The Aztec Mummy and The Wrestling Women, Nos. 4 and 2 - Wrestling Women vs. the Aztec Mummy (1964)

It’s crossover time!, betwixt the Wrestling Women (a franchise so strong, it hasn’t even had a sequel yet) and The Aztec Mummy (which has had sequels, but only because they were made before Part One was released). Meaning this is the first naturally occurring sequel in either enterprise.

Given producer Guillermo Calderón’s track record, one doesn’t exactly expect elegance from this effort. So as crossovers go, this one follows the Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man format – namely, that it’s not so much a combination of film series as it is a mere sequel to one, with a little bit of the other tossed in at the end. Only much worse, naturally, than the old Universal example, because that’s Mexico’s cinematic prerogative. And since Wrestling Women vs. the Aztec Mummy is, for 80% of its existence, a mere Wrestling Women movie, let’s just treat it at that, and dive right in.


The first order of business is determining just how the Wrestling Women can have more adventures. How Gloria Venus and Golden Rubi (Lorena Velásquez and Elizabeth Campbell), two mere professional wrestlers, continue to have adventures dropped right in their lap. By having an adventure dropped right into their lap! A tormented archeologist, fleeing the mob (as archeologists do), directly seeks out Gloria and Golden for help. (Wrestlers: Mexico’s superheroes!)

(Sorry, I forgot…Gloria Venus, though the same character, is now officially renamed Loreta Venus, for absolutely no reason whatsoever!)

Why not just go to the police?! Well, A) in this universe they are as useless as the boar’s proverbial teats and B) the police are right there next to the Wrestling Women anyway! That’s right, it really is a sequel, with the Women’s purposeless police paramours (Armando Silvestre and Chucho Salinas) returning. They exist solely to support a 1960s Mexican’s idea of comic relief, in a movie which is damnably hilarious without help. All they do is fall down and say stupid things. Since it’s remarkably difficult to say amusing things about bad comedy, I now take my leave of the cops.

Back to the archeologist. He dies. Turns out those Wrestling Women weren’t much help after all.

Ah, but here comes a second archeologist, himself bearing plot. Dr. Tracy, he is, and he’s played by Victor Velásquez, presumably the lead actress’ father, or relation of another sort, or Velásquez is simply a common last name. Whatever it is, Dr. Tracy tells of a recently discovered codex, leading directly to that most Mexican of McGuffins, Aztec treasure™. The codex has now been split into several pieces, simply because that’s what is done in these sorts of stories. And now villains, specifically in the form of the Black Dragon Gang, seek it.

Now…everyone’s motives are the same – to obtain the treasure for their own material gain (and that goes for the Wrestling Women as well, who have now teamed up with Tracy) – so you can’t fault one party over another. That is to say, the villain is arbitrary. Except the Black Dragon Gang is doing it evilly. They’re killing archeologists, while the Wrestling Women are killing…Black Dragons. How is this okay?! Well, the Black Dragons are Japanese, see, therefore…Oh, I don’t like where this is going.


Let’s look into this. The Red Dragon himself (actor unknown, thanks to the vagaries of the English dubbing process) is your standard Fu Manchu affair, a white guy (in this case, Hispanic) made to look like an outdated Asian stereotype thanks to squinted eyes and other yellowface. I’ve seen this sort of thing before – yeah, in movies from the ‘30s. But this is Mexico circa 1964, which really oughtn’t to be trafficking in such pointless racism. This is just more proof that Mexican movies were helplessly indebted to aping archaic Hollywood schlock, and not their famous schlock like Gone with the Wind or Citizen Kane, but Monogram-style Z-grade exploitation. Only now, many decades removed, the initial “Yellow Peril” offense Fu Manchu intended is lost, leaving only a blind, unquestioning copycat mentality, repeating old movies for no reason.

Dr. Tracy, to keep the Red Dragons from getting their hands on the various codex pieces, determines to portion out the pieces over time to a different member of the Wrestling Women gang. This doesn’t make a whole heck of a lot of sense, frankly, so let’s just sum up the next 30 minutes as simply as possible:

Fights!

The Wrestling Women and Red Dragons repeatedly come to blows, each sequence, regardless of context, playing out the same way. The same way I imagine all luchadore epics play out, with fighting phrased in the specific idiom of Mexican wrestling. Mostly, people hurl themselves bodily at each other, and occasionally employ holds. It gets a little repetitive, and that’s not counting the separate moments where Gloria and Golden wrestle in the ring.


The one point of interest is Red Dragon’s (that’s the Red Dragons’ leader’s name, so hello there needless confusion) favorite tactics. It’s all a bunch of arbitrary pseudo-scientific hooey, which is totally in keeping from the team that brought us Rock ‘n’ Roll Wrestling Women vs. the Aztec Ape. For one thing, Red Dragon has a television – a magical television – with total omniscience. Wherever the Wrestling Women go, his TV sees ‘em (with perfect audio and everything!). Forget the loony notion he’s got little cameras everywhere, for most likely Red Dragon has somehow realized he’s a fictional character, and tapped into the actual movie footage, ala Spaceballs. This is some Funny Games shit!

Red Dragon’s other technique involves that old exploitation sawhorse: damsels in distress. Welcome, back, cinematic Mexican misogyny, we knew you wouldn’t be gone long! But that’s the challenge of a Wrestling Women flick, that the Wrestling Women cannot be treated like vapid, inane damsels, yet we still want vapid, inane damsels, because that’s the only story type René Cardona et al know. Therefore we’ve a new female character, Chela (María Eugenia San Martin), a new buddy of the Wrestling Women, a living and breathing plot complication. She becomes Red Dragon’s prisoner, then later his slave, via a combination of screwy misconceptions of chemistry and radio waves and psychiatry and about five other branches of science.

So, as I said, the movie just devolves into fight after fight. It’s going nowhere, which Red Dragon at least is wholly aware of (more evidence he’s aware of his own fictionality). Thus he proposes a compromise, that all bad blood between the Red Dragons and Wrestling Women be solved in the ring. Wrestling Women vs. Red Dragon’s two judo chopping twin daughters. Mostly, this is an excuse to wedge in a proper wrestling scene. Whomever wins gets all the codices. And amazingly, this isn’t a sneaky double-cross on Red Dragon’s part, not because the Mexicans doubt the slimy underhanded deviousness of the Japanese (you’d think WWII was still going on!), but because they’re so dismissive of the race they doubt even this degree of competence. Lovely!

Friday night. The National Wrestling Arena. Gloria Venus and Golden Rubi, our vivacious and comely heroines –


- versus these two dour, unnamed Japanese “women.”


Note the subtle cinematic trick by which we’re made to cheer on one group over another.

The following fight is a legitimate unexpurgated ten minutes of pure wrestling. This is no doubt the central highlight of a luchadore movie, possibly in an earlier era where wrestling on television wasn’t yet a thing (excepting Red Dragon’s television). A single, listless master shot from overhead covers all the ringside action, with occasional completely necessary cuts to the other characters watching from the sidelines. Considering the lead actresses were cast for their buxom hourglass forms and not their wrestling skills (as evidenced by the stocky real female wrestlers they regularly slap around), this deathless match isn’t even proper, though it is improvised, and therefore an awkward, stilted, crazy, hilarious thing. But remember, down there it’s a real sport!

