Tales of Bacchus and Uranus

It's no revelation that peplum films recycle a lot of the same props, actors, plots, and so forth. Still, it was kind of astonishing how much these two had in common -- and we're not just talking about the usual stuff, e.g.:

• the evil queen who falls in love with Hercules after he survives a test of strength;
• the soldier who reports a failed mission and is summarily executed;
• the natural disaster that overtakes the kingdom once Hercules inevitably wins.

Yes, those things are present, but so are more idiosyncratic things like:

• hidden sanctums harboring glowing objects that serve as centers of occult power and empower the evil queen -- at a severe price;
• drugged wine that Hercules is, for once (or twice!), too smart to imbibe;
• close female relatives of the evil queen whom she sacrifices to preserve her power;
• giant gongs whose beater Hercules briefly uses as a weapon;
• scenes where almost everything onscreen is blotted out by dust, wind, and storms;
• soundtracks heavy on electronic sound effects;
• ...and long strings of dialogue involving "Uranus" that, after some initial resistance, eventually had us in stitches.

(Yes, we're twelve.)

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Hercules Against the Moon Men (1964)
[aka Maciste e la regina di Samar]

Grade: C-

This is one of those titles that immediately makes you think "camp". Hercules Against the Moon Men? How can this be anything other than a ridiculous mash-up of cheap fantasy and cheap sci-fi, a contrivance that makes Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla seem like the most natural thing in the world?

(Note: we haven't actually seen Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla, at least not yet. We're sure it's lovely.)

Well, the narration sets it up for us:

"That fatal night, a fiery mass dropped from the sky onto Earth, causing the mountain of Samar to erupt and burn everything around it, leaving nothing but a wasteland. Within the bowels of the mountain, a new and monstrous life was formed. From that day on the people of Samar, in order to survive, were forced to offer their children as a sacrifice to the hungry Mountain of Death."

Heavy duty.

From that prologue -- and ours at the start of this post -- you already know the deal, and can safely assume that evil Queen Samara (Jany Clair) is just fine with the status quo. Actually, that's not quite so: she wants to go further, and establish complete dominion over the world (the same thing we do every night, Pinky).

We find out early on that Samara is in touch with a weird alien apparition that, above all, wants her to kill Hercules (Sergio Ciani). Could this have anything to do with the mysterious mountain of death? Will Samara somehow capture Hercules and put him through a test of...?

OK, that's a yes. And will she become smitten with...?

Huh, OK, that's kinda kinky, but whatever. (Whatever she says, Jany's not done with Sergio -- and given how she guides his hands to her neck, apparently the ragdoll thing is her kink.)

And will she spike his wine with...?

...OK, then.

So it's not the basic plot of Moon Men where the interest lies, but one thing we really liked is that every time we had a suggestion for Hercules, he went and did it. For example, we asked: why bend two bars at once when you could focus on pulling one bar to the side with both hands?

"Done," says Sergio Ciani. Or, when confronted by a linebackers' wall of slow-moving golems, we said aloud "Why not just wait for an opening and dive between them?" And what do you know, the clever li'l cuss went and did that too!

One liability in Hercules Against the Moon Men is love interest Agar (Anna Maria Polani), daughter of the nobleman Gladius who was pictured a few screenshots back (and who gets Britney'd in the early going).

If you're playing the love interest of a man who can have any woman he wants, you'd better bring some serious charisma to the table. But Ms. Polani just doesn't have enough to pull it off --

-- which is a genteel way of saying that one of us was really bothered by her chin cleft, and the other wasn't exactly smitten either. Alas, we just couldn't get AMPed for this young woman.

Still, the movie hums along nicely until the final act, where the inevitable assault is mounted against the Mountain of Death -- and we suddenly get bogged down in shot after shot of windswept wastelands. The color gel lighting and dry ice fog look cool in still shots, but -- we're not exaggerating here -- ten minutes of people shouting unheard dialogue and stumbling around aimlessly? That doesn't make for an exciting climax.

Also, this is one of those movies where Hercules never seems to kill anyone. Whenever he's attacked by multiple enemies, they obligingly clasp hands with him and get thrown into the air, like some sort of pre-game ritual gone wrong.

Maybe they should just shoot him with an arrow for a change?

By the way, we liked the cool zodiac graphic that comes in about two-thirds of the way through the movie -- and we weren't above a chuckle at the line about coming under "the evil influence of Uranus". (Paging James Seay!)

One wonders why Queen Samara would take part in a plan designed to make the Earth unfit for human life. OK, "the fairest of them all" is just as applicable with a sample size of one, but then why is she devoting her energies to reviving Selene, Queen of the Moon Men? None of this really computes.

