Returning now unquestionably to the Hercules franchise, we find it as we left it – stupid, incompetent, bad. Ulysses vs. Hercules sounds as though it should be another crossover. Hopefully, not after the dreadful Maciste Against Hercules in the Vale of Woe, as movie as likely as any to provoke audience suicide. But here’s the thing – Ulysses vs. Hercules is not a crossover!
Eh, not technically. There was no Ulysses franchise during the peplum heyday, seeing as 1958’s original Hercules had already staked out Ulysses as a character of their own (along with roughly 14 other mythological heroes, spoiling everyone’s fun). Thus Ulysses, or at least use of that name, is a repeating element of these Hercules films, even if today’s Ulysses has about 0 continuity with any of the other Ulysseses so far.
Despite that, Ulysses vs. Hercules plays like a crossover, making that central battle between muscle-bound heroes the true focus of the piece, far more so than Vale of Woe ever dared. No 3-second grand battle for this ‘un, it makes the whole movie about the musclemen’s duel, almost as an act of atonement for Part Seven.
A narrator starts us off easily enough, flat out explaining that Ulysses has angered the gods, what with blinding the Cyclops and all that. Eh, just like that one Maciste movie, Maciste in the Land of the Cyclops. For their vengeance, the gods have sent mighty Hercules to capture and kill Ulysses. …See how easy that was, Vale of Woe?! Huh?! One minute in, already they’ve justified a film’s worth of contextless strongman shenanigans.
Ulysses makes for a much more sensible Herculean foe than Maciste ever did, anyway, as Ulysses is different from Hercules. It’s not just two interchangeably dumb, muscular nitwits thumping each other with folding chairs this time! It’s brain vs. brawn, smartass vs. dumbbell, words vs. action. To accept this, we must ignore some awkward casting, how Ulysses (George Marchal, a rare French he-man) is beefier and all around burlier than the ostensibly ginormous Hercules (Mike Lane). (It’s no good sign when your peplum stars can be so relegated to mere parentheticals, without greater context.)
There’s a little confusion as to whom Hercules is, even – at least if you’re watching the version I am. As far as the terrible Alpha Video DVD is concerned, this is Ulysses vs. the SON of Hercules. Huh?! Actually, it’s a repackaging of an old U.S. TV show, “The Sons of Hercules,” which was a part of the great American tradition of somehow relating every random peplum back to Hercules, usually by changing up Maciste’s or Samson’s name. This wouldn’t always fly, not with screwy legal precedent to the name “Hercules” (this still doesn’t make any sense to me), so 14 assorted pepla (acquired by Embassy Pictures via almost completely utter randomness) were retitled so their heroes could claim as Hercules’ sons. With all the Herc hulk’s mighty whoring about, it’s easy to assume a progeny of interchangeable he-men such as this. So names like “Ursus” or “Perseus” remain, though they’re now considered Herc’s genuine seed, and not just his copycat progeny. This does to mythological consistency what land mines do to torsos, but whatever.
But wait? Isn’t this already a Hercules film? Indeed it is! So the original “Hercules” is here turned into a “son of Hercules”…”Heracles.” Never mind that’s the original Greek name which the Romans later bastardized. So…Hercules is his own son? Eh, in a world where Athena can be borne of Zeus’ forehead, I’ll allow it.
We also get a theme song to open this movie, and indeed many other pepla I’ve already seen. Here’s how it goes:
“The mighty sons of Hercules
Once thundered through the years.
These men of steel
Would never feel
The curse of a coward’s fears.
The mighty sons of Hercules
Were men as men should be.
They part the streams (?!)
And turned their dreams
Into historyyyyyyy.”
And…so forth on.
Still with me? Time for the plot – And prepare to get lost again. Hercules attacks Ulysses’ ship at sea, since Ulysses is still trying to make it home from the Trojan War. (See “The Odyssey,” which I asked you to read in an earlier Maciste post.) Like weird Italian 1960s fan fiction, this suddenly stops the old Homeric narrative dead in its tracks, never to recover. Hercules captures Ulysses with that brawn of his. Ulysses is bound in ropes he cannot possibly break using mere strength, which is as good as done in Hercules’ mind. Instead Ulysses burns the ropes, the first of many times Ulysses “breaks the rules” of classical competition, winning despite a natural “inferiority” (i.e. scrawniness). This movie’s too blockheaded to make anything of a statement against the muscle-mad pepla as a whole, but the satire is potentially still there. Besides, this is one of Ulysses’ original traits from antiquity.
Ulysses escapes and swims to shore. Hercules follows. Herc’s ship burns down, and his crew swims the seas…a lot. Seriously, this movie doesn’t know when to edit out a nonessential, boring event – and this is the shortened TV version!
