1963, Italy. Starring Reg Lewis, Andrea Aureli, Birgit Bergen, Fulvia Gasser, Miria Kent, Margaret Lee, Luciano Marin, Nello Pazzafini, Ivan Pengow, Rocco Spataro. Directed by Guido Malatesta.

Ahh, Hercules. Heracles to some of you. The mere name conjure up myriad different mental images. Some of us immediately picture a beefy bearded Mediterranean in a little itty bitty loin cloth. Others might think of the luscious flowing locks of TV's Kevin Sorbo doing kungfu on Aries, the God of War. And still others reach further back into the dusty annals of history and picture a bulked-up unnaturally red-faced man in bikini briefs manhandling Hulk Hogan in the mighty WWF empire of the 1980s.

Yes, Herc is indeed many things to many people, but all of them are strong and have a tendency toward hurling boulders every opportunity they get. Hercules. Just as the name spawns sundry mental images, so too did it spawn many films. So many films in fact, that even Herc himself couldn't be in all of them. Thus, the sons of Hercules launched their film careers with varying degrees of success, roaming the globe in search of adventures to be had, wrongs to righted, women to be wooed, monsters to be wrestled, and of course, boulders to be hurled.

The most successful of these many sons of Hercules, most of whom were probably sons only in that they were spawned by the popularity of Hercules films rather than by his loins in the many ancient Hercules stories of old, was a dapper lad named Maciste. During the glut of Italian muscleman sword and sandals films during the 1960s, Maciste films were second in popularity only to the films of ol' Herc himself, and sometimes it's hard to even tell them apart since Maciste films were often released as Hercules films in America, and Maciste often had his name changed in the dubbing to Hercules, Atlas, Colossus, and one time even Fred. But to be fair, there are probably just as many other guys who had their names changed to Maciste in order to cash in on that big Maciste fad of the 1960s. What? You don't remember the Maciste fad? Oh, you should have been there; it was positively cuckoo. We were all wearing gold loin cloths and hurling boulders. You kids really missed out.

Seriously, this whole Hercules, Maciste, Ulysses, Atlas, Colossus, Fred thing reminds of the Bruce Lee, Bruce Li, Bruce Le debacle that plagued kungfu films throughout the 1970s. But you don't see anyone talking about Hercusploitation. If I recall correctly, someone even had the bright idea of throwing Ulysses, Maciste, and Samson (how the hell did he sneak in there) all into the same movie, sort of like when Universal was hitting the end of their big horror boom and would throw Wolfman, Dracula, and the Mummy all into the same movie.

Reg Lewis, not to be confused with Reg Park who played Hercules in several similar films, stars as Maciste. Reg looks sort of like a beefcake version of Rick Moranis, if you can imagine such a thing. His goofiness makes him likeable, though, and somewhat charismatic, which was actually a rare trait in the Italian sword and sandal films of the era, all of which were bubbling over with brawny heroes who were utterly interchangeable and largely forgettable as performers. Reg Lewis looks like a guy who you would pick on in a bar if you were drunk and feeling boisterous. He'd try to calm you down, try to ignore you, do the ol' "Now, just take it easy, buddy" speech, and finally, he'd simply have to pound you a good one to shut you up. Afterward, he'd probably help you up, dust you off, and buy you a beer.

What makes Reg the coolest of all the Macisteseses is his boss rockabilly ducktail pompadour haircut. He looks as ready to kick your ass with a stand-up bass as he is ready to throw boulders at you. If I was evil, I could make a joke about how he really "rocks." And you know what? I am evil!

The movie actually begins with a tribe of cavemen marching across a field. Despite the fact that the weather seems pretty warm, they are all wearing the requisite furs and big boots. The leader of the cavemen is a rather scrawny guy by caveman standards, but this is a tradition in sword and sandal films. The good guys are always lead by a brave but skinny guy who can't get a damn thing accomplished without the help of Maciste or Hercules, or whatever beefcake Greek hero is helping them. It sort of makes you wonder how these guys got to be leader in the first place, let alone how they managed to bag the sexiest princess in the realm as their wife. I mean, if I use sword and sandal films as my model for reality, and Zeus knows I do, then I had a pretty good chance myself of leading a tribe and wooing a princess. I guess what I'm really missing is a glistening muscular hero as a best friend.

Anyway, Skinny the Troglodyte and his well-groomed cavewoman (damn, I want to start a band called "Skinny the Troglodyte and His Well-Groomed Cavewomen") fiancee are down at the lake for a romantic interlude when, wouldn't you know it, a googly-eyed sea serpent menaces them. Or rather, I guess it's a lake monster. Man alive, don't we all know what this like? I mean, I can't count the number of times I've been down at the lake romancing my cavewoman princess only to have the mood broken by a goddamned sea serpent (and sometimes by a policeman). It's something we've all experienced at some point in our lives.

The caveman sort of stumbles around, brandishing his quaint stone ax and failing to hit a giant sea monster mere feet away from him with his spear. Once again, if this guy can lead a tribe, then I'm a shoo-in. Luckily, must as things seem to be at their worst, up runs the bronze dreamboat Maciste, who promptly hurls a spear into the monster's eye and speaks in a noble, booming voice befitting all beefcake heroes.