In conclusion, here's a screenshot of Sergio Ciani having a lie-down.

Speaking of which...

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Hercules and the Captive Women (1964)
[aka Hercules Conquers Atlantis, Ercole alla conquista di Atlantide]

Grade: B-

"Please don't be a comedy, please don't be a comedy, please don't be a comedy," we said to ourselves as the opening minutes of Hercules and the Captive Women unspooled. After our traumatic experience with the utter garbage that was Colossus and the Amazon Queen, we simply couldn't stomach a repeat of that experience.

And disturbingly enough, the beginning of Hercules and the Captive Women bears no small resemblance to Colossus and the Amazon Queen. We've got a bar fight, followed by a betrayal from someone close to the big guy (Reg Park), who ends up unconscious aboard a ship bound for distant lands.

For all his might, Hercules spends one hell of a lot of time in this movie lying down, reclining, or otherwise in a state of repose. Whether he's listening to speeches about a mysterious threat to his homeland...

...or getting lectured by his comrade, King Androcles of Thebes (Ettore Manni)...

...or chilling out after a shipwreck...

...or hanging out with the treacherous Queen Antinea (Fay Spain)...

...or cleverly spitting out drugged wine...

...he often takes it lying down, literally.

Of course, like a male lion, he can easily rise to the occasion when necessary -- as when he drags an entire shipload of convicts back to shore after they try to strand him and Androcles on an island (once again, with echoes of Colossus and the Amazon Queen).

In fact, Androcles's expedition is astonishingly half-assed. Inflamed by a prophetic vision from the heavens -- depicted with the aid of a red filter that almost completely obliterates the onscreen visuals --

-- he goes on a voyage to confront the threat to Greece. Not only does he force Hercules to come with him, he secretly brings Hercules's son Illus (Luciano Marin), specifically against the big guy's wishes. 

But Androcles seems to have no idea who or what they're looking for, or even where they're going: as far as we can tell, he just sets sail and hopes for the best.

How serendipitous that when they inevitably shipwreck, Hercules just happens to wash up on the lost continent of Atlantis -- after receiving a vision of Androcles, begging for rescue.

On arrival, Hercules discovers a young girl (Laura Efrikian) half-embedded in rock. She's midway through the process of being sacrificed to Proteus, the shape-changing protector of Atlantis.

Naturally, Hercules can't stand for this, and defeats Proteus in lizard form by ripping off his horn (which really does look rather painful).

The young girl turns out to be Ismene, daughter of Queen Antinea, and her sacrifice is meant to forestall a prophecy of the "Birnam Wood to Dunsinane" variety. In fact, Ismene seems to spend half the film getting sacrificed in one way or another.

This also explains the inclusion of Illus, as Hercules is just too old -- and too married -- to consort with this puellam nubilem. (One of us thinks she's kinda hot, the other doesn't; we can't imagine Ms. Efrikian is too heartbroken about it either way.)

You can guess much of the rest of what happens, especially if you know about the secret glowing temple of Uranus where men are transformed into mighty warriors -- or leper-like untouchables.

And speaking of Zeus's dad, this is where we really lost our shit, because once Hercules reaches his temple, the inadvertently double-entendre one-liners just kept coming nonstop:

• "Uranus! Betrayed by his own son, Uranus was struck down." (twitch)
• "Only a few drops fell on Atlantis, making us the heirs to all the powers of Uranus." (smile)
• "Now, after much searching, Antinea has found the missing secrets of Uranus." (snicker)
• "I was the last high priest dedicated to Uranus, and I still worship here at his sacred shrine." (this is about where one of us lost it)
• "Uranus was a just god, not a god of revenge!" (struggling to hold on...)
• "The blood of Uranus can never be destroyed!" (...aaaaand, now we both lost it completely)
• "Only the rays of the sun can destroy the rock of Uranus." (trying to catch our breath, you're not helping!)

Like we said before, we're twelve.

None of this makes Hercules and the Captive Women (that title is bullshit, BTW) sound like anything more than a run-of-the-mill peplum. Yet, despite the familiar themes (and poor print), this was probably the most engaging Hercules film we've seen so far. Why? Well, it's not for nothing that Arnold Schwarzenegger holds Reg Park in such high esteem: this Hercules is perfectly suited for the role.

Add to that a plot with genuine momentum (and several subplots), a solid supporting cast, and stronger-than-average production values, and we're doing well. Maybe above all, Hercules and the Captive Women maintains a balanced tone that keeps things light and brisk, with moments of seriousness and of comic relief, but never taking itself too seriously or drifting into an unfunny schtick.