Hercules chases Ulysses through the same sandy dunes recognizable from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Both tire, and come to a surprising truce a mere 15 minutes in – so much for the “Versus.” Even at that, that’s plenty more of what the title promised that we’re used to getting with such underachieving late-era pepla. And now, as the Bird Men (Biiiiiiiiird Meeeeeeeen) close in on Herc and Ulee, the movie takes an irreparable slide into nonsensical randomness as a modus operandi.
At first glance, the roided-out duo’s sudden incarceration in the sub-moronic realm of the Bird Kingdom sounds like simply a stupider variation on the old “seduction by an evil queen” subplot. Indeed, Queen Regina (Dominique Boschero) is there in case the job needs filling – as it were. (Aside: Love that costume, which makes Regina seem more “Vegas showgirl” than “ancient royalty.”) But what if I said this aviary sojourn is but a mere 10 minute detour, to have no long term significance and to never be mentioned again. Yeah, that’d normally qualify it as a Big Lipped Alligator Moment, except the entire rest of the movie is constructed out of similar such moments. It’s not even a picaresque storyline, where contextless incidents comment upon other issues like character, such as in “Don Quixote.” Naw, this is just randomness, done for want of an alternative.
Verily, Ulysses vs. Hercules doesn’t feel like a part of the Hercules franchise – though it is. It feels like a Maciste movie, in that distinctive combination of cinematic cheapness and storytelling wishy-washy mishmash. This is a pronounced devolution in quality, and we’re talkin’ a franchise that literally started at “MST3K” levels! Methinks the Golden Days of Hercules are over, peaked with Hercules in the Haunted World, the series now content to be another simple inelegant peplum, lost in a sea of rippling biceps, idling biding the time waiting for the subgenre to die. No surprise it’s writer/director Mario Caiano’s first film – and he never really improved.
Quoth Hercules: “How long have we been here? It seems an eternity.” Indeed. For a film defined simply by isolated incidents, there’s not much that’s entertaining here. At last the Biiiiiird Meeeeeeeen decide to go all Ewok on the duo, and sacrifice them to the mighty gods of cliché. The lone through-line to the piece is the ongoing argument between Ulysses and Hercules (and Ulysses is the main character, for as much as it’s a Hercules movie). One favors escaping with strength, the other with brains. Guess which is which! Ulysses ultimately acts on his own and starts a fire, for it turns out his “smarts” consist of starting fires again and again and again, that Ithacan pyromaniac! So they escape. And we’ll never hear from Regina & Co. ever again.
So it’s back to wandering the deserts alone again, just as we left ‘em before all this. I get the sense a lot of this movie was filmed in some arboretum, to go by the lush plant life which abounds. Ulysses is bound to Herc’s wrist, and he cannot escape…until he burns the ropes, and wanders off without Herc even noticing (he’s so strong, 1 man and 0 men weight exactly the same to him).
That’s pretty much the end of any ostensible “Versus” notions, though we’re not even halfway through – I’m sorry. Honestly, I’d wager there wasn’t even anything we’d call a script when they made this. Rather, I think Caiano simply got together a small cast, went and filmed any damn random peplum-esque thing he felt like, and called it a day. Then fashioned a tenuous connective tissue, hoping Ulysses wouldn’t burn it.
Hercules, for his part, doesn’t even try tracking clever Ulysses down, but rather forfeits and returns to his luxurious unnamed kingdom, to have a love affair with his wife…Helen (Alessandra Panaro). …Wait, Helen?! From “The Iliad?!” I…cannot…at all…square that away with any sense of normal myth. That’s just asinine. And she’s meanwhile having an affair with Mercury (Gabriele Tinti), which…not gonna address this! Ah, but the love scene dialogue in this is truly a sign of how uninspired things were:
“Is this a dream?”
“If this is a dream, this kiss will wake you.”
George freaking Lucas writes better romantic pap than that!
And since the movie is thoroughly stalled, Helen asks completely out of the blue if we’re familiar with King Lagos and the Cave Dwellers. Sounds like a punk band.
Well, guess where Ulysses is suddenly captured? I dunno how this came about, it just happened. And King Lagos (Gianni Santuccio) doubts Ulysses is Ulysses, for how could hero as celebrated as he be that scrawny? (Again, casting the beefiest of your stars in this role really begs the question…) Lagos persists to pose Ulysses a series of riddles, a sort of Mycenaen Mensa to determine Ulysses’ Ulysseshood: “How long is eternity?” “Why do birds have wings?” “Why did the god create mortals?” “What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?”
We actually stick around with King Lagos for a while, even though ‘tis a truism that no scene can logically fall out from the prior. So now, feats of cleverness complete, Lagos requests that Ulysses invent for him a pair of wings like what Icarus killed himself with. No reason why, no context, that’s simply something else Caiano remembered from his old, half-forgotten Bulfinch’s.
