The Adventures of Hercules (1985)

Posted on February 12, 2022 at 8:44 am by Jeff Kuykendall

I am proud(ish) to say that I saw the Lou Ferrigno Hercules (1983) during its original run at the drive-in. My dad took me, and to this day I wonder what he thought of that decision while the film was unspooling. (He has no memory of it now – and probably didn’t a week after seeing it.) Released to cash in on the success of Clash of the Titans (1981) and to share the fortune of an early 80’s marketplace glutted with fantasy films, the film was also a revival of 60’s Italian peplum, with Incredible Hulk Lou Ferrigno as a next-generation Steve Reeves. Actually, that may have been why my dad took me in the first place. He grew up on the Steve Reeves movies, and I was a budding Ray Harryhausen (and Clash of the Titans) fan who wanted to see any fantasy movie I could. I was young and undiscriminating, but Hercules was the first film that disappointed me. Perhaps “disappointed” is inadequate. The film confused me. I was too young to comprehend that what I was witnessing was a bad film, and not just that – one of the worst wide-release films of the early 80’s. Taken on that level, and watching it as an adult, the film is a hoot. But Hercules gains some unexpected class when compared to its lower-rent sequel, The Adventures of Hercules (aka The Adventures of Hercules II or just Hercules II, 1985).

A battle with a magic knight.

The sequel shares the same director, Luigi Cozzi (under the pseudonym Lewis Coates), and you can tell. It feels like the third film in a trilogy, the first being not a Hercules film but Cozzi’s notorious Star Wars cash-in Starcrash (1979). All three share plentiful but chintzy special effects and blend the sword & sorcery and science fiction genres with no rhyme or reason. Hercules may as well take place on another planet in the far future, with its stop-motion robots replacing the traditional creatures of Greek mythology and a Mount Olympus that appears to be a misty alien planet. The Adventures of Hercules continues this aesthetic, but everything now seems rushed. The opening credits feature clips from the first Hercules film, less to bring audiences up to speed than to showcase some FX work that is actually better than what you’ll see in the film that follows. The gods are still in outer space, with glowing, colored auras like the Greek muses of Xanadu (1980) – a film that was made only five years ago but, by 1985, might as well have been ancient history. (Admittedly, being a roller-disco movie, that film was already feeling dated by 1980.) You know you’re in trouble when the very first monster Ferrigno faces is a man in a Bigfoot suit. You immediately miss the first film’s animated Erector sets.

A battle with a simian creature.

The first film retold some greatest hits of Hercules’s origin story and his 12 labors but added a villainous King Minos (William Berger), who uses the diabolical power of science. Now Minos has returned, teaming up with some rebel gods who have stolen and scattered Zeus’s seven thunderbolts. Hercules must find the thunderbolts to save the world from destruction, and with his quest he’s assisted by two beautiful sisters, Urania (Milly Carlucci) and Glaucia (Sonia Viviani). This is where the monsters come in. Each villain he defeats reveals one of the missing thunderbolts, setting up a video game structure that Cozzi reinforces with his neon-colored opticals. In an interview on the Shout Factory Blu-ray, Cozzi insists on this interpretation: he was well aware that he was making a cinematic 80’s arcade game. The prolonged, increasingly abstracted climax of the film takes place among the stars, with a floating Hercules and Urania battling Minos, and the film essentially becomes a live-action Joust or Galaga. At least it’s original. I can’t think of any other filmmaker who works in Cozzi’s style, and although The Adventures of Hercules looks the cheapest of his fantasy spectacles, it also seems the most his. (Even his bootleg Suspiria sequel, 1989’s indescribable The Black Cat, has one foot in his bizarro Starcrash universe. You can suss pretty quickly that it’s a “Lewis Coates” picture.) Other landscapes, using optical matting of strange miniatures into natural environments, are either pleasingly bizarre or, in a few cases, garishly ugly, leaving me to wonder if they weren’t shot or edited on video, given their crudely low resolution on the Blu-ray.

Antaeus, aka the Id monster from Forbidden Planet.

