The Medusa Vs The Son Of Hercules
The Medusa Vs The Son Of Hercules (1963) Rewatch: ❎
I originally intended to watch Rob Zombie’s take on The Munsters but after a short but not too short while, I was so confused as to how one film could avoid landing every single joke and have the actors completely and consistently make a balls of their lines. I’ve genuinely never seen a film that falls on its arse quite like it, it’s a really strange thing. Nothing about it makes sense to me.
So to some badly dubbed peplum to wash the taste away. One of a whole bunch of “we bought the rights, we re-dub them, everyone is a son of Hercules now if anyone asks” films, stuff I know I’ll enjoy.
It’s a pretty straightforward (though not exactly faithful to anything in particular) Perseus vs The Medusa tale, so much so that it’s borderline unfathomable that anyone would feel the need to rejig it so that Perseus is now one of the sons of Hercules but I guess it means we can roll out the incredible Sons Of Hercules theme song again so that makes it all worthwhile anyway.
For the most part, it is pretty standard swords and sandals stuff. Buff men fighting, bit of romance and intrigue and maybe some gods and monsters thrown in. I pretty much know how the film is going to go in seconds so the beauty for me is that I can just put my feet up and let it wash over me.
It helps in this particular case that a) the film has a really good dragon and b) Medusa herself is something else in this. No, literally something else. This is not the famous Medusa of Caravaggio’s imagination or a thousand other interpretations, for reasons not entirely explained she’s a tree like creature, wobbling her way towards soldiers, ready to turn them to stone with her singular glowing eye. When we first catch sight of her, it’s emerging from a dense fog, shuffling and juddering menacingly. It’s quite disconcertingly shot and really quite effective.
Sadly, the film largely forgets about her until the end where, well, we all know how it ends. Perseus is victorious though the budget doesn’t run to anything spectacular or too magical happening, instead it solves a little bit of a political problem and with that, the film wraps up.
Perfectly chill stuff to sit back and enjoy for what it is.