1963, Italy. Starring Kirk Morris, Demeter Bitenc, Laura Brown, Frank Leroy, Alfredo Zammi. Directed by Guido Malatesta.

You just can't keep a good son of Hercules down, and you can't keep a bad actor in the role of the son of Hercules. I think more beefy men have played Maciste than I can even count, although to be honest, it gets to the point where it's pretty hard to tell them apart anyway, and they all become sort of interchangeable. About all you can do is rank them as "bearded" or "smooth as a baby's bottom." Some Maciste's are bulkier than others, but in the end, they're all pretty much one guy.

This time around, Maciste is played by Kirk Morris, who has a long string of sword and sandal credits to his name, including Maciste in Hell, Samson Against the Pirates, Hercules Samson and Ulysses, Devil of the Desert Against the Son of Hercules, and the always puzzling Conquerors of Atlantis in which Hercules leads the Arabs in a laser gun battle against people from Atlantis (you bet you're tight buns we'll be reviewing that one). As far as beefcake goes, he's about par for the course. Not too spectacular to behold, like Reg Park, Steeve Reeves, or Reg Lewis, but certainly not the worst of the bunch. He stole the frizzy hair off Carmichael from Laverne and Shirley! However, since Kirk ain't the biggest man to play Maciste, his sidekicks and supporting cast are scrawny (as usual) so as to make him look bigger. Really, all it does is make everyone else look sickly. Mayhaps if Maciste were a true hero, he would share some of his Joe Weider Ultra Bulk Up 3000 weight gain powder (French vanilla flavored).

The movie opens with scenes from the end of Fire Monster Against the Son of Hercules in which cavemen flee an erupting volcano. This led me to believe that this would be a direct sequel to that film, only with a different actor in the title role. However, no sooner do the cavemen run by than we see them boarding a giant raft, at which time they have magically transformed into Greeks in the standard issue mini-tunic. I guess this is what they mean with that "stress and emergency" model of evolution in which an evolutionary step occurs very rapidly in response to a drastic environmental change. Sort of like if you were dropped out of a plane and could suddenly evolve into a flying person, only these guys, upon leaving their home, are able to evolve into ancient Greeks by the time they hit the water. I'm trying that next time I go to the beach!

Leading the retreat is Maciste, who goes ahead and dispenses with any notion about this being a sequel by spinning a whole new pre-story for us. The civilization of these people was destroyed by the volcano, and now they must set sail for a new home. Since Maciste is a show-off, rather than just sail a few miles away to another city, he has to go all the way across the ocean to a strange new land that may or may not be South America, or possibly New Guinea. Somewhere with headhunters I guess, because eventually he's gonna have to go against them.

Upon arriving in the promised land, Maciste and some pals lead an expedition into the jungle while everyone else gets captured by some very Greek looking natives. Maciste soon learns they are not all that bad as far as jungle folk go, and in fact are the people of a noble king who Maciste has heard of. They are in a pickle because another tribe is bullying them around and trying to force a marriage between the evil leader and the good queen Amoa so they can control the whole territory, whatever territory this may be. I guess it's not really South America because there are a lot of Greeks running around, and I don't think it was a hot spot for Mediterraneans until Colossus and the Amazon Queen and Hercules Versus the Sons of the Sun. Man did these beefcake guys ever get around!

Anyway, Maciste runs into the good natives in his usual way. He's out farting around in the woods when he happens upon a beautiful woman who just happens to be the queen. Man alive this guy can't go ten minutes without randomly meeting beautiful queens and princesses out in remote jungles.

They ask Maciste to help, and although Maciste feels their pain he says he is too busy to help, as he must first help his own lot of people find a new place to live. Maybe he should try, I don't know, Athens or something instead of sailing all over the world. It's only the birthplace of modern civilization and government and all. But hey, what do I know? I'm not a son of Hercules. Well, when the good tribe hears this, they get pissed off, sort of like "Maciste helps everyone in the world, but he won't help us." I guess I'd feel a bit burned too. It's not like he's doing a lot to help his own people, just sort of leading them around at random on the high seas and in remote jungles. Perhaps they'd be better off without him.

Maciste eventually feels pangs of regret for not lending a hand when he could, so he decides to return and help out after all. Well, too late, Mr. Maciste, because the evil tribe has already attacked and slaughtered a bunch of people! I hope you're happy. This is actually a bit of the film that is fairly accurate to the greater Hercules mythos. One of Herc's defining characteristics was that he would often do stupid things and make dumb decisions, then spend a lot of time trying to redeem himself and make up for it. On the one hand, it taught us that Hercules was a bit of a lunkhead; on the other, the fact that he willingly did his penance and took his punishment when he was easily powerful enough not to do it if he didn't wanna, showed that he was genuinely interested in learning to do the right thing.

