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The overture presents the Roman eye on Greek legend, plus a note of Noh in the masked oracle who predicts "every shriek will become music." (She's flanked by fire pits and mirrored in pond water, streamers swirl before the lenses for good measure.) Hercules (Reg Park) comes home to an accursed Deianira (Leonora Ruffo), the usurper (Christopher Lee) is behind it, the mission points to Hades. The Golden Apple must be seized across a burning lake, along the way Theseus (George Ardisson) sinks into the bubbling magma only to hit it off with Persephone (Ida Galli). The temptation is a maiden bare but for tresses and chains, the guardian is a behemoth made of stone. "Zeus, my father, guide my hand if what I'm about to do is just." Beefy peplum lovingly transformed by Mario Bava's psychedelic gels and fog machines, as purely a leçon de mise en scène as the Powell-Pressburger Tales of Hoffmann. Tintoretto is the principal modality, Lee in black is out of El Greco, his visage materializes upside-down in a gory puddle. Crimson columns under indigo skies, green-purple-cherry planes of artifice to compose an infernal grotto. "Believe in what you do, not what you see," thus the leap of faith amidst flames, cf. Boorman's Exorcist II: The Heretic. The putrefied hand reaching out of the tomb multiplies with an uncanny creak, the hero negotiates the ghoulish hordes by hurling obelisks. "Oh god of evil, the great dragon has swallowed the moon—and now my destiny shall be fulfilled." A fountain of imagery for Fellini Satyricon and no mistake. With Marisa Belli, Mino Doro, Gaia Germani, Franco Giacobini, and Rosalba Neri.
--- Fernando F. Croce |