And that's not easy to do in a movie that drops a pile of Uranus jokes -- or in which the ultimate adversary is an army of albino Amish clones. (Seriously.)

Mom, I want my own production!

Mention "director William Wilder", and people will think you're referencing the man behind Some Like It Hot, etc., while being weirdly formal about it for some reason. Right?

But no, Billy's real name was...Samuel! Meanwhile, his elder brother was also a director, whose first name was indeed William -- but he went by W. Lee Wilder.

To recap, then: Samuel is Billy, whereas William is W. Lee. And there's no Bimmy, but Mark Dacascos is lurking around here somewhere (holding up a sign saying "Will 'BE-E-E-ER!' for food").

So, it's a case like that of George Waters and Roger Barrett, wherein two closely related artists swap names for some reason (to annoy their biographers, probably).

That said, Roger and Syd have roughly equal claims to fame, while -- as we'll see in this next pair of films from spa-a-a-ace -- one of the Wilder brothers was the dramatically more accomplished of the two. Still, the "other brother" had his charms!

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Killers from Space (1954)

Grade: D

It became a dire cliché within a few years, but it's forgivable for a 1954 film to begin with stock footage of a nuclear test. Certainly it was timely, and how else to depict such a thing without CGI (or water tanks and upside-down cameras)?

Still, having your main title come out of the mushroom cloud is probably gilding the lily:

So we have Dr. Doug Martin (Peter Graves), a scientist aboard the unfortunately-named Tarbaby Two, whose job it is to take aerial radiation measurements near the test site. Things are going fine when suddenly, his plane loses control and plummets straight into the ground.

There's no way Dr. Martin could live through a crash like that. When his wife asks if there's any hope, Col. Banks (James Seay) has to tell Mrs. Martin (Barbara Bestar) -- and her unfortunate nose (also Barbara Bestar) -- that there isn't.

But his body is nowhere to be found in the wreckage: what gives? And wait, who's that stumbling up to the guard house?

Yes, it's the man who survives the unsurvivable, revives from the unrevivable, but (to paraphrase one of the greats) "comes back different". A bunch of movies in this box set have already used this trope -- Night of the Blood Beast and The Man with Two Lives come to mind -- but the approach in Killers from Space is a bit more Manchurian Candidate meets Freejack, if you catch our drift.

Either way, as his friend and doctor Major Clift (Shepard Menken) notes, "Your plane was completely demolished, the pilot burned to death -- and you show up, the picture of health!" In fact, the only outward evidence that anything at all has happened to Dr. Martin is a brand-new, yet well-healed surgical scar on his chest. 

One nice thing about Killers from Space is that the other characters aren't idiots. They haven't even seen The Twilight Zone, yet only 10 minutes into the film, they're already asking questions like "Did you ever stop to think that perhaps...this Dr. Martin isn't really the Dr. Martin?"

How many times have we seen movies -- or episodes of Star Trek -- where we tore our hair out at characters' contrived obliviousness to such things? Not so with Killers from Space.

Still, Doc Martin seems like himself, knows all the right things to say, and is one of the two key men on this nuclear test project. Couldn't we just reinstate him? What do you think, mysterious googly eyes that just materialized on Venetian blinds for some reason?

The best part of Killers from Space happens over the next 20 minutes or so, as Dr. Martin's behavior becomes more and more erratic, starting with night terrors...

...and ending in acts that could easily be prosecuted as treason, or at least espionage.

In another film, or a half-hour Twilight Zone episode, Dr. Martin's spiral of self-destruction would take up most of the running time. But we're not even halfway through Killers from Space when Dr. Martin is cornered, captured, given sodium amytal, and asked to recount the events before and after his plane crash.

Now, if you call your movie Killers from Space and don't want to get hunted down by angry filmgoers, sooner or later you're obligated to fulfill the equation. You could throw in meteors, alien microbes, UFOs, whatever you like, even total and obvious nonsense. But it has to be "from spa-a-a-ace".

So, what do F. Lee Wilder and his scriptwriter son Myles have in store for us? Check it:

It's the Marty Feldman family reunion...in spa-a-a-ace!

Well, no, it's actually underground, and (if you haven't guessed it already) this is where things get very silly. At first it's the good kind of silly, because you get things like the above, or this:

Or this:

And heck, if all this amounted to Googly Eyes: The Movie!, then fair enough. By this point the film's already put googlies on a car accident, so doubling down on the proposition would seem reasonable.