Cozzi is shameless in his “homages” to other classic fantasy films. Hercules borrowed moments wholesale from Clash of the Titans (a skeletal Charon on the River Styx; a semi-nude ritual bath), but Adventures takes this even further. Most strikingly, a battle with a Medusa-like gorgon is a shot-for-shot recreation of the climax of the famous Harryhausen Medusa sequence in Titans. He presents a new, anemic-looking stop-motion creature (Jean Manuel Costa is credited for stop-motion in this film), but skirts lawsuit territory by giving the monster a scorpion’s tail rather than a snake’s. Nonetheless, Hercules defeats it the Harry Hamlin way, using his shield as a mirror. (Worth noting: my 5-year-old, who has seen Titans, was very excited by the appearance of this “Medusa,” and if I saw this when I was 5, I probably would have been excited too.) In other scenes, Cozzi actually uses footage taken straight from the movies he likes. Women are chained up and sacrificed, Dragonslayer-style, to the mythical monster Antaeus, which is clearly the Disney-animated Id monster from Forbidden Planet (1956). Urania and Glaucia consult the “little people” a couple of times in the film, who are psychedelic Rorschach inkblots disguising lifted footage of the twins of Mothra (1964). In the final battle between Hercules and Minos, the two transform into scenes from King Kong (1933), rendered in rotoscope animation but easily recognizable. Perhaps the best way to consider The Adventures of Hercules is a tour through Cozzi’s own Id (monster). It’s a curious object floating through the debris of 80’s fantasy B-movies, the kind that scraped their way straight to video store shelves or late-night slots on basic cable.

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Midnight Video Dispatch – Feb 5, 2022

Posted on February 5, 2022 at 8:33 am by Jeff Kuykendall

Well! It’s been a minute! As I return to a hopefully more regular schedule, I’m initiating a new feature, the Midnight Video Dispatch. At the start of the pandemic, I began work on building a video store in my basement. Naming it Midnight Video (after this website), it now houses my video collection using cast-off video store shelves from a shuttered Family Video. This series will use the Midnight Video framework to spotlight staff picks, new releases, and recommended titles from different categories of the “store.”

New Arrivals

(Or new-ish, since some of these have been out for many moons.)

Over the years, Vinegar Syndrome (from whom I purchased the lovely “New Releases” box displayed above, as part of their last Black Friday sale) has split their time between releasing adults-only titles of the 70’s and early 80’s with all kinds of other exploitation-themed whatsits, always with the most consistently high-quality presentations on the market. As their brand has expanded in popularity, they’ve been able to acquire some higher profile cult titles, including their late-2021 release of Andy Warhol’s – er, scratch that, Paul Morrissey’s Flesh for Frankenstein (1973). The film has been unavailable for quite a while, although it was Criterion’s spine #27, long out of print on DVD. Yes, those were the days when Criterion would actually release something as unapologetically lowbrow as Flesh for Frankenstein. Though I had seen its famous follow-up, Blood for Dracula (more on that in a second), I never quite got around to this one before it became something one had to really make an effort to find. And yet Blood for Dracula made a big enough impression on me, when I rented it on VHS in the 90’s, that I bought a soundtrack CD that included Claudio Gizzi’s score for both films. I listened to that CD over and over for years, having to rely on imagination to put pictures to Frankenstein‘s gorgeous themes.

Well, all those years – even after reading about how over-the-top the film was – I wasn’t imagining that Gizzi’s delicate, sensitive, romantic gothic orchestrations accompanied this bad-taste wonder. That contrast just makes Morrissey’s campy horror comedy all the more ridiculous. Udo Kier, who was Nicolas Caging his roles in horror films at least a decade before Nicolas Cage began Nicolas Caging, plays Dr. Frankenstein as an overtly insane necrophiliac. He’s married to his sister (Monique van Vooren), a minor detail which took me a while to grasp, before slapping my head and saying, Well of course he’s married to his sister. It’s that kind of film. She’s sexually unsatisfied since he spends so much time in the lab, fetishizing every aspect of his surgical procedures, so she takes their latest servant as a lover. He’s played by Joe Dallesandro (Flesh, Trash), who, like Morrissey, was a veteran of Andy Warhol’s Factory scene. Dallesandro has a thick New York accent that blends like oil in water in this Eurocult castle: Kier speaks with an at-times impenetrable German accent, while most of the cast is Italian. The film gleefully reinterprets Mary Shelley as grand guignol by way of Pink Flamingos. It’s a midnight movie through and through, and originally played in 3D, dripping organs dangling right in your face. In fact, one of the reasons why I put off this movie for so long was the desire to see it as it was originally presented, which is something Vinegar Syndrome’s deluxe set remedies. (If you don’t have a 3D projector or TV set, a red/blue anaglyph presentation is available, and glasses are included.) Also inside the comprehensive package is a 4K and Blu-ray, for those who haven’t made the UHD upgrade yet. (I made the leap when pushed off the cliff: my beloved plasma TV died a year ago.) This is an outrageous, endlessly quotable film, though I still prefer its semi-sequel…