I guess now is as good a time as any to address a particular problem with this film. Greek culture is ancient, not quite as ancient as Chinese culture, but it gets pretty far back there. The famous Oracle of Delphi, which plays a prominent role in just about every Greek myth ever, was established way back around 1200 BC, which means sometime between 1200 BC and the rise of the Macedonians under King Phillip II and his son, Alexander the Great, round about 320 BC, Hercules and his many sons did their deeds.

Now, 1200 BC is a long time ago, older even than Strom Thurmond, but even back then certain things had already happened. For instance, the Sumerians and Mesopotamians pretty much got all that reading, writing, and building stuff down. The Chinese were kicking out advanced astronomy, navigation, and other cool stuff. By the time Maciste must have been around, both the East and West had advanced systems of government, architecture, art, literature, music, what have you. Over in the new world, the Aztecs and Incas and Mayans were building big-ass step pyramids and having themselves some of the largest cities of the ancient world. Egyptians were in on the fun as well. Civilization, for the most part, was in high gear. Even the barbarians and nomads were pretty advanced.

And here we have this skinny dude who can't even beat a goofy sea serpent leading his caveman tribe that still thinks fire is magical and doesn't know how to make it. They still use Palaeolithic stone tools and do cave painting. I tell you something, if everyone else is building Parthenons and pyramids and shit, and these guys haven't even figured out fire, I think they need more help than Maciste can provide them. I mean, come on! When did the Bronze Age start? 2000 BC? Get with the times, man! I'm no historian, so maybe there were indeed bunches of no-fire-having caveman tribes around this time, in which case I stand corrected. But still, I don't have any sympathy for a big group of people who managed to miss out on all the advances from the time of the cavemen to the time of the Greek empire.

Of course, you could shake your head in shame that I would complain about historical accuracy in the context of a movie where the son of a Greek demigod fights hydras and sea serpents. You'd be right to do so.

So anyway, Maciste gets rid of the monster but refuses to come down off the craggy cliff where he stand majestically with arms akimbo, sun shining off his muscular build as chiseled as the very rock itself 'pon which he stands. Instead, he throws out some "free as a bird" type line, and I found myself suddenly imaging a sequence in which the loin-cloth wearing Maciste runs over hill and dale of the ancient world while "Freebird" by Lynard Skynard plays. It was disturbingly moving.

To be perfectly honest, I'm a huge fan of the ramblin' loner type of hero, the man who walks the earth with his sandled feet, helping people out along the way, but always walking off into the sunset by himself at the end. There's something melancholy and heroic about that archetype. Whether it's Maciste, Herc himself, Conan, Mad Max, or even Bill Bixby in the Incredible Hulk tv show, one of the closest approximations of a sword and sandal film the modern world ever saw. Every episode, our hero would wander alone into a new town. Sometimes, he'd meet friends, people who accepted him, and always he would encounter injustice, at which time he would have to call upon the green barbarian inside himself to battle the evil. And in the end, because he could just barely keep the beast inside in check, but primarily because it was his fate to walk the earth, he would have to hit the road again, alone, while the sad piano music played. The hero used and discarded. That got me every time. Now imagine Maciste doing that, only with "Freebird." Yeah, you feel the tears swelling up, don't you? I know I do.

No sooner does Maciste bound off into the sunset to seek adventure in the far corners of the globe than the good caveman tribe is attacked by the bad caveman tribe. The bad cavemen kick ass on the good cavemen and steal a lot of their women. What? You expected something different? I mean, come on. The leader of the good cavemen can't even figure fire out. You think he's going to be able to organize a fighting force?

The good cavemen gather around to whine and moan about how they are being picked on by the bad cavemen. There's actually quite a bit of sociology at play in this, though I am the first to admit very few people turn to Son of Hercules movies for their final college thesis. But remember that, however outlandish these movies may be, there is some kernel of historical truth to them. They are, after all, based at least in some part on ancient Greek and Roman stories, and just about everyone knows the Greek playwrights of yore packed tons of politics into their stories. Aside from being the sexiest empire in the history of the world (an historical fact proven by the many short little tunics and togas worn by men and women alike), the Greeks were also among the most politically aware. So it's not surprising that, even if it's unintentional, some degree of political meaning would slip into these sword and sandal epics.

The basic gripe between the tribes is that the nomadic good guys have decided to plant their roots in this valley that the bad cavemen consider part of their turf. After all, they were there first. However, the bad guys live in caves and consider agriculture to be wimp stuff. so the good guys don't see how their living off the land harms the bad guys, who don't even use the land but want to horde it and claim it anyway. Take what you will from that.

