lemon_magic First of all, am I the only one who thought that the grey chin spinach they pasted on Vadis' face made him look way too much like Abraham Lincoln? I found it extremely distracting. Vadis is a handsome guy, with a nicely sculpted physique, although he does seem preoccupied and glum in most of his scenes.( Or maybe that's the beard.) But the beard absolutely pulls the focus from where it should be - his eyes and cheekbones - and makes his mouth and jaw fade away. Bad costuming choice. Second, the plot is your standard drunkard's walk/generic peplum , where things happen just because the writers didn't really know what to do next, because it had all been done to death. The dialog follows suit, although how much is this is the fault of the dubbing is hard to say. The stunts and fight scenes are staged fairly well, and are the real reason to watch the film.(Assuming you want to watch it at all) The acting is...serviceable. No one stinks on ice or anything, or looks as if they are reading from a teleprompter or cue cards. And the blocking and stage business works as well as you might expect.I assume the actor playing the comic relief has built a career doing this kind of thing. He's not funny at all (at least not that way he's dubbed), but he's mildly likable at least. There's no way a movie like this could go without comic relief, so they might as well use this guy. Doesn't mean I have to like it, or him. In short, this is another Hercules (or Argoles) movie. If that's how you want to fill your leisure viewing, well, here ya go. For what it's worth, it's not the worst one in the genre (that would be "The Loves Of Hercules" with a wildly miscast Mickey Hargetay), but not even as good as "Hercules vs the Moon Men.".

Eric Stevenson I only saw this movie because I heard it was the worst Hercules movie ever made, or the worst movie made based on Greek mythology. Whatever the standards, this is quite bad. The biggest drawback is the special effects. I mean, that has to be the fakest looking dragon I've ever seen in my whole life. This movie fails because the buildup is so poor. Almost everything is talked about in the first ten minutes and then the plot just goes from random place to random place. There's little point in keeping up, because you're so uninvested. Many scenes just go on way too long for no reason, especially the parts with the elephants and Hercules opening the door.This film also lacks humor in every sense of the word. For all the flak I give this, I will admit that the backgrounds and sets are actually quite good. They really do come off as quite colorful. That's certainly not enough to save this. I'm used to seeing bad movies like this on MST3K, but not this time. Why didn't they ever use this on the show or even Rifftrax? Maybe they will someday. *1/2

DarthBill Hercules (Dan Vadis, who also played the role in "The Triumph of Hercules") saves a beautiful princess and, as a reward, he is offered her hand in marriage (which is great for both of them given that they're both nice people) but is also asked to help the royal family against their enemies. Next thing you know Herc is up to his neck in trouble rescuing his fiancé's entire people from an evil subterranean empire. An okay entry in the sword & sandal genre with some decent atmosphere (and some stock footage from the first Steve Reeves Hercules film), Dan Vadis is perhaps the film's greatest asset in addition to the beautiful women. Some may not like him for not being Steve Reeves or Reg Park, but the very nimble and agile lightning bruiser Vadis brings a Burt Lancaster level of energy to what would have otherwise been some fairly generic fight scenes, and he looks quite larger than life battling his way through an army of henchmen. And while he may have had to kill a lion (which looks pretty good since it really is Vadis wrestling the lion) he is nice enough to save a bear that got in his way. Weirdly enough, when the film came out in America it was re-dubbed as "Son of Hercules in the Land of Darkness" with Herc being changed to Argolese, son of the Herc. An unusual choice to say the least.

MARIO GAUCI This is easily among the lamest peplums to emerge out of Italian cinema during that subgenre's heyday: in this respect, muscular lead Dan Vadis certainly proved consistent since his efforts in this vein are all quite terrible! Anyway, this starts off with one of the most side-splitting Anglicized cast lists ever that bears repeating in full here: apart from Vadis himself, we have Ken Klark, Jannette Barton, Red Ross, Sand Beanty, Kirk Bert, Kriss Moss, Jannette Le Roy, Paul Mac Lee, Pat Kein, Angel Pat, Flow Garden, Tago Convers, Albert Cardiff and, finally, Al World for director!! – but equally hilarious are the hero's intermittent fights with a variety of incredibly fake-looking wild animals (a lion and a bear) and monsters (a dragon that looks more like a dinosaur!)…though he also survives getting torn apart by a bunch of real elephants in the arena! Worse still is the obligatory comic relief courtesy of a cowardly elderly sidekick that is truly unbearable to behold. Having watched a handful of such undemanding and virtually interchangeable fare back-to-back, I can hardly recall what the plot was all about: I do know, however, that much is made of the fact that the aforementioned dragon's smallest tooth has all-important magic powers that, needless to say, are craved by a Fu Manchu-type potentate who incongruously turns up at some point, to little effect