Though this post is primarily a consideration of Hercules the Avenger (1965), let it stand as an epitaph for the entire defunct Italian sword-and-sandals craze.
What leads to the death of a franchise (or a genre)? One may usually cite related notions like audience disinterest and reduced profitability. For Italian pepla, these movies (be they Herculeses, Macistes, Ursi or mere Atlases) were so ridiculously cheap, profitability was mostly guaranteed, no matter how niche they became. In response, the marketplace was submerged in bargain basement bodybuilder bonanzas boasting an intense misinterpretation of ancient times, a “mythological” without the “logical.” Such rancid feces are rarely watchable as simple movies. Hence comes audience apathy, as the moronic mania neared a wretched decade in length.
What is lost in this arrangement is another fatal symptom of series mortality: filmmaker disinterest. Oh, producers still desired more Herculeseseseseseses, from now until Ragnarok. They could only see lira signs cartoonishly in their own eyeballs, nothing more. Directors, actors, even lowly technicians, they’d shirk Herc, and by 1965 were off in the Spanish desert creating rip-offs of A Fistful of Dollars in favor of rip-offs of Hercules Unchained.
But for someone like Maurizio Lucidi, a Hercules movie could still be made, in total defiance of Zeus, Yahweh, even dreaded Xenu! For all you need is a back catalogue of the scant good Herculi, an editing booth, and the dubbing capacity to alter things as you see fit. Thus Hercules the Avenger, the dead final film in the cycle, is hastily cut-and-pasted from preexisting efforts, accomplishing top spectacle for minimal effort. And since dubbing is a phenomenally common factor in Italian movies, this makes the task that much simpler.
It seems someone was preemptively listening to my claims that the best of the series were always Hercules and the Captive Women and Hercules in the Haunted World. These came of the genre’s glory years, and of capable directors (Mario Bava for the latter). Even more usefully, Reg Park starred in each. So with a quick rejiggering of formula elements, the standout scenes of Park’s two efforts can be reshuffled into a new narrative, edited slightly for pace and whatnot (Lucidi is primarily an editor), and you’ve spuriously created the final Hercules!
Hercules the Avenger is a remarkably painless viewing experience, surely in light of the emaciated wastrels the later pepla had become. It helps that the original movies are decent – you won’t find me complaining about rewatching a Mario Bava movie. And the seams aren’t hugely obvious, a credit to the dubbing approach. Compare this to Trail of the Pink Panther, a similar(ish) cannibalism of former footage, but it a stagnated story with huge discrepancies in tone, quality, etc. And Avenger further solidifies my theory that the best pepla have been preserved more scrupulously than their lesser castoffs. There is actual color in this movie…though to compare it with images from the original movies, one still sees a certain degradation.
Actually, so non-misguided is Lucidi’s lucid effort, he was even granted the capacity to film assorted new scenes, amounting to at most 10% of the final product, to add the needed connective tissue (and tiresome tyrant subplot). And with so little time needed to be filled, Lucidi was able to accomplish a lush look comparable to the pilfered footage. They even got Reg Park back! All told, for a project as ignominious as “outright plagiary of something I’ve already scene,” Avenger is easily in the top 90th percentile of its genre.
Avenger’s story is spurned on by scenes of political intrigue, which seems to be new footage, if memory serves. Not that any one throne room scene is distinguishable from any other. King Eteocles (Franco Ressel) of the Kingdom TBD offers to wed Syracuse’s Queen Leda (Gia Sandri), to join their two realms. Okay, this always happens, and so does what follows. The wicked Eteocles learns, via a plot-enabling prophecy, that Hercules shall one day stop him. So Eteocles sets about scheming against Hercules, never realizing it’s just this behavior which’ll cause his defeat. As Eteocles puts it, “I know who the enemies of my kingdom are. They are my enemies.” Oh well thank you then!
Meanwhile, Hercules has worries all his own, as his new dubbing fills us in. He’s just slain the Hydra, something I think about three different Hercules films cover. This time, it’s earned him the undying wrath of, oh, let’s say, Gaea. Basically, it’s like those assorted Ulysses-invoking pepla which hypothesize a Poseidon vengeance in regards to the Cyclops’ de-eyeballing. Gaea’s de-Herculizing of the world involves bestowing a bizarre illness upon his son Xantos (Luigi Barbini). Hercules sets off on some vague voyage to “save his soul,” though it takes Avenger a good long while for this entire though process to become clear. Which is just in keeping with the other pepla, for a clarity of storytelling is priority # 196 for every single Italian genre artist. Besides, the audience needs something to confuse ‘em every once in a while.
