User Reviews

The monster barely puts in a cameo in this half gladiator/half cave man film where the good guys are all blondes and the villains all brunettes. What does exist of the Hydra (Fire Monster) is one of the silliest looking creatures in cinema history that looks like a monster face painted on somebody's index finger with the camera up real close to try and fool its audience. The rest of the film (following a "Blob" like theme song obviously added to the American release print) mainly surrounds the alleged son of Hercules (named Maciste) stepping in to save the day as he battles the dark-haired villains to free the light haired captured slaves after they've been conquered. While some of the action sequences are actually pretty intense, this is as forgettable as gladiator movies can get.

Here's a high-spirited Italian adventure film which doesn't let a low budget stop it having a wealth of action and adversaries for Maciste to fight again. In a typical marketing ploy, the main thrust of this film concerns the story of two warring tribes with the actual monsters themselves only being incidental to the plot of the film. Anybody who has seen any other peplum movies from the period will know what to expect, and there's not much in the way of surprise here. However, all of the attributes that we have come to love and expect (Maciste proving himself through strongman tasks, violent battle scenes, cheesy dialogue) are present and correct and as a whole the movie is a lot of fun. It's also pretty bizarrely plotted; for the first half of the film, the lead character is one of the tribesmen in the film, but later on it's Maciste who we follow through the countryside as he performs various feats of strength!

Amongst the film's many ingredients, we have cave-dwelling women wearing plentiful eye-liner, lots of unnecessary padded dancing scenes which grate on the senses, some small-scale battles which are well-shot and pretty exciting to watch, Maciste getting buried up to his neck in sand, a cheap and cheerful volcano explosion (which was apparently ripped off for the opening of COLOSSUS VS THE HEAD HUNTERS), some romance, and a fearsome cannibal tribe who still end up getting beaten up by Maciste. Our muscular strongman is played by the red-haired Reg Lewis this time around, and he proves to be a solid enough leading hero, with an ounce more charisma than others of his ilk. Supporting Italian faces like those of Margaret Lee and Luicano Marin will be familiar to those who have seen other Italian movies of the period, but they fail to leave much of an impression. Watch out for Bruno Mattei's name appearing in the credits!

Now, I was expecting a serious lack of monster action after reading a negative review of this movie, but I was pleasantly surprised. There are exactly four monsters in total. The first is an exceptionally cheesy and lovable sea serpent which rises from a lake on strings to terrorise some passers-by; it's not long before this unfortunate creature gets speared (through the eye!) by Maciste, so it didn't cause much of a threat. A sadistic shot shows blood frothing in the water as the monster dies, and I couldn't help but feel a pang of regret. This is definitely one of the weirdest-looking monsters I've seen in an Italian movie.

The second creature is pretty disappointing, a very-fake looking underwater serpent whom Maciste has an underwater knife battle with. It's pretty hard to see what's going on here and the sterile effects are less than convincing. A scene later in the movie has Maciste and his girlfriend coming upon a woodland clearing where they are menaced by a blown-up lizard! Hmm, I thought they only used these kind of back-projected effects in American movies, but I must have been mistaken. The shot is brief but it was a nice try anyway. The final monster is the biggest, and perhaps the least convincing! It's a giant papier-mache dragon which Maciste fights in a cave and brutalises before escaping. Great fun.

Maciste and the Monsters is not a film for all tastes. Many have come away disappointed. However, I think it's a brilliant film which offers up almost continuous action and perilous situations in a really old-fashioned way which is able to rival the best big-budget adventure movies there are. Sure, it's done on a smaller scale because of the budget, but it's just as impressive, if not more so, because of the limitations. A well-meaning and highly entertaining slice of sword-and-sandal adventure.

Another one of the erstwhile "Sons of Hercules" films by Embassy Pictures. This time the American dub turns Maciste into "Maxus," Son of Hercules. We get the usual super cool theme song tacked on by Embassy and a really goofy dub for Reg Lewis, who sounds like two different guys depending on the scene. And (owing to the crappy print quality) his ridiculous pompadour looks orange! All in all, a bizarre beefcake lead for this prehistoric adventure. This is old school cavemen stuff, with a papier mache volcano, foam boulders, and four, count 'em FOUR monsters - a lake monster, a multi headed hydra, one forced perspective monitor lizard, and a cave dragon! Not a bad haul! I love the dragons in peplum films. No fancy special effects processes, just a giant, immobile wood frame draped in canvas. Maybe the head(s) moves, and a little fire comes out, and then Hercules throws a stick at it and it falls over in all its inarticulate glory and some blood pours out the mouth.

This is one of those mythic peplum entries where the strongman ignores the boundaries of space and time to just go wherever the hell he wants in order to fight for what is right. In this case, Maxus defends a tribe of peaceful prehistoric sun worshipers from their aggressive, subterranean, moon worshiping neighbors. The peaceful tribe are basically a bunch of naive innocents, and Maxus runs around saving these dopey people from themselves. The action is spiked with the occasional monster highlight, and a third act volcanic eruption that plays as a low budget version of the climax to ONE MILLION YEARS BC, still four years to come.

You just can't go wrong with a fun film like this. It's cheap, it's cheerful, and Margaret Lee makes for one saucy cave dweller. By the time the theme song swells for THE END, you'll be blissfully humming along, awaiting the next adventure of THE SONS OF HERCULES!

Heed the words of Maxus: "Don't forget to defend yourselves from wild animals!"