The match ends with the Wrestling Women victorious, because this is one of those franchises where the protagonists are always successful, at all times, like a peplum. (Suspense? What’s that?) True to his word, Red Dragon gives them the pieces of codex he’d stolen from all those pre-murdered archeologists, and his notorious gang of ethnic caricatures retires for good.

And…switch!


It’s a new movie now, essentially, as we enter the Aztec Mummy phrase of things, an Aztec Mummy plot told over the course of a mere half hour and change – which proves to be a much more sustainable running time for this exact same story than any of the proper Aztec Mummies.

By that series, we start with human protagonists (here the Wrestling Women) learning of Aztec treasure™, and the whole history around it. Thoroughly eschewing the former forgotten memories, the translated codex reveals this. The tale, same as ever, about forbidden love in Aztec times between a princess and a warrior. We know this one, she’s Xochitl and he’s Popoca – Hold up! Nope, he ain’t Popoca! The mummy-to-be male lover is called Tezomoc. He’s a new character!

So…how is this a sequel to those Popoca mummy movies, when other generic Aztec and Mayan mummy movies (sadly, never an Olmec mummy) aren’t? Well, it’s all about producer Guillermo Calderón. If he’s delivering mummies, it’s technically an Aztec Mummy. Sure, whatever.


Name changes like this, to titular undead, are part and parcel with movies of this quality; it’s possible Calderón simply forgot what Popoca was called. Except Tezomoc is functionally different than Popoca – who was, recall, a mere shambler and a shoulder-slapper. Tezomoc is oh so much more dangerous, a nagual (Aztec sorcerer), able to shapeshift himself into a bat, a spider, whatever rubbery “scary” prop they already had lying around the studio. In other words, vampirism and mummification are intentionally confused for the hell of it. (In all this, it’s heartening to know Popoca’s story really did conclude in The Aztec Mummy vs. the Human Robot, and he’s still chilling out in that mausoleum to this day.)

Now we’re an official Aztec Mummy movie that just happens to involve the Wrestling Women, things fall out as predictably as the Red Dragon section, but according to different rules. The Wrestling Women find Tezomoc’s tomb, steal away the breastplate which reveals the location of the thing which reveals the location of the thing which reveals the location of the Aztec treasure™. Tezomoc stalks them back home, kills whomever, the Wrestling Women return the breastplate, the end.

As always, there are lapses of illogic which warrant at least some examination. Tezomoc kills people, something all these Aztec mummies seem very fond of. Specifically, he kills all the Red Dragons, never mind they’re now genuinely disinterested in the whole story, now that it’s moved them by. Still, they were the “bad guys,” so I guess for no reason they deserved it. It wasn’t gruesome, anyway. They merely see Tezomoc, shot their prop guns to no effect, and he nears them. The end. We don’t even get shoulder-slapping, the usual ceremonial indicator that a death has occurred.


Oh, and Chela, now freed of the Red Dragons’ grasp (that is, in the stages well before their deaths-by-mummy), becomes a new damsel. Tezomoc’s damsel. Not because he, the mummy, has any specific need to sacrifice her, but it’s just what Aztec mummies do, and it gives the Wrestling Women someone to save at the end, even if we’re still a decade away from movies allowing all three women smooch as an ending.

And there’s some randomly humorous dialogue wedged in the proceedings as well. Most of it is in response to Tezomoc’s shapeshifting:

“Look, it’s a vampire now!”

“He’s a mummy again.”

Well, Wrestling Women vs. the Aztec Mummy served its purpose…I guess. It solidified The Wrestling Women as a franchise unto itself, with several more sequels to follow. The Aztec Mummy, meanwhile, ends at this stage, not that it was ever really moving to begin with. And interesting that they needed to do a crossover (even if we never really get the glorious “wrestlers fighting mummies” nonsense promised) to justify further movies about spandex-clad vixens. You’d think that sort of franchise could perpetuate itself.

Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street, Nos. 11 & 8 - Freddy vs. Jason (2003)

Freddy vs. Jason was first proposed at least as early as 1987. It came out in 2003. What took so damn long?!

Well, different studios owned Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street, so there was that impediment. But New Line Cinema got their hands on Friday’s Jason in late 1989, after Jason Takes Manhattan convinced Paramount to orphan their beloved mongoloid. And to be certain the waters were right, New Line produced “Final” entries to each series solely as a lead in to this project: Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare and Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday. That last one was in 1993 – still ten years out of the film’s actual release. What took so damn long?!

It’s called development hell. There was one underlying problem with a Freddy vs. Jason project: There’s actually no reason to make it! That’s from a storytelling point of view, where the mash-up doesn’t further illuminate either character, merely satisfies (or doesn’t) an old playground argument about who could win in a fight – that’s something us kids would debate before turning our attentions to pitting RoboCop against the Terminator, or velociraptors against xenomorphs, or any number of other crossovers they’ve never actually made. (Though FvJ DID somehow get the wheels started on AVP, so we have that to “thank” it for.)

Still, Freddy vs. Jason for ages remained horror’s Holy Grail, if for no other reason than so proponents of the modern slasher movement could crow that it’d produced something as iconic and lasting as the Universal monsters – by putting together their very own House of Frankenstein. Never mind that’s the point of no return where a franchise has lost all credibility, it still remained a goal.

The challenge fell to assorted screenwriters, and reportedly 18 different scripts costing New Line a total of somewhere around $20 million, all of them rejected! The question fans of either series never seriously asked now needed answer with utmost urgency: How do you actually combine these two fellows, and cohere two continuities which are already hopelessly frayed?


Frederick J. Kreuger – A child murderer as a mortal, he was killed in flames when the parents of Springwood sought their vengeance. Under an armistice with three free-floating ancient dream demons, Freddy stalks his survivors’ dreams, killing them there, as he passes down from consciousness to consciousness.


Jason Q. Voorhees – Has a mask, stabs people.

Here are a few of the rejected screenplays. To wit (having actually read through these things when I was younger and dumber, and before Freddy vs. Jason existed), here are some of their ideas:

- Freddy and Jason are each unleashed on the dawn of the new millennium, 2000 A.D. [sic], to perform some ridiculous series of bullshit magical ceremonies in order to bring forth ultimate evil – a series of ceremonies which largely involved following genre formula to a T.

- A cult called the Fredheads (oy!) resurrects Freddy. Then a group of Mensa reject teenagers make the inexplicable decision to go snatch up Jason to combat him. As the “funny” one, the title fight is literally a boxing match.

- Jason is captured and put on trial! His defense team makes the inexplicable decision to pull Freddy out of dreamland as a part of the immortal “insanity plea.” Freddy, able to conjure waking nightmares in this one, pays a bloody visit to a shopping mall, which (if filmed) would’ve been the stuff of legend.

