Maciste nelle miniere del re Salomone

This 1964, Sword & Sandal saga's most unintentionally hilarious moment took place when Maciste (Reg Park) suddenly came out of the deep trance-like state that the beautiful, but wicked, Queen Fazira had put him under.

You really have to see the goofy and totally unconvincing expression on Park's beefy face for yourself to know what I'm talking about here. But, believe me, it's a real hoot of some of the most embarrassingly incompetent acting that you're ever gonna see.

From start to finish, this dreary Italian production (whose outdoor scenes were shot in South Africa) was a blundering mess of stale storytelling that purposely threw in a couple of scenes of whippings and torture in a lame attempt to try to generate some viewer interest.

Yes. It was nice to see the tall giraffes at such a close range. And, yes, the 2 darling lion cubs were certainly mighty cute, little critters, indeed - But, as far as the rest of the movie went - It sucked, big-time.

Muscleman, Reg Park (at 6'1" & 230 lb) was 36 (and in top physical shape as a bodybuilder) at the time of this picture. In 2007, at the age of 79, Reg Park died from skin cancer.

"Maciste in King Solomon's Mines", as this film is known (although just barely) in the states, is another in the long line of sword and sandal "epics" churned out in Italy in the wake of the hugely successful Hercules films starring Steve Reeves.

Toplined by Reg Park (whose claim to fame is that he's brawnier than most of the other so-called "musclemen" who played Hercules, Goliath, Maciste, etc. - it certainly isn't his acting, which is atrocious and seemingly dubbed by himself or some equally erudite ex-high school football hero), it's the story of a mythic hero of the people, summoned to the jungle city of Zimba to free the oppressed masses, who have been enslaved by the evil Queen Fazira to dig gold (and more gold) from the legendary mines of King Solomon.

Once Maciste arrives in the city, he is overpowered by Fazira's personal guard and bewitched with a magical ankle bracelet, which causes him to lose his free will, relegating him to servitude in the mines. Soon (but not soon enough), he is freed from his mind-numbing paralysis and exacts his revenge upon Fazira & her minions & co-conspirators, frees the slaves and installs his friend as the new ruler in an energetic finale.

Having accomplished a job, well done, he walks off into the veldt, awaiting his next adventure.

I admit I like this stuff (I grew up watching hundreds of such "gladiator" pictures, or peblums, as they are also known)), but this opus is not one of the best examples of the genre. Filmed in South Africa, the film makes little use of the scenery other than to pad the running time with a variety of nature shots. It's for "early 60's" nostalgia buffs & die-hard fans of the genre.

These types of films are virtually unshown on TV today (except for an occasional airing on the TNT network). The version I saw, obtained from a PD video company, has severely washed-out color and is not nearly worth the investment.

Reg Park had the body for these "Hercules" movies -- providing you like 'em bulky and beefy -- but he had neither the face nor the personality nor the talent. It takes nearly half-an-hour for him to make his first appearance here and when he does, he adds virtually nothing to the proceedings.

This means the movie must survive on its peripheral values and it does have a few of those. The African setting is at least a bit different and there's an impressively-large sculpture of an Egyptian head that can be retracted into a wall to reveal a secret passageway underneath. While Wandisa Guida makes for a rather glum heroine, Eleonora Bianchi adds zest to her role as the evil usurper and the unconvincingly-named "Dan Harrison" serves as an appealing young hero.

As usual in these affairs, there's a strong dose of male bondage-and-torture. Reg Park gets tied between two teams of horses which are supposed to pull him apart like a Thanksgiving wishbone, but a similar scene in Steve Reeves' "Goliath and the Barbarians" did a better job of it. Dan Harrison gets whipped in a dungeon but, strange, the bloody marks on his back don't change one bit no matter how many times the whip strikes him. Then Harrison is chained to the wall of an arena so that he can be both stabbed and crushed by a contraption which is slowly propelled toward him. It's part of the movie's problem with its leading man that in this scene, a sweat-covered Harrison -- stripped to a loincloth to reveal an adequate but unspectacular physique -- is far sexier and more attractive than Reg Park could ever hope to be.

Heavy and slow-moving as its beefy star Reg Park, "Maciste nelle miniere di re Salomone" is one of the least attractive pepla I have seen. The bad impression is worsened by the prejudice contained in the narration and in the depiction of the African tribes. If British Park, who looks like a mammoth version of Terry-Thomas, is not appealing as a mythological hero, Italian director Piero Rognoli thinks otherwise, setting his camera in the weirdest places to show the bodybuilder's neck, back muscles or nipples, or making him repeat scenes from other films that do not improve a bit from the original: fighting a lion (already seen in a dozen of films, done by Victor Mature, Steve Reeves, Mark Forest, Ed Fury and others), or having horses hitched to his wrists, as the animals pull in opposite directions. And what is worst is that the film editor seems to have no idea of how to cut parallel actions in tension-filled sequences, as when Abucar, the young co-lead (Bruno Piergentili, billed as Dan Harrison) is about to be killed, while Maciste takes an eternity to reach the city and try to save him; or when the evil queen Fazira (Wandisa Guida, wearing a towering black wig) and throne usurper Riad (Elio Jotta, billed as Leonard G. Smith) decide to bath maid Samara (Eleonora Bianchi) in liquid gold "a la Goldfinger", as it takes ages to free Maciste from the gold anklet that has made him forget his identity. Add Francesco de Masi's pastiche score and start counting the minutes. If you are a peplum completist or share Arnold Schwarzenegger's admiration for Park, watch "Maciste nelle miniere di re Salomone". Otherwise, go to the beach.

Hmmm. Reg Park certainly looked the part as the muscle man dragooned - thanks to a magical anklet - into working in the mines of the nasty "Queen Fazira" (Wandisa Guida) after he had travelled all the way deep into the jungle to rescue his fellow prisoners. They are all digging like mad in the hope that they can find the legendary treasure of the biblical king, but thus far aren't having too much luck. She's getting fed up waiting so he'd better get a move on, or better yet - find some way to remove his malicious enchantment so he can start throwing the polystyrene scenery around and get into the action. Aside from the ropey production standards and the equally over-scripted dialogue, that's really the problem here. What action there is is largely reserved for the last ten minutes and by then the whole thing is entirely procedural. What this does have in it's favour is a bit more quality from the studio sets, and some imagination has certainly gone into these to give the thing a better look than many of this genre, but little use is made of any real African scenarios and the stage-bound nature of the storytelling robs this of most of it's pace or distinctiveness. It's an hybrid of ideas and well trammelled stories that seems a good deal longer than ninety minutes.