Hercules’ trek starts out like the introductory sea voyage out of Hercules and the Captive Women. Actually, footage of Hercules randomly traveling on a ship (as he does in both instances) is so easy to plop into new contexts, there’s not even very much new dubbing. So the same sequence follows with nary an alteration: mutiny, marooning, Hercules singlehandedly tugging the ship back via chain, Hercules along escaping on the ship.
The entirety of Hercules’ subsequent adventure has nothing to do with Eteocles and his political intrigue. The only reason that stuff exists, as with most of Lucidi’s new footage, is to get this up to a proper, non-Hercules and the Princess of Troy running time, and to give Hercules a climax.
Sticking with the interesting thing (old footage), Hercules’ ship is wrecked in a storm. He slowly drifts from the start of Captive Women into the middle of Haunted World, and it really simplifies identification since all this even follows the order of the original films. But look what a little trimming of dialogue allows! In Captive Women, the Herc battles a shakeshifting elemental, who takes (among other shapes) the form of a large, rubbery iguana-man. Without citing the elemental, Avenger simply plops Hercules down in some inexplicable underwater yet completely dry grotto, to fight a real giant rubber lizard.
Meanwhile, Eteocles sets about his unrelated scheme against Hercules, which can move ahead even without Hercules’ presence. For, in something a little more clever than the standard “Go murder the unmurderable demigod,” Eteocles has decided to damage Hercules’ reputation (he’s gonna release a series of uninvolving exploitation movies?!). No, Eteocles has wrangled up a Herc lookalike, a Hercalike, and charged him with a sequence of (newly filmed) chaotic murders that rival the Joker’s. Never mind Eteocles, like most peplum tyrants, betrays his own villainous intentions by chumming around with a serial-killing muscleman.
Now, it seems many long-running series eventually succumb to the lookalike plot. It’s only surprising Hercules managed to avoid this until the very end. But oddly enough, it’s not a briefly returning Reg Park who plays the Herceauxles, Anteas. Nope, that’d be Giovanni Cianfriglia (a peplum bodybuilder so undistinguished, we haven’t even encountered him in this cycle). It’s telling that you can cast two entirely random bodybuilders as each other’s doppelgangers. I doubt Avenger does this to make a subtle satirical point, as it’s too concerned with telling a rousing yarn to make such meta statements. Still, for whatever reason Lucidi had to use a non-Park to seem Park-like, and it never seems exceptionally foolish.
That’s the new stuff, which necessitates new interpretation. Back on the Hercu-front, Hercules is well and surely in the Haunted World’s haunted world, though this time it’s not Hades, but simply some generic Land of Vague Damnation (Or Some Such). With no evident alterations, Hercules once again assists the Hesperides in obtaining their Golden Plot Apple. He then proceeds to cross a familiar pit of fire, and skips ahead to Haunted World’s climax for his wonderfully Evil Dead II-esque zombie fracas.
In considering screen shots back to back, it’s clear a lot of Mario Bava’s beautiful, hellish surrealism has somehow been lost, though the imagery remains. The crispness is gone, as are the rather immaculate widescreen compositions (which barely register at their present scale). It’s a testament to Bava’s art that even in this bastardized state, a repurposed Haunted World sequence remains the crown jewel in the genre.
Hercules frees Xantos’ bound soul, which is represented by the guy from Haunted World who played Theseus (awkward! – especially since there’s a totally different Theseus in this one). Thus ends the Haunted World segment of Avenger, and with it the movie has peaked.
Emerging from Quasi-Hell, Hercules learns of the ridiculous Anteas plot some good 2/3rds in. He also finds himself back in Captive Women for the majority of the ensuing action sequences, as Lucidi has the good grace to not trust himself with competent physical choreography. And now, as if we're in a completely different movie (which we are), Syracuse is well under the iron bicep of Anteas. And with Anteas’ body count somehow besting Jason Voorhees’, Hercules goes to the Valley of Agony (formerly the Valley of Unsuitable Leprous Would-Be Sacrifices) to amass an army of extras.
As in Captive Women, Hercules decides (here for less justifiable reasons) to trigger a volcanic eruption, because somehow Syracuse’s salvation lies only in Syracuse’s (nee Atlantis’) violent, cataclysmic destruction. What is it with Herc and wanton mass murder? (He does up Anteas’ kill count in a single swoop, for what it’s worth.)