One would think the Ulysses of legend capable of scheming out a way to use this situation to his benefit – you know, to escape (yeah, Ulee’s still a prisoner, as he is for damn well the whole of Ulysses vs. a Frequently Absent Hercules). This Ulysses cannot do that, as there’s nothing to be gained by burning his wings. Instead, given a measly half day to invent flight several millennia before the Wright brothers, Ulysses gets his cheapy-deapy wings ready. He could use ‘em to fly away, if they work, or he could use ‘em to kill Lagos, if they don’t work. Instead, Ulysses affixes his gadget to the back of the Geico Caveman (above), and he proceeds to leap of a great big cliff…and die. So not only is Ulysses still a prisoner, but he’s put inside a descending ceiling Temple of Doom death trap for his troubles. (It occurs to me I reference Temple of Doom in nearly every peplum write-up. Guess where it got its inspiration?)
Stone prison cells cannot burn, so Ulysses is trapped. Meanwhile, Lagos is dismayed because he hasn’t his miraculous flying machine with which to take over the world. Frankly, this plan makes less sense than the villains’ scheme in The Rocketeer, and The Rocketeer is awesome. Instead, all of a sudden, Lagos decides to just go and conquer, ummmm…Thebes! He’ll go massacre Thebes, simply for the pure hell of it. ‘Cause we gotta get some sort of warfare into the end of a peplum, for reasons sensible or no.
This is a cause to bring Hercules back into his own movie. He rushes out to battle as –
Detour! In a cell adjacent to Ulee’s, several women plan to escape. Ulysses warns them not to. They do anyway. They wander into a valley, and are suddenly all murdered viciously by a random troglodyte. For no reason, except it eats up a few more minutes. What was that all about?!
Back to war! It’s all one great big flailing of prop swords, waggling them around like so many…you know. There’s nothing to distinguish this battle, surely not in the greater morass of pepla. And for a movie which lavished five minutes of footage upon nonessential characters swimming, never once changing the camera angle despite the edits, what are the chances that a battle scene will be conveyed effectively? Pretty much nil.
Hercules kills Lagos, and rather too soon in this mess for us to call him (Lagos) the villain. Then, eventually, he (Hercules) makes it over to…wherever, and rescues mighty Ulysses from the Descending Ceiling o’ Doom – with strength. This movie never resolves the brain/brawn dichotomy, but at least it’s not racist. So Ulysses switches prisonerships, once again lashed to Hercules’ wrist as though the last 45 minutes hadn’t happened, once again surrounded by flammables.
Such a narrative construct is potentially never-ending, so it’s hard to say how they’re gonna end things now that we’ve reached the inevitable end. Why, with randomness, natch! Hercules is attacked by…some guys. For reasons which scream “arbitrary plot contrivance,” mighty Hercules is unable to defend his immortal demigod self from these random forest pirates. So instead, it’s up to Ulysses (having already burned his latest rope) to rescue Hercules, by…by shoving the guys over a cliff. It’s not quite “smart,” nor is it “strong,” but I guess “blind stupid fucking dumb luck” is as good a reason as any to call a dude a hero.
The gods still demand that Hercules kill Ulysses for them – which is why he’s spent this whole movie simply transporting Ulysses. But having been up and rescued, Hercules gives the gods the metaphorical middle finger, letting Ulysses go free for good. Meaning once again an ostensible “crossover” (though it isn’t) cannot follow through on announcing a victor. And the gods’ vengeance remains looming like a sword of Damocles, now surely to inconvenience both Ulysses and Hercules. So…it feels like an ending, but things are as unresolved as ever.
Still…you gotta love how these pepla portray reconciliation between two strapping, glistening men. Why, there’s more passion here than in all the hetero romances they listlessly spurt out.
Ulysses vs. Hercules is a thoroughly unremarkable peplum, notable only by its relation to the greater Hercules series. With 11 films still to go, the quality is gone – probably for good. But with some past success, Hercules could coast along for the rest of the sword-and-sandals’ benighted existence on former glories alone. This movie sucks, the rest will suck, but it still stands as a (lamentable) milestone in the series.
RELATED POSTS
• No. 1 Hercules (1958)
• No. 2 Hercules Unchained (1959)
• No. 3 The Revenge of Hercules (1960)
• No. 4 Hercules vs. the Hydra (1960)
• No. 5 Hercules and the Conquest of Atlantis (1961)
• No. 6 Hercules id the Haunted World (1961)
• No. 7 Maciste Against Hercules in the Vale of Woe (1961)
• No. 9 The Fury of Hercules (1962)
• No. 10 Hercules, Samson and Ulysses (1963)
• No. 12 Hercules in the Land of Darkness (1964)
• No. 16 Hercules and the Tyrants of Babylon (1964)
• No. 17 Hercules, Samson, Maciste and Ursus (1964)
• No. 18 Hercules and the Princess of Troy (1965)
• No. 19 Hercules the Avenger (1965)
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