- A serial killer named Freddy, but not that Freddy, terrorizes a group of teens. Then, for no reason, they all get ridiculously high on drugs, and battle Freddy and Jason in a completely sanity-free nightmare scenario.

Oh, and those (not even 25% of the overall scriptitude) are the best of the lot. Pondering all of them, one constant is clear: Presumably by producer insistence, each features the same twist. Freddy, when mortal, was one of Jason’s counselors, and is largely responsible for Mr. Machete’s turn to mass murder. Giving the killers a shared past was an effort to give this project some meat, some something. Oh well, none of these things was used…and then Scream happened, changing the horror landscape. Hopeful crossover producer Sean S. Cunningham (Robert Shaye was too busy seeing the Lord of the Rings trilogy get made to care) fell into a great, depressive madness with his baby aborted. In such a state, men do illogical things. Cunningham financed Jason X.

Then came the project’s saviors, Damian Shannon and Mark Swift.


Even though Freddy vs. Jason was deader than the assorted hundreds of murdered teenagers shared between the two icons, this first time screenwriting duo swore not only to write a functional script where so many others had failed, but to jumpstart interest in the effort entirely. Against all odds, they succeeded!

Forget millennial cults and drug trips and shared backstories. These jokers did the elegant instead, and simply merged the idealized versions of the two franchises into one, marrying tone and plot construction and all else in something as close to a 50:50 split as is possible. It cuts through the chaff, and gets both Freddy and Jason on screen in under five minutes. The result is a funky hybrid, a Nightmare the 13th, a Friday on Elm Street, which doesn’t wholly satisfy contingents on either side, but gets the job done as damn well as we could possibly hope for.

Of course, with a 2003 release date, the timing couldn’t have been more random for Freddy vs. Jason. Both had been gone for around a decade (except for the seven people who actually saw Jason X), and horror was already ramping up for the new Saw torture pornography phase. To hedge his bets, producer Cunningham hired Hong Kong maestro Ronny Yu to direct, seeing as he’d already done the impossible and revived the Child’s Play series in 1998 with Bride of Chucky.

Unexpectedly helping the project further, 2003 was the dawn of the current horror remake mania that only now seems to be dying off – hopefully. Occurring only two months before the Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake, Freddy vs. Jason benefited from an unexpected nostalgia for the form it follows. With only a few exceptions (i.e. Seed of Chucky), it is the dead last original (i.e. non-remake) horror film from its generation. And astoundingly, Freddy vs. Jason was the most financially successful of either franchise, an accomplishment which stands to this day, if I am not mistaken.


Both killers emerge quickly, established in their most basic forms. Freddy (Robert Englund’s final stint) is chattier than usual, even, and directly informs us (how thoughtful) about his current predicament – Trapped in dream limbo, shut off from his would-be victims of Springwood by town-wide forgetfulness. Having “searched the bowels of hell” (and presumably passed over Michael, Leatherface and the Candyman), Freddy summons Jason (Ken Kirzinger, because somehow Kane Hodder wasn’t adequate) to go give the kids of Elm Street a machete spanking, as part of a generic notion to reinstall fear – “fear” getting treated only slightly less often here than in Batman Begins.

Before you even realize you’re actually watching Freddy vs. Jason, Jason Voorhees is strolling down Elm Street with his “ki ki ki.” With unerring plotdar, Jason happens upon a mass of vice-happy teens in 1428 Elm. Because this is a Friday movie, there are many, many teenagers, mostly the familiar Jock, Stoner, Nerd, Bitch, etc. Because this is an Elm Street movie, Final Girl Lori (Monica Keena’s distractingly fake breasts) is plagued by angst, ennui, and a ridiculously complex backstory. In fact, the exposition in Freddy vs. Jason is pretty intrusive altogether, largely because Shannon and Swift want to make damn sure we all follow what’s going on. So time and again characters repeat Freddy’s fear-based plan to reinsert himself into their lives and…

You know, hopefully the plot of this thing is familiar enough I don’t have to dwell upon it too much. There’s more interesting things in a Freddy vs. Jason – namely, Freddy vs. Jason. Let’s just give story a quick run through…

Jason gives one teen a quick run through – with extraordinary serendipity, it’s one teen, dead in a bed in 1428 Elm. Lucky for Freddy that Jason’s actions always seem somehow Kreugerific, ignoring his Voorheesian instincts to just heedlessly slay the entire town. Anyway, as Jason’s antics continue, word spreads about Freddy, to the point where finally he is lethal again in dreams, only…Only Jason keeps on killing Freddy’s prey first, because Jason isn’t wont to “entertain” his victims for ten straight minutes, or usually even let ‘em know he’s there. Though by the time Jason is recklessly slashing down an entire cornfield rave – a scene as awesome as it is illogical – it’s hard to figure anyone in town could attribute this all to a dream killer.

So…Freddy wants to start killing kids, but he can’t start killing kids because Jason won’t stop killing kids, so Freddy has to stop Jason from killing kids so by killing Jason, so that he can start killing kids. Got that? Basically, it’s a turf war.

(Oh, and there’s this Springwood conspiracy about suppressing Freddy info, and institutionalizing any kid who dreams too much, except it all distracts from the psycho vs. psycho mano a mano we’re really here to geek off on.)


I was curious to see how Freddy vs. Jason would read having more recently plowed through the Elm Street series. Previously, in my junky cinematic diet, I’ve watched it in tandem with the Fridays, so I always found myself siding with Jason – and always felt he was a little underutilized, despite Cunningham’s producer credit. (For one thing, why is it always the machete this time around?!) Now I cannot help but focus upon Freddy, which is easy to do since he is one outgoing Bastard Son of a Hundred Maniacs. In contrast, Jason comes across as a complete blank slate nonentity – and I mean even more than usual.

The thing is, the Elm Street series never wanted for imagination, with its ambitious special effects and set pieces. The Fridays were always so much more streamlined, minimalist, that for all their myriad flaws, the brain compensates by engaging them more critically. (At least that’s my experience.) Jason is an empty ewer, able to take whatever personification you wish to bestow upon him – I think of him as the avenging angel against whatever jerks I know (who are mostly engineers). Freddy is a punster, trickster, speedster…a Napster, given the whole dream thing. With the exception of Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (and possibly the first Nightmare on Elm Street), he lacks a mythic stature, because his movies explore him so thoroughly. Jason transcends his series, which has no single definitive entry – sorry, Jason Lives.


I’m not sure where I’m going with this. Though I’m mostly in Jason’s camp (heh!), I’ve now seen Freddy vs. Jason from the other side, and actually cheered Freddy on – and no one series really gets the edge. Though Springwood is our setting for most of the flick, Crystal Lake hosts the climax. There’s a good mixture of dream sequences and stalk sequences, and even if Freddy scores a paltry one kill, he was barely making it over three in his proper movies anyway. Give Jason his two score strewn, dismembered corpses!

