). At least there's a lot of shouting and running around then, and people wave their swords at each other. The excitement!

Even the mandatory dance sequence is absurdly unenthusiastic, the poor actress (yup, no money for more than one dancer - or more than some brown walls in the background - here, sorry) looking for all the world as if someone was pointing a gun in her direction from off-camera to convince her to dance.

Need I even say that the film decides to do nothing at all with the potentially fantastically entertaining "Maciste discovers America" angle? As it stands, I'm not even completely sure the place is supposed to be America. Truth be told, the film's just too boring for it to matter in any case.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,peplum,kirk morris,guido malatesta,in short

Conqueror of Atlantis (1965)

Hercules (Kirk Morris, this time dubbed into Heracles, which makes sense) is the victim of a shipwreck. Fortunate as he is, he washes up on a desert beach, right in front of beautiful princess Virna (Luciana Gilli). Obviously she can't take her eyes off the mostly naked male beauty before her and promptly falls in love with Herc as does he with her - at least as much as he is able to, having by my count had about 123 girlfriends before her. It doesn't seem to matter much anyway. She has to get to her father's camp, while Hercules should better trot into the other direction. All the longing glances let the two forget things like giving Hercules water and food to help him survive a walk through the desert, but don't fear for him. This is the kind of desert people routinely cross in broad daylight without water or shelter, as we'll see throughout the rest of the film. After Virna and her entourage are already gone, our hero finds a ring belonging to the princess lying in the sand, so he starts to wander through the desert after her caravan. He finds a group of nomads under attack by bandits instead. Being Hercules, he of course helps the nomads fight off their attackers.

His new friends take him to their leader Karr (Andrea Scotti) and after some male bonding procedures no tent can survive (damn, is there a homoerotic subtext here!?) the two become fast friends.

Another bandit attack, during which Herc shows a surprising amount of tactical acumen, and Karr tells the sad tale of his peace-loving people, who are regularly attacked by the men of evil nomad king Assour (Mahmoud El-Sabbaa). Assour is of course Virna's father.

Hercules (after showing un-American insight into the uselessness of torture) promises Karr that he'll take care of Assour.

A visit to Assour is rather fruitful - his attacks are revenge for supposed raids by Karr, raids that only leave dead bodies and stolen gold in their wake.

When Assour, Karr and Hercules finally understand that this is just a plan by a different enemy to keep them separated, said enemy attacks. If Assour and Karr had just talked with each other before. Or had sent each other messages...

The true enemy of the desert people are the Atlanteans, the last survivors of Atlantis, now residing in an underground city on top of a volcano.

The Atlanteans are in dire need of a queen and Virna looks fit enough for the job, so they kidnap her. Hercules and Karr pursue them and stumble into a Flash Gordon serial: The golden skinned men in the blue rompers who kidnapped Virna aren't exactly Atlanteans. They are instead the reanimated and gold-plated corpses of asphyxiated desert nomads, whom the only surviving male Atlantean Ramir (Piero Lulli), obviously the twin brother of Ming the Merciless, uses as mindless slaves.

The Atlanteans have a problem, you see: They are immortal, yet there aren't many of them left - besides Ramir, there is only the queen and barely a dozen female "warriors" with psychedelically coloured whigs. Personally, I wouldn't try to solve my population problem by kidnapping another queen, but what do I know about things like that.

Many (or competent) they are not, but they have great plans. They want to build an army of Golden Phantoms (the official name of the gold-skinned guys) to CONQUER THE WORLD!

A devious plan that would probably succeed if not for Hercules. Or Ramir's hobby to show prisoners around his lab and explain his fantastic contraptions, like a blaster (which Hercules will later put to good use), a machine that robs people of their will or gives it back again (which Hercules will later put to good use) and a machine that regulates the gas streams of the volcano (which Hercules will later - you get the gist).

Before the movie is over the excited viewer will experience many things, including: Feats of strength! Men fighting golden phantoms with the large iron ball and chains that they use like bolas! The explosive truth about cities build over volcanoes! The fact that Atlanteans lose their immortality when they fall in love (because it's forbidden and they get shot afterwards)! Daring escapes! A cackling mad scientist! And more!

 

Young Alfonso Brescia doesn't disappoint. As we all should know, Brescia would later go on to film a few mad and/or dadaist SF films and invent the SF porn genre and has a big place in my heart as one of the great holy fools of cinema.

At the point in his career when he made Conqueror of Atlantis he seems to have been still rather sane. Someone with my lowered expectations regarding logic can't help but call the plot here sensible, even logical, as if Brescia had actually tried to make a film that does make a certain amount of sense. Well, if you are able to overlook a few pesky things, like the dubious intelligence of the bad guys, or the bizarre nature of their culture or their plans, but really, who cares about those things when there is a wonderful lab to look at, and women wearing, um, things and undead cyborgs with golden skin dressed like toddlers and soldiers who use spears when they could use blasters. And so on and so on. Which is my longwinded way of saying that the script is absolutely awesome in its wrongheadedness and that the pulpy nonchalance with which it switches from peplum in the desert into Flash Gordon mode is a true joy to behold.

What else can I say about a Brescia film I have not already said elsewhere? The editing is either grotesquely inept or brilliant: There are important transitions missing and everything seems to move just outside the normal way time and space work. There are actors, some of them even seem to have an idea what they are supposed to be doing. Kirk Morris makes a fine Flash Hercules, even if the does not let him throw any pillars around and Piero Lulli knows what's important when playing an evil genius: Ranting, cackling and ominously staring into the camera.

Conqueror of Atlantis is a fine film when you want to relive some of the beauties of classic serials, or if you want to start your education in the works of maestro Brescia, but don't want to dive into the headier stuff at once. Or if you want to have an exceedingly fun time.

 

Technorati-Tags: peplum,adventure,italian movies,reviews,piero lulli,kirk morris,alfonso brescia