6th April 2007: Sword and Sandal double!

The Giant Of Metropolis

Italy 1961 colour

aka Il Gigante Di Metropolis

Director Umberto Scarpelli Writers Sabatino Ciuffini, Ambrogio Molteni, Oreste Palella, Emimmo Salvi, Umberto Scarpelli, Gino Stafford

Cast Gordon Mitchell (Obro), Bella Cortez (Princess Mecede), Roldano Lupi (King Yotar), Liana Orfei (Queen Texen)

Tonight we pose the eternal question: How many weightlifters does it take to change a light bulb? Ten - one to change it, and nine to stand around him saying “You’re looking HUGE, man...” With that, we hit the sword and sandle or “peplum” genre with a vengeance, with The Giant Of Metropolis and The Last Days Of Pompeii.

The international success of Steve Reeves as Hercules, made in Italy in 1958, unleashed a titanic tidal wave of Homerean and Bible-themed epics, most with “Hercules” or the convenient “Sons Of Hercules” in the title. Soon every muscleman in America AND in Europe headed to Italy, wanting to be the next Steve Reeves. Acting ability or not, they believed they could flex their way through these colourful adventure yarns - cheap, tacky, but with genuine scenery, and technicians trained on Hollywood epics shot in Rome’s Cinecitta Studios like Ben Hur and Sodom And Gamorrah.

The lunkhead in Giant Of Metropolis is American B-identity Gordon Mitchell, who toured the US stages behind a rapidly aging Mae West with fellow bodybuilders and future peplum superstars Mickey Hargitay and Brad Harris. Forming a column of human flesh in the background of The Ten Commandments in 1956, he soon jumped on the first plane to Italy and established himself as a B star, first in a toga, then later with a pistol in a series of successful spaghetti westerns. So tight was the Europe-bound bodybuilding fraternity that his funeral service in 2003 was attended by Arnold Schwarzeneggar, Lou Ferrigno and Richard Harrison - who weirdly enough have ALL played Hercules. Small world, and with even less room than usual around the buffet table at the wake. “Zese buggalo wings are sublime...uh uh uh...”

Giant Of Metropolis tries to break out of the Hercules formula and cosies up with a wild science fiction plot reminiscent of Island Of Dr Moreau without the cute pantherwoman. Muscleman Obro played by Mitchell travels to the “sinful” Metropolis - a vaguely disguised version of Atlantis - where Mitchell towers over the local pygmies (relatively speaking of course) and where the evil lord Yotar is searching for immortality. This involves implanting braincells and other odd futuristic nonsense. Speaking of futuristic nonsense, there’s some wild silver-foil sets and ray guns, as well as a gladiator ring where our hero does the inevitable battle.

It all adds up to supremo Italian weirdness played with the straightest of faces - camp without the humour, science without the friction. In the tradition of strange sword and sandal films like Hercules Against The Moon Men, we present the even stranger but weirdly entertaining Giant Of Metropolis.

The Last Days Of Pompeii

Italy 1959 colour

aka Gli Ultimi Giorni Di Pompei

Directors Mario Bonnard, [uncredited] Sergio Leone Associate Producer Lucio Fulci Writers Sergio Corbucci, Ennio De Concini, Luigi Emmanuele, Sergio Leone, Duccio Tessari

Cast Steve Reeves (Glaucus), Cristina Kaufmann (Ione), Fernando Rey (Arbacès), Barbara Carroll (Nydia)

And now a costume epic from the maestro of spaghetti westerns, Sergio “Fistful Of Dollars For A Few Dollars More The Good The Bad And The Ugly Once Upon A Time In The West And America” Leone.

Leone was actually at the start of his career when Last Days Of Pompeii was made in the late Fifties. He was one of several scriptwriters along with future spaghetti western specialists Duccio Tessari and Sergio Corbucci, and ended up directing much of the film uncredited after replacing the original director Mario Bonnard. If you expect the flair and technical prowess of his later westerns with Clint Eastwood or even a “ayee-ayee-yar” when the villain appears you’ll be disappointed, but it’s a solid workman-like effort on Leone’s part.

Last Days Of Pompeii is not your average Sons Of Hercules peplum B-film. It’s actually a big-budget attempt at an A film that somehow becomes more tacky by the presence of its star Steve “Hercules” Reeves. It’s guilt by association; Steve is often accused of being more wooden than the Trojan Horse, but in reality is the best known and possibly the most talented of all the American musclemen working in Italy in the Fifties and Sixties. Here he plays Glaucus, a legionnaire who returns to Pompeii, saves a damsel in distress, finds a string of dead bodies including his father with crosses carved on their chests, and learns of the very anti-Christian activities of the Temple sect of Isis, who are naturally pagan, wear evil black hoods, and plan to throw the Christian population of Pompeii to the lions.

The whole while you’re waiting for Mount Versuvius to errupt, and when it does - well, if you’re a fan of both high school science projects and the term “anti-climax”, you’ll be well catered for. With no one-eyed monsters, cold rays, Moon Men, or even a son of a Son of Hercules, it’s still a pretty swanky, well-oiled sword and sandal “epic”. Ladies and gentlemen, we at Schlock Treatment present to you The Last Ninety Minutes of Pompeii.

