1960, Italy. Starring Ed Fury, Rod Taylor, Gianna Maria Canale, Dorian Gray, Alberto Farnese, Ignazio Leone, Adriana Facchetti, Alfredo Varelli, Gino Buzzanca, Marco Tulli, Renato Tagliani, Daniela Rocca, Paola Falchi, Carla Dody, Nadia Bianchi. Directed by Vittorio Sala.

People unfamiliar with genre films have this weird idea that the movies all carry themselves with an air of complete seriousness, that a particular type of film can't possibly be aware of its own clichés and pitfalls until some smarmy mainstream director steps in and makes a spoof. The fact of the matter is that genre films are far more aware of their own short-comings and trappings than most mainstream films (do Meg Ryan or Julia Roberts ever spoof how trite and predictable their own movies are). Genre films - science fiction, horror, sexploitation, action, and so forth - have been self-referential and satirizing themselves since the early days.

The Italian sword and sandal films that were so popular during the first half of the 1960s were no exception. They were pretty light-hearted fare to begin with, despite what some less astute critics might think. No one making a Maciste adventure thought they were recreating Ben Hur. Well, most of them didn't anyway, even if the hyperbole storming across the screen during the trailer claimed it was the biggest epic since God, his son Jesus, and a few friends collaborated on a book. They knew they were making a shallow, somewhat ham-fisted but good-natured and rousing action film that appealed to a matinee audience who didn't demand too much beyond what the films offered. Not everything can be a heavy, soul-searching work of art. Sometimes, you have to take a break from genius and watch a guy in a loin cloth throw a rock at a rubber monster.

Since peplum films were a blend of all sorts of ingredients, including comedy, doing a satire of the genre seems somewhat redundant. What's the point of spoofing something that isn't meant to be all that serious to begin with? Well, redundancy never stopped anyone - especially in film - from doing it anyway. While the peplum comedies are not as plentiful as, say, the peplum horror or peplum sci-fi films, there's still a couple out there that tried to up the yuks while delivering a solid action outing. Maciste against Hercules in the Veil of Woe gave it a try in 1961 with good-natured sport Kirk Morris and a plot about pro wrestling promoters who travel back in time. Unfortunately, the movie stars two of the foulest creatures in the history of cinema, the comic duo (and I use the word "comic" as in "painfully and profoundly unfunny") of Franco and Ciccio. For me, watching one of their movies is akin to inviting Roberto Benigni around to do three hours of improv while he boils your scrotum in a tub of sulfuric acid.

More palatable for the distinct lack of Franco and Ciccio is the peplum spoof Colossus and the Amazon Queen. Instead of a comedy team whose shtick is about as funny as your average Hee-Haw hillbilly comedy act, you get a load of gorgeous women and, for the ladies themselves, Rod Taylor and peplum pretty boy Ed Fury. Like most peplum stars, he was a body builder, but he took beefcake to hear cheesecake levels with lots of saucy "naked haunches" type photos with him being caught up in fishing nets and other goofy scenarios. I always wondered what must have been going on for a naked bodybuilder to get tangled up in someone's fishing net, but then I quickly realize such quandaries are best not dwelled upon for too long, at least in a public forum.

Plus, it only gets more disturbing when Fury shows up in this movie all tangled up in rope. Still fully clothed (well, as fully clothed as anyone can be in one of those little tunics), but still the nightmare surfaces.

Fury brought the same sense of goofiness to a lot of his sword and sandal roles, which include such films as Ursus (1961), Ursus in the Land of Fire (1963), Samson Against the Sheik (1962), Ursus in the Valley of the Lions (1961), and The Mighty Ursus (1961). Obviously, the guy was really into Ursus. But what young man doesn't go through an Ursus phase? It was Fury's somewhat silly approach to the muscleman character that makes some people love him while other can't stand him. Personally, I figure I like some his movies, and I don't like others, so I have no strong feelings toward Ed Fury other than thinking he picked himself a name that is every bit as cool as Alan Steele or Slab Hunkchest.