Severin Films had a banner year in 2021, culminating in the mammoth All the Haunts Be Ours compendium of folk horror films (built around the documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror, directed by the box set’s curator, film scholar Kier-La Janisse). I’m not writing about that here simply because I haven’t cracked it open just yet. So, with that massive exception aside, my favorite release of theirs in 2021 was Andy Warhol’s – scratch that again, no idea why I keep making that mistake – Paul Morrissey’s Blood for Dracula (1974). Reuniting the director with Kier, Dallesandro, and composer Gizzi, this is the superior film, though it also takes less of the John Waters approach to its satire. I mean, I wouldn’t call it subtle. Kier’s anemic Dracula can only survive on virgin blood, but in the swinging 1920’s virgins are harder to come by. He travels to Italy in the mistaken belief that a Catholic country will have virgins in greater supply. Perceived as a wealthy bachelor, he’s eagerly hosted by a landowner played by Italian neo-realist icon Vittorio De Sica, his wife, and their three beautiful daughters, one of them Suspiria‘s Stefania Casini. Unfortunately for the Count, the daughters are being seduced one by one by the hunky gardener (Dallesandro). Featuring a cameo by Roman Polanski and a fantastic Gizzi score, which plays over one of 70’s cinema’s most memorable opening credits sequences, this is essential Eurocult and a lot of fun. Severin’s package is the perfect companion to Vinegar Syndrome’s, with a UHD, Blu-ray, and interviews with Morrissey (amusingly bitching that Warhol did nothing on the films, which of course were released in many regions as Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein and Andy Warhol’s Dracula), Kier, and others.

Speaking of the lord of vampires, Severin has also released to Blu-ray the overlooked Klaus Kinski film Nosferatu in Venice (1988). A sort of belated, bootleg sequel to Werner Herzog’s Murnau homage, Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979), this was a hugely troubled production thanks entirely to the hugely troubled Kinski. The film’s completion was delayed, went through multiple directors, and was repeatedly undermined during shooting by the notoriously difficult actor, details of which are discussed in the feature-length documentary featured on the disc, Creation is Violent: Anecdotes from Kinski’s Final Years. This is an essential work, featuring interviews with those who knew and worked with (or, as necessary, against) Kinski during the last six years of his life. Principally covering the production of Creature (1985), Commando Leopard (1985), Revenge of the Stolen Stars (1986), Crawlspace (1986), Nosferatu in Venice, and Kinski’s only directorial effort, the disastrously received biopic Paganini (1989), the documentary creates a surprisingly complex portrait of Kinski that feels much more complete than Herzog’s otherwise entertaining doc My Best Fiend (1999). Here are the expected harrowing tales of Kinski sabotaging his directors, including a very funny Ulli Lommel recounting how he had to turn Kinski’s character in Revenge of the Stolen Stars into a ghost just to accommodate the egregious continuity errors the actor deliberately created. But these anecdotes share space with tales of his physical and sexual abuse both off and on set, actresses recounting, with both horror and gallows humor, how they tried to defuse intensely inappropriate situations (some of his victims, unfortunately, could not). And these anecdotes share space with more tender recollections of Kinski, including from a California postal worker and his daughter, both of whom shared an unexpected bond with the actor in his final years. The documentary is so amazing that it renders Nosferatu in Venice something of an afterthought, but the main attraction is worth watching. Here you have Christopher Plummer as a Van Helsing type (hamming it up on purpose, as the doc makes clear; Kinski left him no choice), Donald Pleasence, misty Venice location shots, and an appropriately haunted-looking Kinski, donning the familiar rodent-like fangs of Herzog’s film (but refusing to wear the rest of the makeup). There’s much which is muddy and confused, but against all odds, the film has atmosphere to spare. It’s even Jean Rollin-esque at times.

