Hi, all. Recently I suffered a computer meltdown. I’m still cleaning up the mess. One of the main casualties is a lot of the older site material, which I’m have some trouble recovering, although I hope to get it all back eventually.
In the meantime, I wanted to work on something not too mentally taxing, and decided to overhaul an old peplum review; because nothing says ‘relaxation’ like beefy guys in man-skirts and endless opportunities for bottom jokes – right?
ERCOLE ALLA CONQUISTA DI ATLANTIDE (1961)
When a prophecy threatens all Greece, Hercules, his son, Hylus, and Androcles, King of Thebes, set out to find the source of the danger. They inadvertently end up in Atlantis, where Hercules battles a shape-shifting god, an evil queen who is hot, hot, HOT, and a great many worshippers of Uranus [*snicker*].
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(Oh – and there are some stone boobies, if that’s a problem for anyone.)
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Edited to add: as a small beginning, I have recovered, re-formatted and added screenshots to La Fatiche Di Ercole and Ercole E La Regina Di Lidia, and re-formatted La Vendetta Di Ercole.
And frankly, I think I’ve seen about as much of men in mini-skirts as I can bear for the present.
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#1 by Baron Scarpia on September 29, 2009 - 4:09 am
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So, basically, Hercules ends up killing everyone, soldiers, citizens and prisoners alike? What a guy.
#2 by lyzard on September 29, 2009 - 4:51 pm
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Yeah, pretty much.
We’re probably supposed to accept that it was Atlantis’s destined fate to blow up and sink into the sea; but yes, it’s all a bit casual for comfort, in the end.
#3 by Luke Blanchard on September 29, 2009 - 7:18 pm
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If you have no other means, you might be able to recover some of your text from the Internet Archive at http://www.archive.org.
#4 by lyzard on September 29, 2009 - 7:27 pm
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Thanks, Luke, I’ll keep that in mind. I’m pretty sure I do have it all, somewhere; it’s mostly a question of time and effort.
#5 by The Rev. D.D. on September 29, 2009 - 8:04 pm
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I think one of my favorite things about your reviews is your ability to vary things as the movies warrant. You have serious, thoughtful reflections like your ones for Gojira, the ones that combine your insights with your wonderful humor like Jurassic Park, the brutal maulings like Deep Blue Sea, and the just plain fun and silliness of, well, this one, for instance.
A woman who is equally at home ruminating on the fine points of quality cinema with wit and incisive depth…or making “Uranus” jokes.
The world needs more Lyz Kingsleys. Hurry up and clone yourself already.
#6 by lyzard on September 29, 2009 - 8:33 pm
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Time and effort, dearie. Time and effort. 🙂
#7 by supersonic on September 30, 2009 - 12:07 am
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If you really do lose some of your old content, there will be wailing and gnashing of teeth. Audible all the way to Uranus.
#8 by DamonD on September 30, 2009 - 3:55 am
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I do wish some big studio would throw out a flick like this these days. There’s just much fun to be had with having some big beefy laughing Hercules striding about fighting monsters and throwing boulders about as the Gods look on.
I hold out hope the Clash of the Titans remake does well, but I’m concerned they’ll lay on too much of the over-emotive amateur dramatics and not enough of punching of four-headed scorpion men.
#9 by El Santo on September 30, 2009 - 6:47 am
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Question: Is the lost content lost on your host’s computer, on yours at home, or on both? Your FTP software should work both ways, so if it’s one or the other, you ought to be able to transfer the surviving copy in whichever direction is appropriate. I do that all the time when stuff gets lost or broken at one end or the other.
#10 by lyzard on September 30, 2009 - 4:54 pm
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It’s a combination of things, but (long story short) the main issue is that there was still a second server involved, which seems recently to have gone out of commission. So the answer to your question is, none of the above. It’s a matter of determining what I have an electronic copy of and what I don’t, and tracking down the original documents in the latter case.
#11 by The Rev. D.D. on September 30, 2009 - 9:33 pm
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You’d probably make more progress on the cloning thing if you could drag yourself away from the remote-controlled zombie army and the attempts to make an Arm…but I doubt there’s much chance of that, eh?
Of course, clones would help you get those other things done sooner…
*whistles innocently*
#12 by Read MacGuirtose on October 1, 2009 - 1:22 pm
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Erg… bleh… I seriously bungled the formatting of that previous comment. Is there any way an administrator can delete it so it’s not messing up the page like that?
In the meantime, let me try that again:
Mythology nitpick: While it’s true that there were gods for the winds of each of the four cardinal directions (as well as lesser-known gods of the four in-between directions, too, northwest (Corus), northeast (Caecius), southwest (Livas), and southeast (Apeliotus)), there was also an overall god of the winds who ruled the others, named Aeolus. Classical mythology had a lot of gods.
Of course, none of this changes the fact that Helius was, as you say, the god of the sun and had nothing to do with the winds…
#13 by Read MacGuirtose on October 1, 2009 - 1:56 pm
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Actually, while I’m at it with the mythology notes:
Actually, the treatment of Uranus here seems… interesting, and not at all out of line with mythology. Uranus was a primordial god, who in Greek mythology was indeed betrayed and overthrown by his son, Cronus… who was in turn betrayed and overthrown by Zeus. Uranus doesn’t seem to have actually been worshipped in classical times, at least according to any existing evidence, but that makes him all the more appropriate a choice for the patron god of an alien and hostile civilization.