Born Edmund Holovchik in June of 1928, Fury gave himself the tough sounding name and went on to a successful career as a fitness model during the 1950s. His acting career started on the stage, and he later moved into small roles in films like Athena (alongside Steve Reeves), Abbot and Costello Go To Mars, and Wild Women of Wongo. So, you know, serious stuff. In 1960, he packed his bags and set sail for Italy, where he made his sword and sandal debut in the wild peplum comedy Colossus and the Amazon Queen. It was the first of the peplum comedies out of the gate, and it manages to balance the humor and the action fairly well, without excelling at either one. Certainly there are more exciting sword and sandal adventures out there, and funnier comedies. But it's not a bad blend, and the movie is all the funnier if you are a fan of peplum movies, or at least know enough about them to recognize the movie's attempts to exploit the genre's growing reputation for homoeroticism and rather limited roles for women. Not that it takes a brain surgeon or a trained master of film criticism to recognize homoerotic undertones in films full of naked, sweaty men wrestling with each other and doing that Spartacus "gripping the forearm" handshake.

Many people have analyzed the homoeroticism of the sword and sandal genre then patted themselves on the back for their clever insight and reading of homosexual tendencies boiling just below the surface of the film. Given that many of these films contain greased-up, stripped-down muscleman heroes bent over a table covered in spikes while being whipped mercilessly by some foppish henchman, revealing to people that there may be some homoerotic shades to the films is about as insightful as revealing that Pink Floyd's The Wall is about a guy going insane. Of course, none of the heroes were expressly homosexual. They still lusted heartily after the ladies, even if they also loved a good grappling session with the lads. One can only imagine, then, if instead of "the Masked Avenger" (as in Hercules and the Masked Avenger, a film that combines muscleman heroics with Zorro swashbuckling) Hercules had teamed up with Zorro The Gay Blade.

Since you can't really expect subtlety in the action of a peplum film, you shouldn't expect any subtlety from the comedy or the self-referential jokes. Taken for what it is within the confines of the peplum world, this is a clever film that plays off the gender clichés already emerging in the genre. The ladies of sword and sandal films almost never do anything other than get rescued, swoon, faint, engage in erotic tribal dancing, or make strange proclamations and predictions. The important stuff, like throwing rocks at monsters, plotting dastardly schemes in the throne room, and pushing over columns, is left up to the men. Well, I take that back. Women -- you know, the evil ones with black hair and black hearts -- sometimes get to take part in throne room scheming. In Colossus and the Amazon Queen it's the women who perform tasks like hunting and fighting and belching while the men all run around like a bunch of howling fops. It's also one of the only peplum films to feature a hero who shouts, "Yahoo!" in a high-pitched girlie voice.

It' a ground-breaking story, at least for a sword and sandal film, for this inversion of the sexes if not for the plot (which is pretty much the same plot used in every Amazon exploitation movie). The film decided to have some fun with things by turning everything upside down while also delivering the sexiest -- yet most feminist (as feminist as these movies could be) -- peplum adventure there had been. The city of the Amazons is a subversion of everything people expected from peplum. Effeminate men prance around and swap tips on getting the whites whiter when doing laundry. When the women return from hunting and killing, the men all giggle and run home to engage in arguments with their wives in which the wife complains that the men don't understand the value of a hard day's work while the men whine, "You think cooking and cleaning all day isn't hard work?" Eventually, some marauding pirates threaten to upset the Amazonian society, and the two sexes must unite on equal ground in order to combat this common enemy. Luckily, Ed Fury and Rod Taylor are there to help the dames know their roles. All things considered, I bet the ancient Greeks would have loved it. It's a classic farce (well, maybe not classic), and it would have given everyone a break from The Frogs or that dreary Antigone.

Like I said, that's the plot for just about nine million movies in which a society of strong women dominate a bunch of men. Almost every one of them involves a strapping hero and his men who arrive and upset the balance of things, with the women eventually admitting the equality (or superiority) of the men when they all have to team up and fight some band of brigands. It's a way to have your feminist cake and eat it too. Oh sure, you have your strong females, but they're still drop dead sexy. And sure they boss around the men, but in the end a man has to come to their rescue. That way, the men in the audience don't feel emasculated, and the women can be pleased by a well-placed wink that says the movie's "men to the rescue" finale is just part of the camp appeal. It's the same thing on a far less sleazy level as those rape-revenge movies that relish every nude shot they can get of a woman, then try to pass themselves off as a feminist movie by claiming that since the bulk of the running time involves the wronged woman getting violent revenge, they are somehow sending out a positive message.

