31 Days of Cheese - Day 20: Goliath and the Dragon

Before they started about making 1,245 westerns a week during the 60’s-70’s, the Italian film industry during the 50’s and early 60’s spent it’s time churning 1,245 films a week set in the ancient world .

These Sword and Sandal Epics (Peplum was the Italian term) ran pretty much the same, insert muscleman with waxed chest and armpits – Steve Reeves was the prototype but lord love a duck a lot of them came along after he did – call him Hercules or some other name Maciste, Samson, et al, have him fight people and monsters in a vaguely ancient Greek/Roman setting and then end the film.

Some were entertaining some were just weird and some were kind of weird and entertaining and some were like 1960’s Goliath and the Dragon just blah.

In the original Italian this was the story of Hercules who comes back home to Thebes after finishing his seven labors. Turns some other film company in the US owned rights using the name Hercules in a film so he became Goliath.

I’m going to call him Herc anyway. Just because.

Anyway Herc is played by Mark Forrest who does have the muscles to do the job if not quite the acting chops but Herc in this films just yells a lot and smashes thing so there isn’t a lot he needs to do. Per the IMDB.com he used the money he made from these films to study Opera.

So at first we see Herc fighting a very very fake 3 headed dog that breathes fire (you see the nozzles) then a guy in a bat suit. Both fights take about 13 seconds. He then sees a dragon (and we see a stop motion dragon) but doesn’t’ kill it because, well we have to wait for the end of the film for him to do that.

He then grabs some kind of red jewel and returns it to a god’s statue. Which god isn’t quite made plain but it’s a god and we accept that.

Then the rest of the film is confused mix of plots launched by several people including the Evil King with a name too long to type played by Broderick Crawford. As side note, when the time came to dub this puppy into English they had someone else do the voice for Broderick which is very disconcerting but I assume cheaper than paying Broderick any money.

The film sort of wanders around now, there is a scene were Herc fights an elephant, he also ties up his brother to a tree because he’s in love with the wrong woman (looking back on my own life, I wish someone had done that with me once or twice. Maybe I wouldn’t have made the complete ass of myself that I ended up doing. Well never mind), also he yells at the gods, a centaur attempts to kidnap his wife; he tears his house down in a fit of pique. Herc in this film is a bit of a jerk. In the old legends he isn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer either so this almost works. There are some children of his that vanish halfway through the film and a dwarf that shows up in a lot of these films. A very annoying dwarf I should mention.

And at the end Herc faces first the stop motion dragon and then the head of the dragon. The head looks like a very very large hand puppet and doesn’t put up much resistance to Herc. Then the bad guys are vanquished his wife is rescued and Herc starts rebuilding. No sign of the children however.

There is a lot of talk in this film, and you rarely seen the bad guys and Herc in the same shot. Also the Monsters are very fake looking (there’s guy in a bear suit that is just embarrassing to look at). It’s a rather disjointed and not quite there example of this kind of film.

Enjoy with a chicken parmesan hero.