Like father, like son I suppose. When Maciste returns to find Amoa under more pressure than ever to surrender to the evil king, he decides to lead them in battle. To do this, he must first crusade with his skinny pal Arial to a giant stone fortress, where he discovers, among other things, that Amoa's father is still alive and has been a prisoner all this time. I should also mention, since they are in the title, that the evil king has struck up a bargain with some headhunters, and they serve as his foot soldiers even though it's never really clear exactly what they get out of the deal. But then again, it's not really clear why controlling this rather useless area of land is that important in the first place. I mean one tribe has about fifty people, and the second ain't much bigger. Maciste seems to have about twelve people with him. So I don't really see all the fuss in fighting to create an evil empire of about a hundred people.

Discovering the old man seems a good thing at first, like he's going to pull one of those scathing indictments out of his hat and turn everyone against the evil king, or possibly whip out some Essence Absorbing Stance a la the long-imprisoned Wicked Wu in Swordsman II and start flying all around shooting magic thunder and laughing maniacally. No such luck though. All the guy does is putter on home, see his people being picked on, and promptly he surrenders and gives his blessing to the coerced marriage of his daughter to the evil king. Thanks, pops. Luckily Maciste is locked, cocked, and ready to rock and the only thing he's going to bless is a serious ass whuppin' for the evil-doers. With the help of his own little band of people, Maciste leads the rather small-scale battle against oppression and injustice.

Despite the promising set-up of Italian beefcake ancient heroes clashing with headhunters, Colossus And the Headhunters is a much better surf guitar band name than it is sword and sandal movie. I'm pretty liberal with my assessment of these films, or maybe it's just that I'm easily amused. Whatever the case may be, even on my relatively lax scale, this movie comes in at average. It's certainly not awful, but there are a lot better sword and sandal films to watch before you come to this one. It's Kirk Morris' second best film (Conquerors of Atlantis is his best), but compared to the imagination that went into the Reg Park films, the sheer manliness of the Steeve Reeves films, and the wild monsters and beasties that were littered throughout several other sword and sandal epics, this one seems a tad flat. Like when you get some weight gain powder that smells like it's going to taste really good, but then it's just sort of like drinking clumpy, powdery water.

The problems are sundry. For starters, the main villain is about as imposing as Charles Nelson Reilly. even Sigfried and Roy get a bigger chill out of me than this guy. Everyone can tell it's going to take Maciste about five seconds to beat this guy down. Why do the headhunters even listen to this guy? I mean, it's like in those shitty 1980s horror films were "the town punks" are always led by this incredibly dorky twerp of a juvenile delinquent (usually named Ricky for some reason), like that goofball big hair guy in Zombie Nightmare. I guess those guys can only lead multi-ethnic gangs full of people named "Ratso" and "Skeever" and "Hedgehog." You know, I've run into a few gang leaders in my day, and they were always the scariest guys in the gang, not the littlest guy with the poofiest hair like it is in the movies.

Secondly, Kirk Morris, although a regular fixture in sword and sandal films, is really not my favorite actor. He lacks the imposing physique of Reg Park and Steeve Reeves, and he lacks the goofy charm of guys like Reg Lewis. He's a middle of the road hero, the Millard Fillmore of the beefcake world, being outstanding in no single department but passable in all. These days he could be President of the United States, but as a sword and sandal hero he leaves me a bit unimpressed.

What is lost as a result of these weaknesses is made up for in other areas. Director Guido Malatesta, who directed a slew of sword and sandal films during the 1960s (including the far superior Fire Monster Against the Sun of Hercules), makes up for the lack of charisma on behalf of his main players by throwing a wild script at us full of two-fisted gusto. Give the evidence from this film and Fire Monster, coherence and historical accuracy are not not his strong suits, but for all the utterly baffling scenarios the guy comes up with, he at least makes them entertaining. This is one of the bloodier entries in the Hercules/Maciste film series, though we're not talking Cannibal Ferox here. It was still the early 1960s, and Italian cinema wouldn't plumb the depths of outlandish gore for several more years. I guess it's hard to make a movie about headhunters and not have it be a little bloody. That's why you don't really see too many Disney cartoons or Lifetime original movies about headhunters.

The wild spirit behind the film lifts it a couple notches, making my final judgment on this particular Maciste excursion a positive one, but it's not one of my favorites of the genre. Still, it's worth checking out because it's not every day you get to see a son of Hercules stick it to a bunch of headhunters and their foppish leader.

Labels: Fantasy: Peplum, Stars: Kirk Morris, Year: 1963