Shout Factory seems to have adjusted their release model for older (non-Hammer) B-movies, Roger Corman ones in particular, to limited edition releases, increasing their desirability by default. This extends to their new Blu-ray of AIP’s The Brain Eaters (1958), a 61-minute B-movie that would work much better if presented as it was intended: one half of a double feature (it was paired with The Spider, aka Earth vs. the Spider, in many markets). An alien rocket is discovered too late, for an invasion is already underway, the parasitic aliens (which are actually quite adorable) controlling human hosts by latching onto the back of the neck. Its plot bears similarities to Robert A. Heinlein’s 1951 SF novel The Puppet Masters, which prompted Heinlein to sue the film for plagiarism (it was settled out of court; the book ultimately received an official big-screen adaptation in 1994). And really, there’s not much more to say about The Brain Eaters. Most of the scant screen time is taken up with talking; a pre-Star Trek Leonard Nimoy has a bit part; there’s a nifty glowing orb that the human puppets carry around; and I do like the idea that their spacecraft consists of cramped crawlspaces that worm back and forth, adding a nice touch of claustrophobia to an otherwise suspense-free hour (-and one minute). But, obviously, if you’re in the mood for a 50’s AIP SF movie, it is suitable junk food.

Staff Picks

A few years back, animator Morgan Galen King reached out to me, suggesting I might enjoy his short film “Exordium” (2013). And yes, I did – very much! The film is a psychedelic throwback to the rotoscoped animated films of Ralph Bakshi (The Lord of the Rings and Fire and Ice in particular), as well as Heavy Metal (1981) with its bodies exploding into gooey lumps at the slice of a sword. What I didn’t know from the very brief exchange was that King had embarked upon a feature-length expansion of his concepts, which, after many years of production and countless hours of animation, would become The Spine of Night (2021). Like the aforementioned Bakshi films, King, along with co-director Phil Gelatt (who wrote segments for the Netflix anthology Love, Death & Robots, and directed They Remain), filmed actors with costumes and props in a warehouse before the painstaking animation work began. The end result was worth the effort. It’s an epic, multi-generational tale told by a naked pagan sorceress (voiced by Lucy Lawless) to an ancient warrior known as The Guardian (voiced by Richard E. Grant). She recounts the efforts to control an alien flower called the Bloom which grants cosmic powers. (Patton Oswalt plays one of the characters, the grotesque tyrant of a swamp village.) Pleasingly digressive with an ever-changing cast of characters, and featuring beautiful background paintings, compelling (and very bloody) animation, a thrilling battle in and around an airship, and a memorable creation story partially inspired by the myth-telling in Marcell Jankovics’s animated film Son of the White Mare (1981), this is a film that left me saying, Show me more. Here’s hoping there will be. The film is now available in a steelbook which includes both a 4K UHD and Blu-ray.

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Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974)

Posted on March 30, 2021 at 5:02 pm by Jeff Kuykendall

“Phantom Ladies Over Paris” is the subtitle of Céline and Julie Go Boating (1974), and it’s a good indication of what you’re going to get with Jacques Rivette’s fifth film: part epic serialized fantastique adventure in the tradition of Feuillade’s Les Vampires (1915), part outrageous Parisian love letter, its two main characters floating above the city with their intermingled identities and occasional psychic bursts of omniscience. The film has endured as a beloved art house classic and remains the most popular of Rivette’s output, even though it’s shot in 16mm in Academy ratio, features no soundtrack apart from what instruments are played on-screen, and breaks the three-hour mark while indulging in every possibly whimsical digression. Like so many of Rivette’s films, it’s untidy, sprawling, and improvisatory, a portrait of Paris as an endlessly surprising labyrinth in which the fantastical and the mundane co-exist, revealing secrets to those willing to pursue hidden riddles. It’s also bursting with feminine spirit – or, should we say, spirits, given the number of phantoms on display – Rivette ceding much of the story’s shape and ideas to the two stars, Juliet Berto (Out 1) and Dominique Labourier (Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000). Finally, after a too-long hiatus from home video in the U.S., the film is available to sink its hooks into new fans thanks to a new 2-disc Blu-ray special edition from Criterion.

Librarian Julie (Dominique Labourier), studying magic.

