Brilliant and touching

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Hercules (Dan Vadis) strangles a lion to save Princess Telca (Spela Rozin). Her grateful father promises him the hand of his daughter, but only if Hercules can slay a dragon, too. Hercules falls in love with Telca's beautiful blue eyes and decides it's worth trying. He makes the acquaintance of a witch in a cave. After a few evil 'Ha! Ha!' laughs, she provides Hercules with a spear that can kill the dragon - actually a clumsy dinosaur who lives in a remote valley, doing no harm. When Hercules returns, Telca and the king have been abducted by people from the 'Land of Darkness' who always need victims for their blood rituals. Of course, Hercules follows the raiders, determined to rescue the princess. Evil queen Melissa has other plans, though...Colourful adventure with a lot of action and just enough comic relief. Sometimes movies of this genre drag on and on with pathos and too much dialog, but this is not the case here. It was good fun watching it. I'd like to see the Italian original though, because the American version seems to be re-edited and several minutes shorter.

In this peplum movie Hercules saves a king's daughter from a lion attack. The king offers him her hand in marriage if he can slay a dragon. Hercules goes off to do just that but while he is away the kingdom is over-taken by the forces of an evil queen, who takes everyone hostage to her subterranean lair below a volcano.I don't truthfully know an awful lot about the Hercules movies. It seems from what I can gather though that this one is both very typical but also pretty bad. Seemingly, the plot synopsis above is interchangeable with many of the films from the sub-genre. To be fair, I certainly didn't find this to be a good film but it has some moments. Hercules gets to fight a lion, a bear and a dinosaur-like dragon before taking on the forces of the evil queen. Unfortunately, he also has another typical feature of these types of movies - a comedy relief side-kick. I say 'unfortunately' because this character – like most of his ilk – is an appallingly tedious presence, who at no point could genuinely be classified as a relief from anything. If you take him out of the equation though then you have a moderately entertaining bit of sword and sandal nonsense. It also has a silly, cheesy theme tune which was quite amusing.

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

And look at that, it's another Hercules movie, though this time it's billed as Son of Hercules. I can't imagine why film makers rallied around the original Steve Reeves "Hercules" flick to spin off nearly an additional two hundred more of these beefcake bashes. I've only seen a half dozen or so myself, but they're all starting to look pretty much the same. This one's at the low end of the scale, and let's face it, the scale is pretty low to begin with.The standard stuff seems to be here - a love interest for Argolese (Dan Vadis), a wicked queen who attempts to kill him, various beasts to fight and defeat, and even a sidekick, though this time he seems more embarrassing than helpful. The casting of Babar (John Simons) seems to beg the question, 'What were they thinking?'I'm always intrigued when I see Hercules or one of his stand ins use the old speed dial to reach one of the Olympian gods. In this flick, Argolese is about to be pulled apart by elephants when he summons the heavens for help and wouldn't you know it, the chains simply break apart. I mean there wasn't even a pause to reflect on the request and build suspense.I'm sure there are better prints of the film than the one I viewed. It had some jarring jump cuts and a decidedly red hue in many scenes. It started out with a Part 1, signaling to me that perhaps it was made in a serial style format. There were even scenes of coming attractions for Part 2, however the film was spliced together in such a way that the action just continues, only to show those highlight scenes once again in due course. It all seemed quite annoying.There's really no reason to see this flick, and recommending it would be a disservice. My motivation rested simply in the fact that it was one of fifty movies packaged together under the 'Sci-Fi' collection put out by Mill Creek Entertainment/Treeline Films. The only positive worth noting is the catchy little theme song - 'There Be Sons of Hercules'.Hey, was that a real bear or a man in a bear suit?