We mashed up rhetorical questions from sword and sandal epics there. “Are you not entertained?” is from Russell Crowe’s Gladiator, while, “Is there no one else?” is from Brad Pitt’s Troy. But the above poster is for a movie not as good as either of those. It was put together for the Egyptian run of the Dan Vadis headlined adventure Ercole l’invincibile, which was originally made in Italy and known in English as Hercules the Invicible, Hercules Against the Elephants’ Empire, and The Sons of Hercules in the Land of Darkness. Today it’s just unknown. In Egypt it was called in Arabic The Famous Hercules. They’ve probably forgotten it there too. You’ll notice the poster has a secondary English title: Hercole the Conqueror. Since the character of Hercules was not known as Hercole in English, we can’t even begin to explain that. But we love the art. It was produced by Universal Film Distribution in Cairo, and of course they did not credit its creator.
We actually watched this, and it’s about Hercules slaying a dragon to win the hand (and the rest of her) of a king’s daughter only for her to be kidnapped by marauders, who Herc then tracks to their subterranean city and goes nuclear on, but only after he’s captured and the evils try to sacrifice him to some elephants. Once he dispatches those, and is courted by the evil queen for a minute, he makes the bad folks pay dearly, barely ruffling his pleated mini-skirt in the process. It’s gaspingly awful, particularly the sequence where he wrassles a lion, and also every moment involving his bumbling sidekick Babar. But our special consulting critic Angela the sunbear felt the movie wasn’t bad. She has a fancy degree in this cinema stuff, so we defer to her. Plus when we don’t, she threatens to maul us. Artsy types, right? There’s no release date for Egypt, but Ercole l’invincibile opened in Italy today in 1964.
Hello, humans. Gonna throw this out there—the bear was by far the best actor. Amiright?