Whatever makes them happy. Frankly, people who debate the social merits of They Call Her One-Eye and other such films are wasting a lot of time. For me, gender politics has never been an interesting subject. I don't see the world in terms of gender or sexual orientation, and whether or not someone is male or female, gay or straight, couldn't interest me less. It's the quality of the person that counts, and things like gender don't really seem to be a deciding factor in whether or not someone is an asshole. So as shallow as it may sound, film as a crusade is not nearly as interesting to me as film as art and entertainment. Similarly, I don't think anyone is honestly going to go into Colossus and the Amazon Queen with a big interest in how the film handles the reversal of classical gender roles. That's the kind of crackpot essay a sophomore year film studies student dreams up, or the way academic culture has been going these days, a doctoral candidate who has somehow conned the university into thinking that studying the role of gender in cheap 1960s Italian muscleman adventures is the film studies equivalent of discovering a cure for Parkinson's Disease or inventing the Flowbie.

Honestly, I can't believe some of the crap people get to "study" in college these days, and this coming from someone who obviously enjoys writing about these sorts of films. One university even has a course about the films of Quentin Tarantino. What the hell? I mean, regardless of your opinion of Tarantino's work, the man's only made a couple films. Jess Franco has made something like eleven thousand films, but no one studies his work in college classrooms. And let's be real -- who's worthier of study: the man who gave us Uma Thurman foaming at the mouth and convulsing with a syrynge sticking out of her sternum, or the man who gave us Lina Romay naked one more time (one too many times, actually, since they're still at it even at their rather advanced current age)? Not to pass judgment on anyone, but I think academia needs to re-evaluate its policy of letting the whim of damn near anybody become an entire field of study. I love Godzilla toys and Airstream trailers, but I didn't try to turn it into a major.

So aside from that one goofball film student who is trying to impress someone with his serious, academic reading of movies aimed at subliterate twelve-year-olds, most of us aren't looking to peplum films for any dose of intellectualism or an analysis of gender politics in the time of Plato any more than we look to Hercules Against the Moonmen for tips regarding astronomy. No, what we want to see is hot guys and gals in mini-tunics beating up ugly guys in furs. Harmless fun! And that's what we are going to get.

Part of the clue that this isn't going to be your standard peplum adventure vene if it still includes all the requisite ingredients is the fact that director Vittorio Sala wasn't among the "stable" of regular peplum directors. Not that the stable had fully formed by 1960, but most of the directors who were making peplum films made quite a few before moving on to westerns or spy films once the sword and sandal well dried up. Sala, however, only made the one peplum film, and as an outsider he probably found it easier to lampoon what he saw. Similar effects were achieved when Mario Bava was hired for Hercules in the Haunted World, but while Bava isn't known as a peplum director, he'd at least worked as a cinematographer on sword and sandal films before helming one himself. Sala never had nor ever would have again any experience with the genre, so his is a unique point of view. He also made a couple Funicello-Avalon inspired beach party movies, which helps explain the goofball festive feel surrounding most of what goes on in Colossus and the Amazon Queen. Beach party movies always have at least one bodybuilder character, anyway, so it makes sense that this movie possesses a very strong "beach party" feel.

Granted, this also somewhat negates that whole bit I started out with regarding a genre's ability to spoof itself without some outsider stepping in, but my point is still valid (in my head anyway) since beach movies don't exactly make for a respectable director. Sala was still a genre director, even if it was different genres. Unfortunately, expanding my theory to compensate for this means I have to also cut slack to Wes Craven and his rotten Scream movies. Oh well, it's a theory still in it's embryonic stages. I'll have it better defined by the time I have to present it for my graduate thesis.

Although more than a few fans of peplum films have been put off by Fury's slapstick approach to his heroic roles, within the confines of this movie it works remarkably well. He is a more human, more vulnerable sword and sandal swashbuckler. But everyone is outclassed by what may be the only case of an internationally famous and somewhat respectable actor fulfilling the role of the hero's little buddy. B-movie superstar (with some top notch A-list films to his name) Rod Taylor stars as the womanizing con-artist, Pirro. For the most part, he's quite happy to pretend he's a subservient male while he seduced young, impressionable Amazons behind the back of the ever-watchful queen. Taylor hams it up wonderfully, playing his role with all the hip-swaying subtlety of Robin Williams doing his "gay guy" routine.