Magic is present from the very opening, as librarian Julie (Labourier), with her curly mop of red hair, carefully traces an occult symbol in the dirt while sitting on a park bench. When a stranger, the dark-haired magician Céline (Berto), darts by, sunglasses and scarves dropping in her winding wake, Julie picks them up and gives chase, pursuing her White Rabbit through Montmartre. Somewhere along the way, Julie loses all interest in giving back her props, hiding whenever Céline casts a glance behind her. Then Céline tries to keeps tabs on Julie, and it’s not clear who is chasing whom. When the two finally do meet – in a café, the items returned with mutual disinterest – they act as if they’ve known each other a long time. And perhaps they have. As the film tells us at the start, “Usually, it began like this…” – initiating an intoxicating Möbius strip. Another caption recurs throughout, like chapter titles that never progress: “But, the next morning…” A reference, perhaps, to the daybreak refrain from Arabian Nights, interrupting each story with Scheherazade’s promise to continue her tale the next day while her sister Dinarzade pays her compliments to the storytelling. In Céline and Julie Go Boating, the title characters form another dynamic female duo, in line with Scheherazade/Dinarzade and forming a prototype for Rivette films to come such as Duelle (1976) and Le Pont du Nord  (1981). (Female doubles also recur in the films of Jean Rollin, who worked in the exploitation arena but whose works frequently play like grindhouse echoes of Rivette.) Céline is not Julie, and Julie is not Céline – they are distinctively different, at least, until they are not. When they share a Bloody Mary, sipping from the same glass, we feel we’re witnessing an ancient arcane bonding ritual. They proceed to share secrets without speaking them, and they swap places and roles: Céline pretends to be Julie for a rendezvous with Julie’s childhood sweetheart; Julie masquerades as Céline’s magician “Mandrakore” (as in, Mandrake the Magician) for an important audition. Both are acts of wistful sabotage. Neither holds a grudge. The important thing is the haunted house.

Juliet Berto as Céline as Mandrakore the Magician.

The central mystery which preoccupies these two is a mysterious abandoned house that, upon being permitted entrance at a specific time of day, reveals a tragic past which is immediately forgotten, like a dream, when they’re expelled down its front steps some time later, a piece of hard candy in their mouths as they stumble groggily into a taxi. The only way to recall what they witnessed is to suck on the candy, revealing fragmented moments of a family melodrama (which includes director Barbet Schroeder) that seem to have culminated in the murder of a little girl. The two magical sleuths move in together. Julie draws a diagram of the house on a chalkboard and uses her collection of dolls to decipher the cast of characters. They discover a photo of the house within Julie’s chest; we later learn that she lived just across from it as a child and knew the girl who died. But the mystery – a story within a story, as in Arabian Nights – is also an entertainment. Late in the film, the pair suck on their candies together and watch the story unfold as spectators, jeering at the clichés, mocking the villains, squealing with delight at the plot twists. And so this becomes a centerpiece in Rivette’s filmography exploring the fuzzy boundary between theatrical performance and the audience, which was explored in his marathon experiment Out 1 (1971) and would recur in most of his later films, including the underrated, masterful Love on the Ground (1983), a Céline and Julie companion piece.

Céline plays nurse to a bleeding ghost (Bulle Ogier).

When Julie and Céline are finally able to get to the bottom of the mystery, they’re doing so as participants rather than observers. Storming the stage after a certain amount of rehearsal (they’ve witnessed the ghosts’ repeated dialogue often enough that they’ve written a script), the two dress as nurses to play the same part in turns. (Tag-teaming becomes necessary when Céline gets queasy tending to one ghost’s bloody hand – even though the blood, in this moonlit reality, has become bright blue.) Our actor stand-ins are giddy with excitement at the opportunity to take a part in their favorite drama – in a modern version, they’d be writing slash fiction about these restless spirits. And so they subvert the drama with glee. Rivette was a curious figure, a founding father of the French New Wave and editor of Cahiers du Cinéma whose output was stingy during the height of Godard and Truffaut, and whose formal inventiveness was never as purely cinematic as his more famous peers. Instead, this obsessive movie lover made films that exposed his deep love of literature and the stage, and celebrated storytelling and its seductive embrace. True, some of his films are endurance tests, but more often than not the lengthy runtimes are just breathing space to let his performers run riot, and to draw the viewer down a vortex of mystery, spontaneous games, and female magic.

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