Conquérants héroïques

The Avenger covers the story of Aeneas and how he led some survivors of Troy into exile on the Italian peninsula. Steve Reeves repeats his role Aeneas from The Trojan War as the exiled Trojans look to make a new home.

Unfortunately in Etruscan Italy their addition complicates what looks like a delicately balanced situation among a lot of petty kings. One of them covets the land the Trojans have been granted on to settle.

In the tradition of the Trojan War the film is cut above a lot of the Peplum epics that the Italians were churning out in the early 60s, taking advantage of those sets left over from Ben-Hur and Quo Vadis. It's all based on Virgil's Aeneid.

And we get to see more of Steve Reeves physical development. That's what many were plunking their money down to see/

Yes Steve Reeves has done better movies. Maybe just his presence here will make you feel differently about this (and the rating I and many others have given). But if you try to be as objective as possible, this does not really stand out against most of the other Sword and Sandals movies .. it isn't the worst either of course, but there are so many ... it's exhausting.

So yes this is a Trojan story or some resemblance of that. It may even continue from another movie as another reviewer has suggested. Nothing of that seems to be needed to get the gist of it all. Fight scenes are ok, not anything to get too excited about either

THE LAST GLORY OF TROY - aka WAR OF THE Trojans, aka THE AVENGER - is the sequel to THE WOODEN HORSE OF TROY, a film that portrayed the Trojan War and also starred Steve Reeves as the eponymous hero Aeneas. This time around, the Trojans are a defeated people, having fled from their sacked city, but a mixture of courage and cunning sees them go on to found what is modern-day Rome.

Unfortunately THE LAST GLORY OF TROY is a somewhat lacklustre sequel that more often than not is a rather BORING peplum flick. It has relatively lengthy running time, and much of that running time is made up of small talk between dull characters. Even Steve Reeves doesn't have much of a part to play here, feeling like a supporting character in his own movie, although the cast is populated with familiar faces including Giacomo Rossi-Stuart, Liana Orfei and Gianni Garko.

The film does pick up for its second half, offering a handful of battle sequences, although the choreography isn't particularly great in these. But it lacks the tight script and focus of the first film and with six different scriptwriters credited it feels like a bit of a confused mess, struggling to make sense of itself.

This is an unnecessary and very much inferior sequel to THE Trojan HORSE (1961), evidently made on a reduced budget (though the murky, pan-and-scan print I watched certainly did no favors to it or the scenes from the original which were interspersed into the narrative as flashbacks!); Steve Reeves reprises his role of Enea - whose lineage, we are told, eventually led to Romulus and Remus and the founding of Rome (incidentally, the actor appeared in a peplum about that very event called DUEL OF THE TITANS [1961]!) - but his performance here is somewhat mechanical and less convincing...though that may be due to the English dubbing, whereas I had watched the earlier film in Italian!!

As a whole, THE AVENGER (the print I watched bore the title THE LAST GLORY OF TROY, given to it when sold to TV) is only marginally better than the ordinary peplum: the plot is rather dreary this time around, in comparison to the fascinating events depicted in the original; the cast - despite the presence of Euro-Cult regulars like Gianni Garko (essaying the role of the villain) and Giacomo Rossi-Stuart (effectively dispatched by a hail of arrows in the style of Akira Kurosawa's THRONE OF BLOOD [1957]!) - is less interesting; and the battle sequences are only memorable for the ridiculously-shaped helmets with which the warriors on both fronts are saddled!!

The Trojans in Lazio - Steve Reeves as Aeneas

This historical adventure film by Giorgio Venturini, made in 1962, was based on motifs from Vergil's (also known as: Publius Vergilius Maro) Latin epic "Aeneid". The film, called "La leggenda di Enea" in Italian and "The Avenger" in English, is the sequel to "La battaglia di Troja" by Giorgio Ferroni, also starring Steve Reeves. The filming took place in what was then Yugoslavia.

After losing the war for their hometown of Troy, the remaining Trojans flee across the Mediterranean and, under the leadership of Aeneas (Steve Reeves), reach Latium, where they finally want to settle after a long wandering. The local King Latino (Mario Ferrari) is benevolent towards the Trojan refugees and would like to allow them to settle. The leaders of the other tribes are not really happy about this, so violent conflicts arise. Important opponents are Liana Orfei as the combative Camilla (like her cousin Moira Orfei ("Ursus in the Valley of the Lions"), she comes from an Italian family of artists and was seen several times in Italian films of the time, including alongside Lex Barker in "I pirati della costa"), Gianni Garko as the frighteningly cunning Turnus and Maurice Poli as his willing henchman. Euryalus (Giacomo Rossi Stuart) and the beautiful Lavinia (Carla Marlier) stand by Aeneas and his Trojans.

With the powerful fight scenes, in which not only Steve Reeves can shine as the title hero, and the relatively large number of characters with their different ways of acting for a peplum or sandal film, this film strives to achieve a certain level in order to do justice to the literary original become. This is also quite successful. However, it's all too easy to see the tricks in film, for example when Steve Reeves' double is used or individual fighters don't seem as motivated as they should be.

The end of the fighting shown in the film creates the basis for the later emergence of the city of Rome, which would then result in Roman world domination for almost a whole millennium. The Trojan Aeneas is considered a pioneer of later Rome, which is what Virgil's "Aeneid" is also about. The area around today's Rome is still called Lazio, which can be seen, for example, in the name of the well-known football club Lazio Roma.

With slight reservations, this film is not only worth seeing for fans of the peplum genre!