The titular slash bash occupies the final thirty minutes of Freddy vs. Jason, which is actually about right to ensure we get plenty of each franchise’s generic formula first. Orchestrating this rumble was always the mightiest hurdle for screenwriters, for one reason: Freddy exists in dreams, and Jason evidently never even snoozes (he prefers sawing teens to sawing logs). Shannon and Swift must transport each murderer to the other’s locale, dreamland and reality, to really explore their strengths and weaknesses. They do this quite well.

Okay, so things start out with the kids – the inevitable true winners of this match-up, the Final Girl and Boy (the supremely irritating Jason Ritter) at least – debating their multiple multiple-murderer morass. They go about this in equal parts “Scooby Doo” and “That ‘70s Show,” which is a little distracting. Hilariously, one kid even apparently plans to avoid Jason by sleeping, which seems a most fool idea, except therein lies Freddy. “We’re not safe awake or asleep.” But for how little impact he’s actually had, Freddy is deemed the greater threat, and the gang heads off in their Mystery Machine van to procure delicious Hypnocil from Westin Hills (see A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: The Dream Warriors), so they can get their beauty sleep.

Wouldn’t you know it, this is now the place Jason has chosen to go – his trip has gone “house, house, cornfield, psychiatric hospital.” There’s no rhyme or reason to Jason’s wanderings today! And because stonedness is functionally equivalent to dreaming, the standard Stoner character (Kyle Labine, also fulfilling for no reason one half of an ersatz Jay and Silent Bob duo) zonks out there on the linoleum floor, to encounter Freddy. Given the scenario, I guess we can give Fred half credit for the Stoner’s halving – Possessed by Freddy (see Freddy’s Revenge, I guess), said pothead injects Jason with tranq. Which proves fatal. To the pothead.


First up, dreamworld. Boiler room. Jason, as is his habit, just slashes away like there’s no tomorrow. It plays out like the Black Knight routine in Holy Grail, except Freddy regrows his limbs, undoubtedly indestructible. And he pimp smacks Jason all about, even through a pinball routine (the closest to the latter Elm Streets’ love of bad comedy, in a film which mostly does a respectful job of keeping Freddy menacing). Jason proves equally indestructible, purely by dint of being Jason – it’s immovable object against irresistible force. But Freddy’s attack is mental, and there’s gotta be something left in that cephalic zombie’s deformed noggin Freddy can latch onto.

Indeed, Jason is scared of water – at least in his subconscious; alive, he rather revels in the element. (It’s to contrast with Freddy’s anti-love of fire, which is just too convenient.) By subjecting Jason to a replay of his 1957 drowning – which is astoundingly the first time we’ve actually gotten a good look at that defining event in Friday lore – Freddy stands a chance of victory.

But the teens have to a one sided with Jason, even though he just recently killed dozens of their friends. Go figure! It’s that lovable puppy dog look in his eyes – or so Yu claims. So they scheme to draw Freddy into the real world (something we’ve seen work at least twice in prior films), where Jason has home field advantage. And hope Jason simply ignores them (he won’t). Furthermore, they’ve lugged the lug back to Crystal Lake, for dubious logic, though one welcomes it nonetheless. (Yu keeps things engaging enough that we never stop to ponder how they got from Ohio to New Jersey so effortlessly.)


So Jason survives long enough to face Freddy in the real world, with a slight assist from Lori & the Gang – they help Jason rather too often, which gives me the sickening sense that maybe Freddy is otherwise superior. Though in the corporeal realm, Freddy ought to be a pushover, especially when he’s mortal and Jason remains an immortal golem.

Except who wants to see that? Instead, stripped of his dream powers (but with enough other nuttiness going on for it not to be a problem), Freddy has but his knife glove to counter Jason – and it’s plenty. That’s what people want to see when promised a Freddy vs. Jason, the simplest slashdown possible, no dream-based equivocation. And the main thing protecting Freddy is that Jason is sloooooooooooow. Freddy gets countless hits in with nary a scratch, because one lop from that omnipresent machete would K.O. Kreuger.

The title fight is maybe a little problematic, because Yu uses his Hong Kong pyrotechnics to reimagine it as wire-fu crossed with WWF – the WWF thing being something Jason’s embodied ever since the Kane Hodder days. Though the action movie stuff isn’t too aggravating, if we accept such lunacy is inherent in a Freddy vs. Jason, just as Live Free or Die Hard HAD to be insane by the mere nature of Die Hard sequel escalation. Besides, the alternative would be an Itchy & Scratchy-esque exchange of stabbings, which could get old eventually. And we do sort of get that at the very end, when the blood and dismemberment truly reaches 11 – I recall seeing this thing in 2003, and finding its unironic embrace of blood and tits surprisingly refreshing after a decade of tamer exploitation.


The very end is inconclusive, which is proper. There’s no way Freddy vs. Jason could ever side wholly with one party, so it offers up a stalemate so proponents of either side can make counterarguments for their side’s superiority. Such a flaw was inherent from the mere concept. In fact, a majority of Freddy vs. Jason’s flaws derive from its nature as a crossover – such as watching a villain fight a villain, or the strange tonal combination, or any of that. For what it is, this is damn well the best thing we could’ve hoped for, I honestly feel, and it’s better to have scratched that itch than to have left each franchise unfulfilled.

One further problem plagues the franchises, however, once each has committed to Freddy vs. Jason. There is no more room open for independent sequels; now aligned, they have to stay as one. At least, ignoring reboots, the final refuge of a scoundrel.

Among known crossovers, and what’s become of them afterwards, there are few apparent options. Godzilla alone weathered his King Kong vs. Godzilla with genuine sequel proliferation, though practically each follow-up was another ostensible crossover, with more in-house Toho beasties. The Universal monsters continued with their crossover frenzy into House of Dracula, and from there to Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. Slasher-wise, such intentional undermining of seriousness would come to resemble Austin Powers Meets Freddy and Jason, or some shit like that, ‘twere it to happen (that one being possible, as a New Line property).

But comedy so blatant is the final, final, final straw. There’s still a universe of modern horror icons to plunder, and fanboys love weighing in with grotesque abominations like Freddy vs. Jason vs. Leprechaun. Among serious considerations, rumor has it Hellraiser’s Pinhead was pondered for Freddy vs. Jason’s final shock – they both plunge into Hell, where everyone’s favorite Cenobite asks “Gentlemen, what seems to be the problem?” Of course, legal entanglements prevented that, just as they held up the earliest Freddy vs. Jason schemes. So Halloween, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, you name it, none of those was really viable.

Then there’s Freddy vs. Jason vs. Ash, the one which came the closest to becoming an actual thing – it made it to the treatment phase, employing Evil Dead’s Necronomicon Ex Mortis to pit Freddy against Jason against horror’s greatest hero, Ashley Williams, he of the boomstick and chainsaw arm! Groovy! Of course, for such a thing to work, you’d need the OK from both Bruce Campbell and Sam Raimi, and…well…there’s those damn legal entanglements again! A shame, really, because the only inherent flaw in this scheme would be the fact that everyone would root for Ash. Oh well. They still made a comic book out of it (which even got a sequel), so that’s something.