Maciste, realizing that these chumps aren't going to survive on their own, comes back to lend a hand. As an afterthought, he gives them the "goofy buncha cavemen" grin and teaches them how to make fire with a couple rocks. The bad gang, meanwhile, acts like a bunch of bikers in a bikersploitation movie. They holler a lot, listen to loud music, and do a lot of that stuff where the hairy main guys are all sitting around with various women lying in their laps or go-go dancing around the hang-out. With the big furs and general behavior, I swear for a minute I thought I was watching the requisite "partyin' scene" from any of two dozen 1960s/1970s biker films. I guess you could trace movie biker evolution back to these cavemen with their elderberry wine, furry vests, and gyrating women. In fact, when you combine the biker-esque appearance of the evil tribe with Maciste's rockabilly haircut, you half expect Maciste to challenge the evil caveman leader to a drag race at sunrise or a game of chicken in suped-up hotrods.

The fabled son of Hercules helps plan an attack on the main caves of the bad tribe, which will help the good guys get back their women and hopefully stop the bad guys from picking on them. Of course, they wouldn't call this movie Fire Monster Against the Son of Hercules if there wasn't a fire monster. So Maciste has to fight not just the surly cavemen, but also a hydra and a couple other monsters. Of course, he is a Hercules at heart, so whenever a monster pops up to menace him (and not to insult Maciste, but he sure is easy to sneak up on if a giant monster can do it, sort of like when Christopher Walken snuck up behind Tanya Roberts in a full-size blimp in the end of A View to a Kill), his initial reaction is to throw a boulder at it. This rarely kills the monster, or even slows it down, but hey, any chance a Hercules gets to throw a boulder can't be passed up.

Maciste also gets to woo the princess of the evil tribe, since she herself isn't evil. And he gets captured, because well, you know. No one ever accused any of these guys of being rocket scientists, although they at least know how to make fire. The bury Maciste up to his neck and throw spears at him, but he's Maciste, so you know he's gonna escape and kick some serious tail.

The finale has the good cavemen and the bad cavemen going at in an all-out war, when all of a sudden a volcano erupts. The hell? What kind of stupid tribe builds their home in a volcano? I mean, near a volcano sure, but inside it? So I guess the volcano is the real fire monster, devouring all those who have committed evil deeds as Maciste and the good cavemen make their escape back into the valley. The scenes of the erupting volcano destroying the evil caveman tribe would be recycled for the beginning of Colossus and the Headhunters, which is especially amusing in the context of that film since the people shown fleeing the volcano are cavemen from this film, but then when the new footage kicks in, they are all wearing traditional ancient Greek tunics and have much shorter hair. But, just as they say at the end of each Conan film, that is another story.

So we are left with the good tribe establishing the roots of civilization some couple thousands of years after everyone else. Hell, not everyone can be the Chinese or the Sumerians. Maciste is, of course, offered a position of power among the tribespeople, but his fate is to walk the earth in search of more battles to be fought and more people to help. He is, like Willie Nelson, like the Hulk, a ramblin' man. So off he goes to write more pages in the book of incredibly inaccurate history.

It's easy to sit back and laugh at sword and sandal films, and certainly some of them deserve such treatment, but they should also be admired for their scope and ambition. They are wild and full of action. Fire Monster Against the Son of Hercules is, above all else, a fun film. Reg Lewis is a likeable hero, and his daring-do and physical prowess is fun to watch. It gives us pretty much everything we could want from a movie about the son of a Greek hero helping out some stupid cavemen who haven't mastered metals, fire, or writing but do have advanced female grooming techniques. It has feats of strength, boulder throwing, a couple silly but imaginative monsters, tribal dancing, torture, violence, action, and men and women in loin cloths. Whether gay/lesbian, straight, bi, or undecided, this sword and sandal extravaganza has something to offer everyone!

If you are the type of person who is interested in expanding your knowledge of these films out beyond the more popular Hercules films of Steve Reeves and Reg Park, then this is a very fun, if not completely silly, place to start. It's too bad Reg Lewis really didn't have much of a career beyond this film. As far as musclemen go, he's one of my favorites. But so far, all I can find to his credit is this movie and some 1967 beach movie called Don't Make Waves starring Sharon Tate and Tony Curtis, in which he probably plays some bodybuilder who kicks sand in the hero's face. He also has a part in the abysmal movie Sextette, which among other things, cast an 80-year-old Mae West in a sexy role. Lewis plays "athlete," one of the many athletes during a scene set in a gym. Too bad they didn't allow him to simply hurl some boulders at the rest of the cast.

Ah well, much like the archetypal wandering hero, this film used Reg Lewis then cast him back into the wasteland. But at least you can catch him here in all his rock throwing, monster fighting glory. About the only thing he doesn't get to do is push over some columns, mainly because the damn cavemen can't even make fire. You think they know a damn thing about Ionic, Doric, and Corinthian columns? But regardless of their lack of architectural know-how, they all combine for one of the most entertaining, ludicrous, action-packed sword and sandal films around. Surprisingly, they would manage to get even sillier in films like Conquerors of Atlantis, in which Hercules helps the Arabs battle the space ray guns of Atlantian invaders.

But what did Conan teach us? That's right...

"But that is another story..."

(Cue barbarian music, or possibly "Freebird")

Labels: Fantasy: Peplum, Year: 1963