3rd August 2007: Spaghetti Western Apocalypse double

3rd August 2007: “SPAGHETTI WESTERN APOCALYPSE” Double!

Run Man Run

Italy 1968 colour

aka Corri Uomo Corri, Big Gundown 2

Director Sergio Sollima Writers Pompeo De Angelis, Sergio Sollima

Cast Tomas Milian (Cuchillo), “Donal”/Donald O'Brien (Nathaniel Cassidy), John Ireland (Santillana), Linda Veras (Penny Bannington)

Run Man Run is a strange one, even for Schlock Treatment. Imagine an Italian western inspired by Marx - not Groucho, but KARL. Springing from the loins of the European mini-revolutions of 1968 comes a western with a conscience, courtesy of spaghetti socialist Sergio Sollima, who recycles his most memorable character from the 1967 The Big Gundown and builds an entire film around him.

Cuban-born Tomas Milian returns as Cuchillio, a wily yet endearingly naive opportunist who’s quick with a knife but not so quick on the uptake. A quick spell in a border prison sees him share a cell with a seditious poet named Rodriguez, whose dying breath reveals the last resting place of a $3 million cache of revolution-bound gold. And so begins Cuchillio’s journey, spreading his proto-revolutionary seed across the Texas border whilst pursued by a sleazy assortment of cutthroats and would-be revolutionaries, spaghetti western regular Donal O’Brien playing a sheriff with a conscience, two French secret agents, his jealous fiancee Dolores (played by the firey Chelo Alonso), and a blonde seargeant in the Salvation Army, a woman who sticks out of her unlikely surroundings like a turd tambourine. Cuchillio himself spends most of his screen time bound, gagged with dynamite, spreadeagled in some godforsaken location, or in one stunning sequence, strapped to the blade of a windmill. And STILL He doesn’t lose his sense of humour.

Like The Good The Bad And The Ugly it’s a deliberately open-ended epic quest for hidden treasure, but without Leone’s grandiose scale and pretentious camera histronics. It’s more like The Wizard of Oz wrapped in a burrito, and peppered with the most random of supporting characters. The usual grimness of these spaghetti westerns is contrasted with Tomas Milian’s comic timing, a rousing score by an uncredited Ennio Morricone, and a surprising cameo from veteran American actor John Ireland as a crusty, battlescarred soldier of the class struggle.

Socialist westerns don’t usually come this entertaining - come to think of it, socialists are rarely funny at all! So please, sit back and enjoy the picaresque, picturesque and thankfully undogmatic 1968 Run Man Run.

Four Of The Apocalypse

Italy 1975 colour

aka I Quattro dell'Apocalisse, Four Gunmen Of The Apocalypse, Four Horsemen Of The Apocalypse

Director Lucio Fulci Writer Ennio De Concini

Cast Fabio Testi (Stubby Preston), Lynne Frederick (Bunny), Michael J. Pollard (Clem), Donald O'Brien (Sheriff), Tomas Milian (Chaco)

Now to the other face of spaghetti westerns: The Four Of The Apocalypse, from prolific B-filmmaker Lucio Fulci, made just after his violent giallo thrillers like Lizard In A Woman's Skin and Don't Torture The Duckling, and before he kickstarted the Euro-splatter genre with Zombie Flesheaters in 1979. With a pedigree like that, you can tell that Fulci specialized in the darker side of human nature. In The Four Of The Apocalypse, when the blood starts to flow - and it seems to appear more often than necessary - Fulci rises to the task and is not afraid to show it.

This is the West as rewritten by Leone, Peckinpah and company - lawless, brutal, and certainly no place for the righteous. Fabio Testi plays Stubby Preston, a super-suave card shark who rolls into town just as gambling is declared illegal. The sherrif (played by Run Man Run's sherrif Donal O'Brien, locks him in a cell with the so-called scum of the earth: the visibly pregnant woman of the night Bunny (played by the late British actress Lynne Frederick), an unnervingly upbeat African American named Bud, and the weird-looking cherubic Michael J Pollard, most famous for his role as the slightly brain-damaged CW in Bonnie And Clyde, here on his downhill career slide as Clem, the slightly brain-damaged town drunk.

Hooded killers cut a swathe through the rest of the town in a display of gloriously slow motion wholesale butchery while sherriff plugs his ears - and this is before the end of the credits! The four cellmates hitch their wagon southwards, bickering and sniping at each other, all to Greek Chorus courtesy of an abysmal 70s West Coast pop group. Along comes the mysterious half-Indian Chaco, played with demented abandon by a very different Tomas Milian. He soon shows his true talents - hunting, torture and administering peyote like a crazed psychedelic priest.

The harsh landscape suddenly becomes nightmarish and surreal, and the film frequently makes trips across the border into grand guignol territory, which is great news for lovers of Fulci’s zombie quartet. But it’s not all gloom; there are moments of genuine tenderness and heartbreak in the unlikely pairing of a gambler and a pregnant prostitute. And speaking of pregnant, you’re going to need a cast-iron stomache to handle this one, possibly the last word in nihilist splatter westerns: the 1975 Four Of The Apocalypse.