So ends the idea of direct follow-ups to Freddy vs. Jason, especially as we’re nearly a decade away from it now. Remakes have emerged in this absence, which pretty much signals the end of an era. Sequel hopes now lie in new hands…a doubtful notion.


RELATED POSTS:
• Friday the 13th No. 1 Friday the 13th (1980)
• Friday the 13th No. 2 Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981)
• Friday the 13th No. 3 Friday the 13th Part III (1982)
• Friday the 13th No. 4 Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (1984)
• A Nightmare on Elm Street No. 1 A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)
• Friday the 13th No. 5 Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (1985)
• A Nightmare on Elm Street No. 2 A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge (1985)
• Friday the 13th No. 6 Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (1986)
• A Nightmare on Elm Street No. 3 A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987)
• Friday the 13th No. 7 Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood (1988)
• A Nightmare on Elm Street No. 4 A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (1988)
• Friday the 13th No. 8 Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989)
• A Nightmare on Elm Street No. 5 A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child (1989)
• A Nightmare on Elm Street No. 6 Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991)
• Friday the 13th No. 9 Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (1993)
• A Nightmare on Elm Street No. 7 Wes Craven's New Nightmare (1994)
• Friday the 13th No. 10 Jason X (2002)
• Friday the 13th No. 12 Friday the 13th (2009)
• A Nightmare on Elm Street No. 9 A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)

Hercules, Maciste, Samson and Ursus, Nos. 17 & 24 & 5 & 8 - Hercules, Samson, Maciste and Ursus (1964)

This is it. This is, at long last, the GREAT CROSSOVER.

The mightiest of all pepla, conceptually at least, has a name, as lugubrious as one would expect of this genre: Hercules, Samson, Maciste and Ursus (for now on, HSM&U). If that doesn’t say more efficiently than any other possible name “This is a crossover of Hercules, Samson, Maciste and Ursus,” I don’t know what does? (Though it could have added a “vs.” or three.)

This movie’s alternate U.S. title is Samson and the Mighty Challenge, which not only hides any sense of grandiosity, but unfairly marks the thing out as belonging to the frail, emaciated Samson franchise alone.


The idea of combining three of the greatest peplum heroes, and also Ursus, into a single definitive rumble has a certain lizard-like appeal (it’s also attractive to fans of the overtly homoerotic). It would be even more exciting if these four cinematic musclemen were anything more than interchangeable stand-ins for each other, but what’re ya gonna do? Of course, there have already been a few Hercules crossovers, such as with Maciste in Maciste vs. Hercules in the Vale of Woe, and with Samson in Hercules, Samson and Ulysses (spuriously, and not actually a crossover, is the similar Ulysses vs. Hercules). None of these is remotely good, so maybe I shouldn’t be too excited about the prospect of another one with four times the sweaty, glistening muscle. But thank Zeus, Jupiter, Jehovah, or whomever Ursus worships (himself), HSM&U is a fantastically atypical sword-and-sandals!

Don’t get me wrong, it’s still dreadful, near the bottom of the cinematic agora. But at least it comes by these mistakes honestly, forging its own trail of insufficiency rather than just being an uninspired 20th generation copy of Hercules and the Captive Women. I’ve watched in essence the exact same movie every day for the better part of a month, making the rather rancid HSM&U a true godsend. Imagine trying to critique Friday the 13th Part III twenty days in a row; that’s what it’s been like.

Anyway, it can be effectively argued that a crossover doesn’t usually appear until desperation truly sets in. A rule of thumb is the more franchises are in a crossover, the more desperate they are. Look to the crossbreeding of Universal’s monsters, leading eventually to Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, and beyond. (I’d also point out Godzilla free-for-alls like Destroy All Monsters, except such maniacal multi-monster mash-ups became the SOP for Toho.) And surely by late 1964, the accursed Italian peplum craze was truly perishing, already dealt a fatal blow by A Fistful of Dollars and the ascendant Spaghetti Western. Pulling out all the stops, every single major peplum franchise combines here into a hybridized chimera, joining the powers of every series…

Which means HSM&U sucks with the combined magnitude of four mortal pepla.


With a budget paltry even by the standards of Maciste vs. the Headhunters, HSM&U is lucky they could afford a single marquee-name bodybuilding superstar. They did in fact get one, as Alan Steel draws the long gladius and plays Hercules (having only fist essayed that particular role earlier that year, in Hercules Against Rome). This leaves the other three lugs relegated to no-name he-men, obscure even by the standards of this forgotten trend. But we’ll get to those.

For now, Hercules is shown wandering with characteristic aimlessness, until Zeus’ voice booms down from the clouds with moral guidance. You’d be totally surprised to learn this is actually the first peplum I’ve seen which directly invokes Zeus, or any of that puffy cloud and lightning imagery. And lest we think this is one of those compromised American dubs, where Maciste is rechristened “Hercules” since non-Italians don’t know aught about Maciste, remember everyone is in this one, so when they say “Hercules,” they damn well mean “Hercules.” And Alan Steel is Hercules!

Hercules highs his way to the kingdom of Lydia – and don’t even bother trying to redress that Spanish coastal town as something that isn’t 20th century, guys! Around now I start to notice something funny (and not “ha ha” funny) about HSM&U…It is a comedy! OH…NO! Vale of Woe, the earliest such crossover (and the dead worst peplum I’ve seen, possibly excepting Ursus, the Terror of the Kirghiz) also tried to be a comic peplum, and was about as humorous as wildly bleeding hemorrhoids. But somehow HSM&U manages to work in spite of itself (though my standards are ridiculously lowered at this stage), never achieving “humor” but at least totally eschewing hateful, hair-pulling worthlessness. It seems built upon actual genre observation, noting especially its heroes’ personality flaws.

Consider Hercules, a boastful ass who lets everyone within earshot know at every possible moment about his demigodhood, how he achieves the Nietzschean ideal (though a B.C. he-man wouldn’t call it quite that, exactly) and is better than you. Yes, YOU! This is par for the course, which is one reason I’ve silently detested this peplum exercise. But among the characters Herc meets, they all treat him as I would – with anachronistically modern condescension, but with great tact lest he hear them and rip their throats out.

Okay, not every character acts that way – though those that do tip this film’s hand as a would-be comedy. Some people, especially Queen Nemea (Lia Zoppelli) are stupefied in Hercules’ exalted presence, as he prefers. It’s just as well, as this mania drives the plot. For Nemea wishes the Herc to wed her daughter Omphale (Elisa Montés); Omphale is of a sane mindset, and thoroughly opposes this. And would you lookie here! The Italians have discovered that subtle storytelling technique, conflict. Suddenly their stories can movie along naturally!

Omphale, in her struggle to cancel marrying the lunkhead, rigs the local oracle, much as Dreyfus rigged that supercomputer in Curse of the Pink Panther, to demand that first Hercules battle the strongest man on earth. You’ve a one in three chance of guessing this one correctly. It’s Samson (aka שמשון). Despite Hercules’ protestations, he (Hercules) is deemed “not a man” – a common ailment amongst steroid abusers – due to his demigod status. Can you believe they seem to have an actual, functional understanding of Hercules’ mythological history, even if they rather make an intentional hash of the Omphale story? I’d wager (for the first time in any peplum) the writers have done some honest-to-Atlas research, for the previously-unacknowledged mythological factoids which spring up. Amongst that “useless trivia” is the idea that Samson worships a non-Zeus god, namely Yahweh. Yes, they actually pose the Zeus vs. Our Lord debate, even if it goes nowhere. It goes to show they knew the subtext of these movies (or one subtext, at least, as the “gay” thing is never addressed).

