Hercules and the Captive Women

This 1961 Sword and Sandals epic has surprisingly good production values but still comes across as a low rent B movie. Hercules (Reg Park) and the King of Thebes are headed back to the palace after a good-natured brawl in a tavern when the sky darkens and a ghostly messenger foretells imminent doom for the world. The King summons the other kings of Greece to address the threat. They all minimize the threat so he must go himself. Worse, Hercules refuses to go because his wife won't let him.

 

Hercules wakes up on a ship well out to sea. He's been shanghaied! Of course, he finds this rather humorous and goes back to sleep. Also on the ship is Androcles, King of Thebes, Timoteo the Dwarf (not the bearded kind – just a little person), and Hylas the son of Hercules. Hylas hides from his father because Hercules had forbidden him to go on the quest.

The ship sails into a mysterious fog and is sunk. Hercules arrives on a beach where he finds a cave surrounded by women apparently petrified into the cave walls. One woman is not yet entirely petrified and warns him off. Ignoring her, he instead does battle with the beast in the cave, which transforms through the battle, finally settling on a lizard-man like beast. Once Hercules kills the beast, the woman is instantly freed from the cave wall and the mists that hid the isle of Atlantis vanish.

Hercules soon finds himself with the Queen of Atlantis who feigns joy at the return of her daughter. In truth, prophecy tells that Atlantis will be destroyed should a daughter survive. In comes as little surprise that Atlantis comes to a cataclysmic end.

Reg Park – a mentor to Arnold Schwarzenegger – is a surprisingly good Hercules. He is jovial, rash, cunning, and built like an ox. The movie suffers from some of the support characters. Androcles is starts as an unwilling participant who is LEADING the mission and then becomes a brainwashed minion of the queen. Hylas and Timoteo flit here and there, mostly distracting from the story. Timoteo is a comic figure; could a dwarf with Hercules be other?

It starts slow and drags at times. This could have been edited to be much shorter and the dialog needed work. Not particularly good.

 

This is an Italian film.  Reg Park made several more Hercules films, none of which I have seen, and later urged Arnold Schwarzenegger to star in Hercules in New York.