Herkules und die Prinzessin von Troja

In 1965 the boom in Italian sandal films was gradually coming to an end. As a result, a pilot film for a series was filmed for American television, but it was not realized. For almost 50 minutes you can watch Hercules (Gordon Scott) save a Trojan princess (Diana Hyland) from being sacrificed to a strange sea monster that looks terribly artificial. The only things worth mentioning are Gordon Mitchell as the pirate captain and Giorgio Ardisson (who would soon start off as the "Italian James Bond") as Leander.

The voice-overs, which comment on the events like a storybook, are particularly annoying. You can clearly see that this was not produced for the cinema, but for television.

Rightly forgotten!

Joseph E. Levine and B movie maven Albert band get together to produce a TV pilot that never got off the ground because the tykes were beginning to bore by this time but for revisiting a campy genre this one is painless and fills the void.The plot is well...minimal so who cares? The main points here are in their highest form. It's short and sweet,beefy and is never at a loss for action. It's also mercifully done in English. The Sea Critter is a Carlo Rombaldi creation (E.T.) worthy of A.I.P. creature constructor Paul Blaisdel's envy.In short it's wacky and original if not very menacing.The major fault I would say that in comparison to many other sword and sandal epics this one is not too babe-a-licious.We only get one semi hot princess and the obligatory harem dances and snake charmers are conspicuously absent.Guess they weren't aiming the series towards the dads. At 47 minutes it's a sweaty trip to fun land.

Not a great movie, this was (as has been pointed out) a pilot for an unsold television series (produced by Joseph E. Levine, who distributed the original Steve Reeves HERCULES) based on the adventures of Hercules. I remembering looking forward to this after seeing a magazine article featuring Carlo Rambaldi's sea monster. In truth, the monster is the only thing worth watching in the show. It's well crafted but badly used. In a few shots it looks very convincing, in others like a big mechanical puppet pointlessly waving its claws around. Still worth checking out for pre-CGI monster fans and Gordon Scott makes a solid Hercules as usual.

It's silly to complain that this is a B-movie made for television - because that's exactly what it is, and doesn't pretend to be anything else. And here's the good news - it's a pretty darn good B-movie made for television. One of the major problems with standard Italian Hercules films is that the are usually 100- 120 minutes long, too long for the amount of story they have to tell; consequently there's a lot of padding to them, usually in the middle. This film is kept lean and tight at 47 minutes - only the highlights of the story are here, and that's all we need.

I must remark that production values are gorgeous for mid-60s television. The acting is professional, the pacing is snappy, the story interesting (for this genre), the special fx are on a par with better television sci-fi/fantasy shows of the period - this is solid B-movie entertainment. Worth checking out.

Gordon Scott is Hercules! There are two kinds of monsters: political and sea monsters and it is up to our muscle man hero Hercules to fight both.

This one is fine. Not a good film but fun to watch Hercules battle another large monster on the screen. Average story - no more, no less than most of the other Hercules films. Quirky dialogue and the large sea monster are really the highlights of the show.

Yet another film to simply kill another Saturday or Sunday afternoon with or a fine late night movie to fall asleep to. Nothing grand but does hold some entertainment value to those that like the old sword and sandal films and giant monsters.

3/10