I’m heaping oodles more praise onto HSM&U now than I rather expected to. Time to counterbalance that. There are many problems with HSM&U, and an early purposeless set piece with Hercules reflects that. While emissaries are off to Israel (or wherever) to find Samson, Nemea has Hercules perform odd jobs around the kingdom – an actually funny conceit. In one scene, he’s asked to dredge a ship from the ocean’s floor. Do you like uncut, murky underwater footage? Was Thunderball’s climax too short for you? You’ll love this bit, then, which somehow eschews the light and breezy tone most of HSM&U boasts for one of the worst Feats of Strength™ in the genre.

Add to that the out-of-place soundtrack, which for some reason samples Beethoven’s Fifth every time somebody namedrops Zeus. That’s when it’s not doing a lugubrious, anachronistic sci-fi pastiche, an utterly bizarre bit of tunage I’ve tried to transcribe here: “Bam bam BAM bam bam whoohohohohohoho!”


Meanwhile, emissaries are out scouring whatever wilderness this film crew had available for Samson. Finding a particularly sadistic muscleman in a tavern, they enter to find…Ursus (Yann L’Arvor). What, Ursus?! Already?!

Yann L’Arvor…This is just the start of uninspiring casting for the non-Hercules semi-Herculeses.

Ursus is blessed with the sort of personality flaws I’ve always associated with Charles Atlas and his sheep-like followers, namely Ursus is a bully. Though HSM&U uses Ursus in the same basic way as they do Hercules, it’s impressive how distinctly defined Ursus is. Ursus, as a mortal who’s become strong, is simply mean – an entitled, priggish asshole. If there were sand in this inn, he’d kick it in people’s faces. In a turn of events having nothing to do with the Hercules/Samson debate, the innkeeper sends his own emissary out to succor aid from Maciste. This is all a little random, but anything getting all four together in a halfway sensible way would be.


Let us forget about Ursus for now, as Nemea’s men have just found Samson (Nadir “Baltimore” – nadir indeed!)! With the possible exception of the unseen Hercules, Samson and Ulysses, this is the first Samson movie to get right a few facts about the Biblical Samson – which you’d think would’ve happened sooner. Namely, this Samson is the Biblical Samson, strength coming from his long, rabbi-like hair (yes, the “joke” with Samson is that he’s Jewish), and his love for “the jawbone of an ass” (which is a rather tittersome phrase the more it’s repeated).

And Samson is married…to Delilah (Moira Orfei). And let me take a momentary break to admire Miss Orfei…


Hello, Moira! She is truly the “Queen of the Peplum,” having also starred in (and these are just the ones I’ve considered) Hercules vs. the Hydra, Ursus, Maciste in the Land of the Cyclops, Maciste, the Strongest Man in the World, Ursus in the Valley of the Lions, Zorro vs. Maciste, The Triumph of Hercules. A little more broadly, Moira is known as Italy’s “Queen of the Circus,” and for a nation with a La Strada-like obsession with that institution, you know that means something!

Anyway, back to business. That Samson and Delilah are husband and wife, and bicker constantly like in a bad 1960s sitcom (comedy!), seems a sudden betrayal of the historical respect this goofy mash-up has dabbled in. Though great liberties are taken with the story, I needn’t have worried. Soon enough Delilah shears Samson’s hair as he sleeps, rendering him weak, and perfectly recalling the “Book of Judges.” (This was done to prevent Samson from fighting Hercules, and also schtupping the various known whores of Lydia.) With Samson now weak and cowardly and also beardless, his joke becomes just how worthless these bodybuilder types are when not God Mode Sues.

Back to Ursus! He terrorizes the bar more (actually, he never stopped), ordering people to “Dance!” like a villain in a western. To quote him:

“I SAID DANCE. I WAAAAANT MOOORE WIIIIINE. WWWWWIIIIIIINNNNNNNNNEEEEEEE!!!!!”

The great shitheel even takes to hurling people, inexplicably accompanied every danged time by a comedy slide whistle. But the time has come to pay for his Ursine crimes, as along comes the last of our required he-men, Maciste (Howard Ross). Maciste thrashes Ursus, and there was much rejoicing.


As contrast to the irredeemable buffoons that are the other three, Maciste’s persona is his innate decency, which becomes funny wholly by contrast. I’m glad they could work out unique traits for all these musclemen, seeing usually they’re all just off-brand Herculeses.

The emissaries behold Maciste’s Macistean strength – in fact, they note everyone’s comic book muscularity – and opt to take pretty much everyone back to Lydia as insurance seeing as Samson is a sissy girly man now. Everyone has different motives in the inevitable, upcoming Clash of the Four Interchangeable Guys, in an attempt to be a French farce. It doesn’t quite succeed – frankly, nothing in HSM&U is good – but there’s still the effort, and the intention behind it – and that goes a long way in my peplum-addled state. What does it say that this, the best movie I’ve seen in over a week, has a 2.2 on IMDb?

…

Okay, my fat neighbor is having an argument that’d make Hitler weep. She’s fat, loud and vulgar in the best of times, meaning today she’s fatter, louder and more vulgar than ever. I can’t deal with this, not when I wish to simply enjoy horrible movies in peace. I’m going for a nice stroll in the rain.

[Sound of me walking out of the apartment, locking up.]

[Sound of me going down the stairs.]

[Intensely long sound of nothing more than my fat neighbor’s furtive screeching echoing throughout a vacant unit.]

[Many hours later, sound of me ascending the stairs.]

[Sound of me entering my apartment, drying off, resuming Herculean pleasantries.]

Sorry about all that, folks.


Ursus, Maciste, Samson and the emissaries start the trek back to Lydia. Occasional slapstick fights break out, courtesy of Ursus. These somehow result in Blair Witch Project close-ups (also really pixilated) of various bearded men racing through the woods. Really, imagery like this belongs nowhere in an alleged comedy. This signals, for all HSM&U’s noble intentions, a notable dearth of competence, as the badness starts to creep into this effort as it must all late-period pepla.

Lydia is reached, and preparations are underway for the Rumble in the Agora, with assorted soap opera dramatics from Omphale ensuring all four shall tussle for our amusement. It won’t be that straightforward, since for reasons owing solely to the film’s running length, we suddenly meet neighboring tyrant King Inor (Luciano Marin). In a movie that’s shunned the usual tired peplum formulae, this left-field Third Act villain is most unwelcome. Despite the sudden appearance of Deianeira, another of Hercules’ assorted mythological harlots (who does not serve that purpose here), I’ll leave this section alone, as it might cause me unfathomable dismay.

