jjnxn-1 Taken within the confines of the genre this is a humorous silly adventure. What sets it apart slightly from the usual run of the mill toga films is an odd jazz flavored score and the presence of Rod Taylor at the beginning of his career. Within a few years he's be working for Hitchcock starring in The Birds as well as appearing in other big budget films like The V.I.P.S. and The Time Machine something that no one else in the cast or any other of these sex and sandal flicks ever got remotely close too. Taylor was always a big beefy guy but he is positively dwarfed by Ed Fury, who physique is as usual in awe inspiring shape. Loaded with homo-erotic subtext and dreadful dialog watch this for its camp value and a star on the rise.

fwmurnau Many of the Italian peplum (sword & sandal) movies from the period 1959- 1965 are unintentionally funny, but this one is made as a spoof. It's not great but it's different enough to make it pretty entertaining.Unlike most pepla, this one focuses more on cheescake than beefcake. Colossus, the Hercules character, is played by a slim Ed Fury who looks like he hasn't been to the gym in a while. He's no more built than the other men in the film, and his role is surprisingly small.Most of the story concerns his comrade, a wily mercenary played by a very hammy Rod Taylor (the leading man of Hitchcock's THE BIRDS) who enjoys being captured by a tribe of gorgeous Amazons.The Amazons turn their captives into male housewives, cooking, sewing, and doing housework for the women. There is much role-reversal comedy where the men act and speak like put-upon wives -- some of this is actually funny. There are a number of bizarre touches like a talking parrot, never explained, that sometimes comments on the action, and an insane musical score made up of 1960s lounge-type jazz and hackneyed "funny movie" music of the kind used in bad TV sitcoms during the sixties.This movie has mercifully little of the elements that make so many pepla boring: (a) endless battle scenes of soldiers, horses, and plebeians rushing back and forth, where you don't know or care who's fighting who, and (b) long dialog scenes about court intrigue that are as convoluted as they are irrelevant.Peplum fans should definitely check this out for its peculiar differences from the run-of-the-mill muscle man flicks. It should also appeal to those who feel there's too much male flesh on display in most pepla and not enough female. This movie is all about hot Amazon babes in revealing outfits, led by their gorgeous, sultry queen (who resembles a young Joan Collins). Absurd scenes like a girl fight sequence are included just to up the cheesecake factor.Not great, but for the most part good fun.

classicsoncall It would be hard to imagine this film as anything more than a parody of the Hercules/gladiator genre, but it fails miserably even at that. I can't believe that the film makers had anything remotely sensible in mind when they patched this thing together, or if they even had an overall working outline of what they were trying to do. The result is a poorly executed picture that meanders between action and comedy, but the outcome is simply embarrassing.At least if you have to watch this to complete the fifty movie DVD set from Mill Creek/Tree Line Films, the lead characters are pleasing on the eyes. Ed Fury is the main muscle man named Glauco, who has an eye for Antiope, the would be queen who wants to replace La Regina (Gianna Maria Canale). Glauco's sidekick Pirro (Rod Taylor) is busy chasing down Melitta (Daniella Rocca), as the two women engage in a contest for the 'sacred girdle'. A band of pirates and a wrestling bear also make appearances for reasons that seem entirely irrelevant.The other point has to do with the musical score, it really had no connection to the events happening on screen; most of the time it had a 'Gilligan's Island' feel to it. The thought just occurred to me that watching the picture in reverse probably would make just as much sense as watching it normally. However I use the term figuratively, there's no way to watch this film normally.

Steve Nyland (Squonkamatic) This movie is cool! It's kind of dumb but it is really cool. Like, there are these dudes, and they are like, Gladiators & stuff?? And they go on a boat somewhere, I don't know where, and it like, crashes & stuff. The guys all find themselves stranded on this island, you know, and it's like BABE CITY!! There are only hot Italian B-actresses on the whole island, and they all dress like the sluts in CALIGULA only nobody gets cut in half or has Macolm McDowall put his ring where the sun don't shine on them. I like all female society movies, especially when they are populated by creamy, olive skinned, sharp nosed and firm bosomed Italian actresses who's voices are dubbed into English. So I consider myself lucky: I hope someday you get to find a movie that looks like it was pretty much made with you in mind.So like, these Gladiator dudes are kind of funny. They have all these heroic missions and are all like, former soldiers or something who treat each other like they are closer than brothers. And they all dress like Freddy Mercury from that Queen tour after NEWS OF THE WORLD, which was such a cool album. But what I mean is that, like, they all run around in tights and leather tunics, have big spears and big muscles and always look sweaty or oiled, yet not one of them is gay. Not even by a long shot. The movie is even kind of a silly comedy at times with wacky noise effects and a talking parrot, but there isn't any of the stuff that Oliver Stone found so necessary. And everywhere you look, BABES!!And what babes they are. Jessica Simpson and Scarlett Johanssen and Natalie Portman are like, twits from the underclass study hall compared to the graceful, full figured 1960 era knockouts populating this very sexist and male oriented entertainment. The women throw themselves at these guys, sometimes quite literally, and since there are only about eight of them and a whole island full of these women I would expect that we'd see a working example of that male to female ratio thing that Peter Sellers talked about in DR. STRANGELOVE about needing women with exceedingly attractive characteristics, which sort of makes sense if you hope to re-populate the world with the President and maybe the guys who run Haliburton. Maybe this is where they got their inspiration for Strangelove's speech. Because with an estimated female to male ratio of about 35 to 1 -- and all of them hot -- these Gladiators had better not be gay, or else there are going to be a lot of unhappy faces in the morning.Look for this movie on a 50 Movie/12 DVD box set from Treeline Films called SCI FI CLASSICS: It's a mucky fullframe English print that looks like someone used it to hang their laundry on before the video transfer was done, but it beats the hell out of anything that's been released this year in the theaters so far, and there are what, 48 more to go??7/10