HERCULES UNCHAINED (Ercole e la Regina di Lidia)

1959/Director: Pietro Francisci/Writer: Ennio De Concini/Cinematography & Special Effects: Mario Bava

Cast: Steve Reeves, Sylva Koscina, Sylvia Lopez, Gabriele Antonini, Primo Carnera

Also Known As:
Hercule et la reine de Lydie
Hercules Unchained
Hércules e a Raínha
Hércules encadenado
Hércules y la reina de Lidia
Heracles y la reina de Lidea
Hercules and the Queen of Lydia
Hercules and the Queen of Sheba
Herkules ja Lyydian kuningatar
Herkules und die Königin der Amazonen
O iraklis kai i vasilissa tis Lydias

Boy, I’ve been waiting to start this new sword and sandal category for a long time. Also called peplum or pepla as a term that covers the entire category, the Sword and Sandal genre is one of the most ridiculed and maligned in the whole film division of cult cinema. The overly harsh criticisms range from everything like worst movies of all time, inept and amateurish to just downright being ‘homoerotic’. It is as if a film being homoerotic means it will be a bad film. I have seen plenty of great homoerotic films but maybe we can go into that another day. Well, who knows, maybe all these criticisms are true to some degree or another but I have found these films to be some of the most entertaining low budget B-films, long with old serial westerns, I have ever sat down to watch and I have seen quite few. Lately I have been able to locate scores of these online and have around a dozen or so queued up for viewing. I actually began watching these as a wee lad in the late 60’s on Saturday afternoons, at about the time the movement was losing its steam to new genres like Spaghetti Westerns and spy films. They were shown on a afternoon show that was called The Mighty Sons of Hercules and I can still hear the macho theme music in my head as I type this. We had a crappy b/w TV with ‘rabbit ears’ back then and I never saw any of these films until only recently in color.

MORE OF MARIO BAVA AND HERCULES HERE >>

JENIFER

2005/Director: Dario Argento/Screenplay: Steven Weber, Story by Bruce Jones

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Cast: Steven Weber, Carrie Anne Fleming, Brenda James, Harris Allan, Beau Starr, Laurie Brunetti, Kevin Crofton, Julia Arkos, Jasmine Chan

Some people simply worship Dario Argento. For years and years I just figured I was missing something or that I was not enough of a true film fanatic to see the brilliance in his work that his rabid sycophants did. Now I remember my reactions to films like Tenebre ( by the way, the second picture from the left in my banner is a scene from Tenebre I touched up in Photoshop) and Phenomenon and even his “magnum opus” Suspiria and do not feel I was so out of touch by feeling confused and bewildered. They were not really great movies at all in my opinion. Maybe not terrible movies, but Tenebre was so… so… terrible that I do not see what the big deal has always been about that movie. Okay there was a great axe murder scene with a spurting stump, but the rest of the film was so weird and Italian. (more…)

Mario Bava was born one day after the beginning of WWI in San Remo Italy in 1914. His father was Eugenio Bava and it was at the side of his father that Bava would learn the tricks of his trade in the world of set design and cinematography. Eugenio was a master film technician during the period of Italian silent cinema and a creator of film special effects. Mario would work for several years as his father’s assistant and apprentice. Like his highly creative father Mario was an artist who painted and sculpted and developed a fine sense of design that made him one of the great arrangers of the “mise en scene”, or what can be explained as the total scene one views in a film, as it is shot and framed by the camera. This includes the arrangement and placement of not only the actors but of all parts of the set as well as choices for color and position of props. It means in one sense that nothing you see on the screen is accidental in the same way nothing placed on a stage for a play is accidental or random. There is no denying that at his peak Bava’s stage sets were revolutionary in regards to lighting and shading, and yet at the same time they seem to pay homage to a bygone era of not only Italian cinema but of old Hollywood as well.

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