Rather, I’ll skip right on over to the title fight, which duly occurs as though that last paragraph hadn’t happened at all. It’s a pretty sloppy affair (making it still one of the more cogent clashes in the genre), and it’s not a good sign that the pic below is the absolute best image from the whole ordeal.


Then things end with a literal deus ex machina, as Zeus just up and appears (via a ridiculous face-in-a-wall) to tell everyone to just stop and move along. This story wasn’t going to resolve itself anyway, and if I’m being generous I’d say “The Odyssey” ends in the exact same way. The four strongmen ride on, conflict over and nothing gained.

Hercules, Samson, Maciste and Ursus may as well stand as the final monument to an entire dying genre, for as atypical as it is. For the Samson franchise, this was the end. For Ursus, only 3 Avengers remained, and I’ve already saved time by dismissing that one out of hand. Only one more Maciste was to come, which I’ll halfway address in two days. Hercules alone was able to manage two more movies after this, which is appropriate since Hercules was e’er the torch-holder for the pepla, the originator and the best. It is with those two final entries that we shall bid farewell to this era.


RELATED POSTS
• The Silent Maciste Franchise (1914 - 1927)
• Hercules No. 1 Hercules (1958)
• Hercules No. 2 Hercules Unchained (1959)
• Hercules No. 3 The Revenge of Hercules (1960)
• Hercules No. 4 Hercules vs. the Hydra (1960)
• Maciste No. 1 Maciste in the Valley of the Kings (1960)
• Maciste No. 2 Maciste vs. the Headhunters (1960)
• Hercules No. 5 Hercules and the Conquest of Atlantis (1961)
• Hercules No. 6 Hercules id the Haunted World (1961)
• Maciste No. 3 Maciste in the Land of the Cyclops (1961)
• Maciste No. 6 Maciste, the Strongest Man in the World (1961)
• Hercules & Maciste Nos. 7 & 7 Maciste Against Hercules in the Vale of Woe (1961)
• Ursus No. 1 Ursus (1961)
• Ursus No. 2 Vengeance of Ursus (1961)
• Hercules No. 8 Ulysses vs. Hercules (1962)
• Hercules No. 9 The Fury of Hercules (1962)
• Maciste Nos. 8 - 20 (1962 - 1964)
• Hercules No. 10 Hercules, Samson and Ulysses (1963)
• Maciste No. 21 Maciste vs. the Mongols (1963)
• Hercules No. 12 Hercules in the Land of Darkness (1964)
• Hercules No. 16 Hercules and the Tyrants of Babylon (1964)
• Maciste No. 22 Maciste in Genghis Khan's Hell (1964)
• Maciste No. 23 Maciste and the Queen of Samar (1964)
• Ursus No. 7 Ursus, the Terror of the Kirghiz (1964)
• Hercules No. 18 Hercules and the Princess of Troy (1965)
• Hercules No. 19 Hercules the Avenger (1965)

The Samson Franchise

For Italians hoping to create a thriving peplum franchise in the crowded sword-and-sandals situation of the early 1960s, what was needed most was a recognizable name. A continuing star doesn’t matter, as they’re all essentially the same anyway. Nor do any other factors of consistency, like director or continuity or even basic setting.

Of course, with titles switching up willy-nilly abroad, your Goliath movie may very well end up a Hercules movie, and vice versa. Still, within the boundaries of Italy, the name mattered, and even while you cannot trademark a hero from Grecian antiquity, it makes sense to stake out a spot anyway – for Italian pepla peddlers were surprisingly respectful towards their competitors.

Not available: Hercules, Ulysses, Maciste, Goliath, Ursus (who?!). Unusable: Aeneas, because Aeneas sucks. Nonexistent at that stage: Kratos. Still unclaimed: Samson. Like a Hercules of the Bible, Samson’s Old Testament feats of strength include such genre-ready hijinks as wrestling a lion, destroying a palace, and battling whole armies. Then there’s the whole evil seductress bit with Delilah. The story is essentially a peplum waiting to happen!


Or…or you could just appropriate that name, call a movie Samson simply to announce “There is a strong, shirtless beefcake cipher here,” and call it a day. (Philistines!) Besides, cinematic trends abhor excess innovation, when Follow the Leader is the name of the game. So Samson, a 1961 release coinciding with the absolute zenith of the movement, is pretty much just a Greek-set picture, wherein a beefy beef boy (here called Samson) discovers a kingdom ruled over unfairly by a tyrant type, controlled by a seductress, and all this complex political intrigue is eventually solved by the sheer flexing of muscles most of us do not have.

Filling in the blanks like an Italian-themed Mad Lib: The warlord is presently called Warkalla (Serge Gainsbourg – what, again?!). The seductress, Romilda (Mara Berni). Assorted other no-doubt-standard characters pop up, each portrayed by actors with unfamiliar Italian names.

Headlining it all is Brad Harris as Samson, making his grand leap from stunt coordinator to leading man! Given the particular…obsessions of this fantastical form, that makes him overqualified to star. Obviously it worked out well enough for the genre’s upper echelons, as witness Harris’ ascent to Hercules in the following year’s The Fury of Hercules (reviewed yesterday).

The same goes for director Gianfranco Parolini, an otherwise undistinguished working member of the peplum community. Having not seen this movie (only so very many others which sound exactly like it), I can only refer to Fury for a sense of Parolini’s brilliance. In other words, Samson is bad.

Samson is otherwise notable for granting an early role to future muscleman Sergio Ciani, who…

Start again! Such a Neopolitan name won’t get you very far up the pectoral pedestal. How about we switch it to “Alan Steel?” I dare say we’ve found the most ridiculously hyper-macho name in the genre! The only thing that’d be more epic would be “Brock Samson.”

Anyway, let the record stand that Samson was the start for Steel.


Part Two, 1963’s Samson vs. the Pirates, represents an aberration in the cycle, in that it barely fits at all. Far from maintaining the standard Greco-Roman setting, and also far be it from placing Samson in his original Judaical environs, rather this Tanio Boccia-helmed pec pic pilfers pirates. It’s more swashbuckler and less sword-and-sandals, doing the Errol Flynn Sea Hawk, Captain Blood, Adventures of Robin Hood thing. This counts as “mixing it up” within such a proscribed realm, moving from B.C. to the 17th century.

To keep things from being completely unfamiliar, the story beats follow the standard damsel and villain framework. Only this time, Samson is out to stop dread pirates rather than preserve some kingdom or other. And to show just where Samson vs. the Pirates’ allegiances lie, the movie takes reportedly every opportunity to strip its hero down to something anachronistically resembling the familiar nipple-revealing toga, and run him through Feats of Strength™, “World’s Strongest Man” style.

“Feats of Strength™” are a Kirk Morris special, as it is Kirk Morris who plays Samson here. Calling this a sequel to the 1961 copycat is pretty iffy, as it relies solely upon possessing a familiar name. Surely in the U.S. that wouldn’t fly. But the Italians consider a franchise differently. It’s all in the name, baby!


