Atlas

It'sa Roger Corman flick about how the hero spent his time while Heracles was holding up the heavens. I guess. Apparently he went to Greece and got involved with with a tyrant who liked to dress his soldiers in simply darling short red skirts with matching blouses.

Because it was shot by Corman, the actors speak English. This meant I couldn't amuse myself by noting how every actor sounded like Paul Frees when saying things that didn't match his mouth. I did think about the line from Airplane!, of Peter Graves asking the kid if he liked gladiator movies. Me, I don't. Oh, I like good ones. Ilike the stuff that Harryhausen did the stop-motion for because, while the actors in that average lousy, you still have something by Harryhausen to cheer you up. But like a genre means you like the lousy stuff too.

But not here. Story, eh. FIght choreography, lousy. Actors, didn't recognize any of them and the movie made clear why.

... that is, if you dig flicks that involve men wearing really high cut "togas" that look more like skirts. The battle scenes are absolutely laughable, with lots of shots of shields being hit by things (occasionally the wooden swords), and lots of guys who throw spears really poorly at their crew-cut Greek rivals. The charges just sort of slow in front of enemy lines, once even to turn around and change a formation four feet from the "battle line." Some of the editing looks like it may have been done by a deranged chimp, and that's just for the important dialogue scenes. There are a few shots where the camera literally gets knocked out of place. A final word of warning: the director took full advantage of shot width, so if you are unfortunate enough to watch this on tv, several scenes will have half of the speakers cut off at the edge of the screen. If you need something to MST3K, come and get it!

Playing the title role of Atlas and certainly having the physique for it is Michael Forest best known for playing the God Apollo on Star Trek prime. He gets himself involved in a civil war where one army is besieging a city state.

When a single combat winner take all duel is arranged the besieger goes out to look for a champion and just by coincidence the Olympic Games are being held. Frank Wolff finds Michael Forest and he will face Christos Exarchos the prince of the city. When Forest beats Exarchos but doesn't kill him, Wolff should have thought right then and there that this will mean trouble for him.

Roger Corman produced Atlas. It was his attempt to make a Peplum, sand and scandal less than an epic. The European players stroll rather listlessly through the film. But Frank Wolff, God Bless him is having a whale of time playing Proximades the tyrant who shows pieces of what Peter Ustinov did with Nero in Quo Vadis and later on Christopher Plummer in the Fall Of The Roman Empire. Wolff is so infectiously evil, he makes a mediocre film worth watching.

Proximates the Tyrant is a brutal arrogant conqueror. Atlas is his personal warrior but eventually, the hero sees the evil within his king.

Roger Corman is trying to do a sword and sandal epic. It's bad. The acting is bad. The writing is bad. They are able to use some nice sets. Most of them are ruins in Greece. Otherwise, it's all rather bad.

Cheap, sure. Corman --- of course. But not the usual fare, not even for the King of the B's. Here's the backstory: Corman was in Europe shooting another feature and supposedly entered into a co-production deal with another company. At the last moment his co-producers pulled out and took their money with them. Now Corman had two choices: abandon the project, or shoot the script he had for half the money he'd budgeted. Which did he choose? Well, the movie got made didn't it? Screenwriter Charles Griffith had also written LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS and originally wanted to call this movie ATLAS, THE GUIDED MUSCLE, but Corman nixed that. So we get Steve Forrest (who also played Apollo on a STAR TREK episode) as a slightly malnourished looking Atlas, standing around with a bunch of extras in Greek costumes (including Griffith and Corman himself), looking around at the "grandeur" of ancient Greece, a bunch of the crumbling ruins which the villain explains away by saying "Well, we've been at war so long all the buildings have been demolished" or something like that. I'm not going to pretend this is a GOOD movie, but it's a great example of the unstoppable Corman machine in action.