That’s not to say the mythology presented in the movie is anything near completely accurate, of course. Aside from the Helius gaffe already commented on, there’s the fact that Proteus, according to mythology, was actually the son of Poseidon. (There is, incidentally, a sequence in the Odyssey concerning a fight between Proteus and Menelaus—with the former constantly shifting to different forms—that no doubt inspired Hercules’ fight with Proteus here. Of course, in the Odyssey, Proteus doesn’t end up dying, and indeed it’s hard to see how ripping off a minor appendage is supposed to kill a god…)
#14 by KeithA on October 1, 2009 - 2:36 pm
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Misformatted comment deleted, per your request, sir. As repayment, please offer up unto me the blood of Uranus.
#15 by Blake on October 1, 2009 - 3:31 pm
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Read: Hmmm…And here I thought it was inspired by the whole Sennex Maris character. I’ll have to read up on my Proteus.
#16 by Read MacGuirtose on October 1, 2009 - 4:34 pm
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Well… first of all, Proteus essentially was the original senex maris character—”The Old Man of the Sea” (which, as you no doubt know, is what “senex maris” means) was one of his titles, and I’m pretty sure latter representations were ultimately based on him. (Or at least in part on him; to be fair, Greek mythology for some reason featured several Old Men of the Sea. Apparently the Sea was the Olympian equivalent of modern Florida.)
More to the point, however, I was referring less to the character than I was the scene, the fight with the shapeshifting deity. As I said, the Odyssey features a scene very much like the one here, in which the hero Menelaus fights Proteus while Proteus shifts between a variety of forms. There are differences, of course; aside from the aforementioned fact that Proteus isn’t killed (Menelaus just has to defeat him in combat to force him to give up information), in the Odyssey, as I recall, Proteus changes forms while he’s being grappled, instead of after he’s thrown to the ground as is the case here (I’d imagine that, however, would have been far harder to pull off SFX-wise). Still, it’s basically the same idea.
It’s not the only instance in mythology and folklore of such a fight with a shapeshifting being—there’s a similar incident in the Scottish folktale of Tam Lin, for example. Still, Homer’s story was the first, the best known, and, most significantly, the one that actually features Proteus, so I feel pretty confident in concluding that that’s where the makers of this movie got their inspiration.
(By the way, I’ve realized I made a few minor mistakes in my previous posts—minor enough that probably no one but me would ever care about them, but I’m enough of a stickler to want to make corrections anyway. I didn’t think they were worth making another post to correct, but since I’m making another post anyway…
First of all, in my first post here, the names I gave for the gods of the four “intermediate” winds are for the most part their Latin names, not their Greek names (as they should have been for consistency). If you want to know their Greek names, or more about the classical gods of the winds in general, Wikipedia has a fairly detailed article on them. Secondly, it was perhaps a bit inaccurate to say, as I did in my second post, that Zeus “betrayed” Cronus. Cronus made a practice of eating his children, to prevent them from overthrowing him as he’d overthrown his own father Uranus, so Zeus’s rebellion against Cronus wasn’t exactly unprovoked.
Incidentally, speaking of gods of the wind, it’s occurred to me that the Helius business may have been a mistake in the dubbing. “Helius” and “Aeolus” sound close enough they could conceivably be confused, after all—and for all I know might sound even closer in Italian—so it’s conceivable that in the original Italian they did correctly name Aeolus as the god of the winds, but it was erroneously changed to Helius in translation. Of course, there’s no similar excuse for changing Proteus’s father from Poseidon to Uranus… though actually, to be fair, Proteus’s descent from Poseidon may have been a Homeric invention, and his name suggests he may have originally been construed as a more primordial figure, so perhaps making him a son of Uranus isn’t entirely unreasonable. In any case, I suppose it’s really moot, since I doubt anyone looks to peplum movies as accurate educational sources about classical mythology.
Okay, sorry, I’ll shut up now about mythological minutiae. At least for the moment.)
#17 by lyzard on October 1, 2009 - 5:16 pm
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One of the weird things in these films is how they zig-zag back and forth between accurate detail and complete fabrication; it never really seems linked to story necessity.
Since Proteus had the job of defending Atlantis, I was assuming it wasn’t he who betrayed his father [sic.].
By the way, Aeolus makes a brief cameo appearance in The Revenge Of Hercules. “He gathers human words and carries them on the wind!”
#18 by Blake on October 1, 2009 - 5:38 pm
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The book on mythological creatures that I have just mentions that Senex Maris is a seal-herder and that, if you want to know the future (or hidden things from the past-present), you have to grapple with him and hold on to him, even when he changes forms.
#19 by Read MacGuirtose on October 1, 2009 - 6:15 pm
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Odd… I don’t know what that book is, but at least in this case it seems to be a little inaccurate. “Senex Maris” is just Latin for “Old Man of the Sea”… it’s not so much an individual character as an archetype (which, again, seems to have originated with Proteus and similar classical sea gods).
The description fits Proteus, though… Proteus could indeed reveal the future and hidden facts, and indeed would only answer questions of those who successfully subdued him—as I said, that was Menelaus’s reason for grappling with Proteus in the Odyssey. Even the “seal herder” part sort of fits, insofar as, though Proteus was a god of the sea, not a seal herder, Menelaus did first encounter him in the form of a seal, sleeping among a colony of seals. So it sounds like the book in question is giving a slightly garbled description of Proteus (and/or Nereus, an extremely similar god who may or may not have originally been supposed to be the same entity), but mistakenly calls him by a generic Latin phrase instead of a name. (Though Proteus was sometimes referred to by that phrase, so I guess it’s not entirely out of line…)
#20 by Blake on October 2, 2009 - 1:57 pm
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The book is “Mythological Creatures” by Paulita Sedgwick. Despite a few errors and omissions here and there, it’s a nice reference book for kids who want to learn about mythology (and the pictures of the female characters aren’t shy about showing nipples, either, which I find kind of awesome, for some reason).
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