Morris returns for the same year’s Part Three, Hercules, Samson and Ulysses, only now in the role of Hercules – the only time he’d officially play the Herc. And indeed, the title betrays one notable fact: This is a crossover! Yes, it’s Hercules # 10, even as it’s Samson # 3 (and Ulysses # 0, for that isn’t a franchise). Such was the swift prominence “Samson” attained, that it became financially beneficial to crossbreed, confuse the hell out of me, and rake in the lira.

Even so, whatever ambition one would expect from Hercules, Samson and Ulysses doesn’t extend to the casting. Able to afford only one top drawer Adonis at a time, producers cast a rather ridiculous figure as Samson: Iloosh Kohoshabe. The man had basically no career prior, and hardly any afterwards, but for a minor position in Iranian film…Man, tossed out of the Italian film industry – that’s gotta sting!

Of Ulysses (Enzo Cerusico, unacceptably puny), he does not belong to any prior franchise – See my write-up for Ulysses vs. Hercules as to why. Still, his name in the title sounds mighty impressive.

At the very least they for the first time recognize the Biblical significance of Samson, and treat his “character” likewise. For while the tale begins with Hercules and Ulysses setting out to defeat a no-doubt cheesy-looking sea monster, instead they get washed up all Jonah-like in Judea. Here, Samson and Hercules mistake each other for villains, and duke it out. It’s the old philosophical schoolyard quandary: Could Hercules beat up Samson? Does Zeus hood a candle to Yahweh? And will Hercules be clever enough to make the connection between Samson’s burliness and his hair?

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Needless to say, I have not watched any of these flicks. Blame obscurity, blame cheapness, blame the fact that the only ones to survive into the DVD era are those which got the “Hercules” name slapped on them. Movies such as Samson # 4, 1963’s Samson vs. the Black Pirate (itself a damnably confusing title, barely distinct from Samson vs. the Pirates). So Samson vs. the BLACK Pirate is known to most (amongst those rarified weirdos who do know such effluvia) rather as Hercules and the Black Pirate.

Anyway, Samson vs. the BLACK Pirate…


Or…HERCULES and the Black Pirate, whatever.

Also in keeping with Samson vs. the Pirates, Part Four is a swashbuckler – so we’re on the fringe of the peplum, which I believe is actually a pun in Italian. Also in keeping with the apparent form of Samson vs. the Pirates, Samson vs. the Black Pirate does most everything in its power to do nothing. Let’s skip over this plotline with efficiency, for the filmmakers, like director Luigi Capuano, themselves have little concern for it.

There is a kingdom – check! Or, rather, a governorship, or some such, in this Caribbean set swashbuckler. Present and accounted for, at any rate, is the leader, Don Alonzo, and his lovely daughter Rosita (Rosalba Neri), waiting patiently for her true life’s calling, as a damsel in distress. On the flip side, there’s the scheming nogoodnik with aims at the throne (or whatever it counts as), Don Rodrigo (Piero Lulli). The titular Black Pirate, which is his entire name, is but Don Rodrigo’s henchman (Andrea Aureli). From these standard players, you could more or less use your peplum familiarity to parse out the rest.


And of course, there’s also Samson himself, with Alan Steel graduating to lead status. Though he behaves like a personality-deprived variation on Errol Flynn, Steel’s Samson has a marvelous clothing allergy, switching from a dapper fop to a rippling he-man at the first possible moment. In fact, the clothing gradually diminishes from the entire male cast as the film goes on, introducing anachronistic near-nudity into a tale of piracy.


Now, those are the elements which keep Samson vs. the Black Pirate well within the peplum framework. It is what I’d call a “bad” peplum. Forgivably, there is no fantasy element, giant monsters or whatnot. A fantasy-steeped swashbuckler would instead be a Pirates of the Caribbean film, and thank Yahweh that wasn’t a peplum – saving us all from a shirtless Orlando Bloom or [shudder!] Geoffrey Rush.

Less forgivably, within the sword-and-sandals game book, is the lack of a secondary female, a femme fatale, leaving the non-homoerotic eye candy severely depleted. It’s amazing, a swashbuckler which cannot make the corset a comely fashion, but leave it to 1964 Italy.


That doesn’t leave a whole lot to respond to, not in a genre so prescribed, and with so many of ‘em recently under my belt. The story is not worth delving into. It’s not like the filmmakers would’ve expected audiences to take it seriously anyway. With that, none of the characters read in even the slightest. So a viewer is never remotely concerned with how this’ll play out, and I doubt even a movie-ignorant child could lend the slightest bit of credence, interest, or suspense to what plays out.


That leaves only a few methods for getting any enjoyment out of Samson vs. the Black Pirate. Naturally for these lesser pepla, one can just take it as camp – though there’s not a gigantic amount of that, once one has grown desensitized to the visual presence of naked male flesh.


The other option is to simply appreciate the action sequences as a mere collection of stunts.

Oh, but the movie’s not that technically adept either! The visuals are murky and washed out – and we’re dealing with the best surviving print here! The cinematography works poorly even in terms of framing, not that dealing with a 1960s pan-and-scan helps. All the physical exploits are generally familiar, though there’s at least the novelty of seeing rapier duels in a genre more fixated upon the broadsword. Given this uniqueness, it’s unsurprising that such swashbuckling shenanigans are not done terribly well. And that’s even when one considers director Capuano was familiar with epees, what with his previous Zorro e i tre moschettieri – Yeah, the Italians combined Zorro and the Three Musketeers! You wanna make something of it?


…

So…Samson vs. the Black Pirate, a movie I can barely be arsed to think twice about, even after a walk. As is, we’re left with the sheer, Ed Woodian pleasure of a few enjoyably bad bits, brought upon us by the U.S. distributors. That means laughing at the dubbing, which is never as promising a proposition as with kung fu exports. The major fun is the name switch from Samson to Hercules. But somehow, this doesn’t seem to have been the original design, even with the English dub. No, I’d wager they first went with the “Samson” name, as it ought to be. So the name “Hercules” gets re-redubbed in awkwardly, in a temporal space demanding a two-syllable word. In a deeper voice! It’s pretty hilarious, frankly, so at least something is salvable from this bland product.

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Moving on with the series, to its final entry, Part Five…

The sword-and-sandals genre was waning in these middle years of the 1960s, a victim of oversaturation. Pity Samson, as that hero only managed 4 entries in the time that Hercules and Maciste appeared in over a dozen extravaganzas each. Surely there wasn’t the sort of major box office clout for such a Jewish name, without a Cabiria or the 1958 Hercules to back it up. And for the genre’s standards, Samson does like clothing too much.

No matter, in the desperate final year of the peplum (1965), all the great producers joined forces together to do the sword-and-sandals crossover to end all sword-and-sandals crossovers – the GREAT CROSSOVER. That day, when it comes, shall mark our penultimate peplum probing. But we’re not there yet, as we must first look at some more Hercules, then more Maciste, then Ursus, then some MORE Hercules. Still, the light is at the end of the tunnel – and only 10 days out!


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. 8 Ulysses vs. Hercules (1962)
• No. 9 The Fury of Hercules (1962)
• 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)