Fans know Taylor best for his turns in films like The Time Machine, World Without End, and Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds. Interestingly, those last two films also feature similar themes of gender subversion - World Without End being about a futuristic post-apocalyptic society where the women are all fit and healthy while the men are all sterile old farts, and The Birds being Hitchcock's delightfully twisted absurdist answer to gender-obsessed filmmaking (notice how every time a women does something strong and independent, the birds are there to beat her down or peck out her eyeballs). I don't think Taylor is a crusader for the rights of women as much as he is a fan of roles that allow him to star alongside a cast of cuties in little togas (World Without End, Time Machine, and Colossus and the Amazon Queen all allow him to do so -- someone get me this man's agent!) Just as the presence of Christopher Lee in Hercules in the Haunted World gave that film an air of sophistication above it's contemporaries, Taylor's comical turn here makes the film seem more important that it really is. After all, he's mostly just goofing off and doing that "feminine man" walk where you swing your arms side to side in front of you a lot. I can't really describe the walk, but as I mentioned earlier, if you've ever seen any of the eleven billion times Robin Williams has invoked his gay guy character, you've seen the walk.

The requisite tribal dancing number is one that can only be described as fabulous. I'm guessing with that many dandy lads around, they must have one hell of a Broadway-esque production company going on the island of the Amazons, even if much of it's lost on their female masters, who prefer introspective folk rock about genitals. This particular dance number is possibly the weirdest, goofiest, and funniest of any peplum dance number. Golden men in loin cloths with little dangly bits up front start things off with some spriteful leaping about, after which the chicks sashay onto the floor for a saucy go-go number that culminates in all the scantily clad ladies writhing around on the floor while Rod Taylor reflects on his good fortune. If he has to be a slave, it might as well be a sex slave to women who go-go dance and writhe on the floor.

I won't even get into the guy who looks like a white Sammy Davis Jr. who, upon being chosen as a mate for a couple women, purrs "Y'all is my womens now," with a sassy Southern queen drawl.

So let's face the facts. This isn't a feminist movie, and while it's subversive within the peplum genre, no one is going to get away with an essay on how Colossus and the Amazon Queen was a major step toward advancing the rights of women. More than anything else, the flip-flopping of traditional gender roles gave the makers of the film a chance to show even more sexy women in tiny tunics while also packing in dozens of over-the-top gay man caricatures. No one walks out of Colossus and the Amazon Queen stroking their chin and going, "You know, it really made me think." If you have to come up with any one thing that truly epitomizes this movie, it wouldn't be anything about a bold challenging of genre conventions. It would, instead, be Ed Fury howling "Yahooo!" as he graces the world with a staggering buffalo shot while swinging from the rafters.

While you may be disappointed that this isn't the important arthouse exploration of sexuality you were hoping to get from a movie called Colossus and the Amazon Queen, it delivers the goods in every other way. The action is fast and furious, and Ed Fury handles himself very well in the stunt sequences. Like Gordon Scott (but less serious) or Kirk Morris, Fury is leaner than Steve Reeves or Reg Park, which means he does less strongman type stuff and more flipping and jumping about. No one is going to mistake him for Jackie Chan or Fred Berry, but he moves well and executes the action with panache.

The supporting cast is pretty good. The women are there to kick ass and look good doing it, while the men are there to screech and worry about their hair. The guys playing the pirates who bring the sexes together are there to look hairy and pasty. Things sure must have been simpler back in the days when you could tell a villain simply by seeing if he was pasty-skinned and clad in fur-trimmed duds. One of our favorite peplum/historical hellraiser actresses, the gorgeous Gianna Maria Canale from Hercules, Goliath and the Vampires, and I Vampiri which was co-directed by Mario Bava (with his peplum credit being Hercules in the Haunted World) and Riccardo Freda (whose peplum fim credits include the spectacular Samson and the Seven Miracles of the World and The Witch's Curse).

For those who find the peplum genre a little much to swallow, this may be a good action-packed way to still get a taste of the fun without watching a movie that handles itself with Spartacus-like seriousness. Everything is played for laughs, but it's not played so over-the-top that it becomes shrill and annoying. No Franco and Ciccio here. It's kind of similar in spirit to In Like Flint - it delivers all the goofs on the genre you want, but without disrespecting anything or forgetting that it still needs to be a good genre film. Fury's shtick may have ruined more serious films, but it's right at home here amid this world of dominant female warriors and the men who do their washing.

Labels: Fantasy: Peplum, Stars: Ed Fury, Stars: Gianna Maria Canale, Stars: Rod Fury, Year: 1960