But instead, Killers from Space decides to throw its lot in with another, less noble trope of 1950s science-fiction movies...

...the "let's use close-up footage of a common animal or insect, and pretend it's a giant beast" one.

We've seen this sort of thing before, of course (sad little mushrooms that we are), but Killers from Space provides the most interminable example we've ever seen. It's hard to believe the core sequence only lasts about 5 minutes -- because those were some long, long minutes.

In many ways the second half of Killers from Space bears an odd resemblance to Teenagers from Outer Space. Just as in Tom Graeff's film, we've got hospitals, giant arthropods, and power stations as keystones in our plot.

But without charismatic leads or a sweet sensibility, there's nothing to sustain Killers from Space once its plot deflates. It's far from the worst, but just doesn't pay off on what could have been an intriguing premise.

By the way, anyone notice that W. Lee Wilder (or his cinematographer) really has a thing for Venetian blinds? They're literally in the last shot of the film, which makes for a nice symmetry with its beginning.

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Phantom from Space (1953)

Grade: C-

OK, we complained about the "giant" footage in Killers. But Phantom from Space begins with 20 of the most unpromising minutes we've ever encountered in a film, at least since our Umbrellahead journey began.

Once again, we start out with stock footage and voice-over narration -- the perennial sign of a director whose acquaintance with "show, don't tell" is limited to strip joints -- and then throw in some compasses pirouetting around maps, for kicks.

The MacGuffin, such as it is: an unidentified UFO has streaked across the Pacific Northwest, and is now interfering with radio and TV reception. Send out the mobile units with their detector dishes!

Show their parked cars at bizarre angles for absolutely no discernible reason!

One of the mobile units is flagged down by a distraught woman, Betty Evans, whose aging husband and (ahem) "friend" were just attacked by a mysterious, helmet-wearing man.

Mr. Evans dies, but the friend, Pete, pulls through with merely a bump on the head...and investigators suspect that sketchy extracurriculars are going on between him and Mrs. Evans.

And maybe they are! To the film's credit, it never does rule that one out -- and, if they hadn't been already, there's pretty much no chance they don't start banging after this.

The cops go after Pete aggressively, especially once he claims the occupant of the helmet appeared to have no head. Handed a fish story like that, they feel comfortable writing the whole affair off as "one of those things...pretty girl, older husband, young boarder."

But then new bodies turn up, and new testimonials confirm Pete and Betty's story. Hmmm, could all this have anything to do with the UFO? And what are "Ten-Ring Tips", anyway?

(Answer: it's a Smith & Wesson poster, apparently very collectible nowadays.)

What's the logical next step? Bring in the military and the scientists, so they can speculate at each other in claustrophobic rooms with (once again) lots of Venetian blinds, and offer up lines like "This guy's walking around in a monkey suit...killing people."

All this had us groaning in dismay, and bracing ourselves for yet another mind-numbing cheapo with tons of talky exposition and very little action -- you know, like The Snow Creature (also a W. Lee Wilder joint).

But then something happened that was totally unexpected: Phantom from Space became...engaging. Not good, exactly, but taut enough to hold our interest and keep us from guessing exactly where the narrative was going next.

And the dialogue had a few crisp moments, like the moment when scientist Dr. Wyatt (Rudolph Anders) introduces sexy scientist Barbara Randall (Noreen Nash) to Lt. Bowers (Harry Landers). Noting Bowers's Tex Avery-like response, Dr. Wyatt adds a quick and pointed addendum:

"I don't believe you have met my assistant, Barbara Randall...(pause)...it's Mrs. Randall, Lieutenant!"

And that's the end of that: no subplot, no sexual tension, no convenient killing of Mr. Randall by the monster. Who knows if Bowers had a chance if things were different, but they're not, and that's kind of refreshing.

On the other hand, Major Andrews (James Seay again!) certainly doesn't have a chance if -- as IMDb's "Goofs" page suspects -- he unleashed a silent tide of flatulence on-camera. That would explain why, in the middle of an innocuous scene, Noreen Nash suddenly shoots him a series of very dirty looks. James Seay, disappointer of women and their noses.

Unfortunately most of Phantom's intriguing threads turn out to be little more than shaggy-dog stories...

...like the rhythmic, coded tapping of a pair of scissors, which had us guessing: is it the atomic number of an element? A known mathematical series? A mangled version of the intro to "YYZ" by Rush?

Alas, the film never bothers to tell us -- which adds an element of realism, we suppose, but also makes for a less satisfying story.

Still, at least we get some more weird-ass camera angles.