This medium-scale peplum has a problem: Venus. And the problem with Venus is that she's a no-good tramp, whom no man or god can resist because she's so beautiful. (It's actually kind of hard to tell just how beautiful the actress is; one suspects she really would look rather ordinary if you scraped away the ton of makeup.) Apparently even the gods can only take so much scandalous behavior, so in order to "tame" Venus, it is decided to marry her off. Yeah, that'll work. The main candidates are Vulcan and Mars; Mercury, played rather conspicuously as gay, is obviously not in the running. When the squabbling between these rivals (not helped by the meddling of Gordon Mitchell's scheming Pluto) gets to be too much, Jupiter banishes the lot of them to Earth, where they must contend with mortals, Lizard Men, armies, barbarians, and so forth.
This isn't exactly a "good" movie, but it's a fun peplum, in large part because much of it takes place in the realms of the gods, where modest but nice sets, garish colored lighting, and lots of dry ice make a stylish impression a la (if hardly in the same league as) Bava's "Hercules in the Haunted World." Some will argue there's not enough "action," but things move fast enough. And frankly I think the dullest thing about these movies is that they often spend so much time having extras march around and have unconvincing sword fights in interchangeable desert-type settings. So this movie's emphasis instead on fantasy and intrigue is an improvement, in my book.
As Vulcan, Iloosh Khoshabe (who had a career in Iranian films before and after his run of Italian muscleman roles) has a fine physique, but he's a pretty colorless actor. Perhaps to make up for that lack, most of the other actors ham mercilessly, abetted (in the dubbed print I saw) by some comically stilted English dialogue. As Mars, Roger Browne also spends the whole movie shirtless to good effect. Annie Gorassini's Venus pouts and poses (albeit with a very 1960s hairdo) in an entertainingly campy fashion. As the "nice girl" Vulcan ultimately prefers, buxom Bella Cortez nonetheless performs a "dance" where she just kinda struts around in a bikini, at one point simply lying down in front of our hero and writhing.
Well, nobody watches a movie like this for the choreography...or the acting. Given the leads' natural attributes and minimal clothing (plus the whole plot being motivated by Venus' allure and insatiable appetites), this is a slightly sexier peplum than most.
I wonder if this movie was shot back-to-back with "The Seven Tasks of Ali Baba," because it involves the same director and much of the same cast. In any case, I saw there were several versions of "Vulcan" on YouTube, and watched the one that had the best-quality print in terms of definition and color (though it wasn't the most complete re: running time). That was a good decision, because this movie's silly charms are almost entirely visual. I wavered between giving this a 5 and a 6, but if it had been seen in a washed-out, 3rd-generation TV print, it probably wouldn't have earned more than a 4.