Thus the prophecy is mostly fulfilled, with a little impenetrable detour so that Xantos can question his father’s sanity – see the general Italian issue with “B follows A” storytelling. At last, in new footage making up the climax, Hercules and Anteas face off in Peplum Cave. It’s a surprisingly legible wrestling match between two greasy dudes, something most pepla cannot manage. Here’s perhaps why Lucidi cast a new actor as Anteas, as he wouldn’t want the challenge of having Reg Park fight himself.
And this is how the Hercules franchise ends, on a much higher note than it has any right to, honestly. Though the whole series’ existence is a similar fluke, owing to a coincidence of timing, plagiarism, and good U.S. distribution. It’s pretty amazing that a cobbled reediting of preexisting movies could be among the better of this franchise’s efforts, due to the quality of those original films, the competence of the editing, or the general crappiness of everything else.
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Over on the Maciste front, that semi-Herculean franchise itself produced one more film after Hercules, Samson, Maciste and Ursus, which by all means should’ve been the end of these franchises. And ever the follower where Hercules was the trail blazer, Maciste mangles out its final token entry, 1965’s Maciste, Avenger of the Mayans, using Lucidi’s Hercules approach. Namely, this is another cobbled-together act of filmic photocopying.
But like all Macistean efforts, it habitually sucks worse than Hercules – this I am unfairly assuming, having not seen the MACISTE Avenger. For the two films cruelly press-ganged into franchise eulogy service are Maciste vs. the Headhunters and Maciste vs. the Monsters. Now, I haven’t seen the latter (unavailable), but I maintain that the former is among the worst of its kind. Not to mention, while Lucidi had the common sense to reuse two Herculi with the SAME actor, these Macistes seem chosen at random, starring, respectively, Kirk Morris and Reg Lewis. Forget howall these actor/strongmen are one and the same; there is no way switching actors around like Heath Ledger in The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus (only without that Gilliam-esque artisty) could work.
And there’s no English version of this thing either.
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Such covers, to my inestimable gratitude, the conclusion of the ‘60s peplum trend, with its glut of needless crossovers (which necessitated this interminable blog exercise in the first place). This is now the epilogue. Cinematic subgenres come and go in cycles; sword-and-sandals films existed prior to 1958’s Hercules, and would exist again afterwards.
Sticking briefly with Maciste…Only two more movies have emerged since 1965 with his name. These are not a part of the central franchise; besides, they are genuinely lost films. Both are the products of Spain’s über-crud-meister Jesus Franco, because when you need cinema which makes Italy seem like France, Spain is your man! Franco’s reputation is noxious, equivalent to the worst “Ed Woods” of various nations. And his Macistes? The Erotic Exploits of Maciste in Atlantis and Maciste vs. the Amazon Queen, both with Val Davis as Maciste (and each shot as one solo movie, then split up in another marvelous example of producers milking their products dry).
No more Macistes have followed, not even in Italy, the world’s only place where that name holds any sway. But seeing as Hercules derives from antiquity, whereas Maciste hails from 1914, it makes sense the one name would persist beyond the other.
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Hercules, the name and mythological (i.e. non-copyrightable) character, reappears with frequency fairly often. Consider the incomparable Arnold Schwarzenegger himself, early in his bodybuilding career when he was in serious danger of getting lost in the wilderness like his he-man forbears, in 1970’s Hercules in New York.
It was also Schwarzenegger who inadvertently reignited the peplum’s second wave of the 1980s, with his Conan the Barbarian. Soon Hercules returned again, now played by Lou “The Incredible Hulk” Ferrigno, in Hercules and Hercules II. By now, the formula which defined the ‘60s movement was long ago abandoned, and the nouveaux pepla are more “barbarian” than “Roman” – reflecting the general temperament of the ‘80s. So different were these movies, they fall under the wholly distinct term of “swords-and-sorcery.”
Toga movies evolved still, as mainstream, big Hollywood made Braveheart, leading to Gladiator, Troy, Beowulf, 300, and more such films I don’t want to list. These have more to do with Spartacus and Ben-Hur, films which were the impetus for the ‘60s Hercules craze to begin with. And with the only recent major “Hercules” being Disney’s in 1997, we’re well beyond the scope of our original discussion. And totally done with this branch of cinema. I’m 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. 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)
