An eruption of popularity sparked by Pietro Francisi’s Hercules (1959), starring Steve Reeves, helped make the Italian peplum or sword-and-sandal movie into an internationally successful genre, with an air of trashy, semi-illicit appeal, for a short but memorable reign. A similar craze for Asian martial arts movies would be sparked in the west some ten to fifteen years later. Such luminaries of Italian genre cinema as Mario Bava and Sergio Leone did apprenticeships in making their compulsory peplum entry. This genre’s essential simplicity was a great part of its appeal, operating, like Shaw Brothers’ wu xia flicks, on a level of rigorously elemental emotional and moral drama, punctuated by fantastic displays of physical prowess. At its worst, the clichés of peplum were amusing, a fresco of ill-dubbed muscle-men in miniskirts throwing about papier-mache boulders.
But at its best the peplum could connect with the bare-boned force of myth and become journeys through the Italian film industry’s straitened but inventive, often eye-gorging beauties, with plots and characterisations thankfully delivered from fashionable complications, all rendered in hyperbolic Technicolor. The highpoint of this glut is probably Bava’s superlative, hallucinogenic cross-breed, Hercules in the Haunted World (1961). Giorgio Ferroni’s career, like many other talented jobbing Italian directors including Sergio Corbucci and Antonio Margheriti, charts the phases of Italian commercial cinema precisely, with stints in neo-realism, peplum, horror, and spaghetti westerns. Ferroni’s most regarded movie today is his 1961 horror film Mill of the Stone Women, although he made several other high-profile historical action flicks like La Guerra de Troia (1961). Not surprisingly, however, for a director who possessed strong affinities with horror, Ferroni’s work on this film is most interesting when it strays close to the gothic. The branding of Hercules vs. Moloch is however misleading, as it doesn’t actually feature the reputable demigod: rather, sometime-Tarzan Gordon Scott plays Glaucus, a prince of Tiryns, who takes on the pseudonym of Hercules when he ventures undercover, in a story that actually plays as semi-realistic rewrite of the Minotaur myth. The opening of Hercules vs. Moloch sees the population of Mycenae forced to relocate after their city is destroyed by natural disaster, and the statue of the patron god Moloch seems to crumble in flames, suggesting the anger of the god at his unruly worshippers. The king dies, leaving behind his young daughter, Medea, and his pregnant second wife, the beautiful but sociopathically narcissistic Demeter (Rosalba Neri).
The Mycenaeans rebuild their city with impenetrable walls and, with Demeter ruling, aided by the corrupt and vicious general Penthius (Arturo Dominici) and obsessive High Priest Asterion (Nerio Bernardi), they set up a reign of terror with a mix of martial bullying and religious mystique. Claiming her grown son is the earthly vessel of Moloch, whom he’s been named for, Demeter has declared him both holy figure and heir to the city over Medea’s claim. Mycenae forces other cities to pay tribute by sending selected sacrifices, all attractive youths, to satisfy Moloch’s blood-lust. Asterion has ignored the Earth Goddess in favour of Moloch, and the population of the city suffers from a famine they believe caused by this neglect. After the city of Argyra is punitively attacked by Mycenae, Glaucus successfully argues to his father, the King of Tiryns, that they must resist, and he hatches a plan to infiltrate Mycenae amongst the next batch of tributes, whilst his father concludes alliances with other cities. Amongst the tributes, Glaucus meets the Princess of Argyra, Deianira (Jany Clair), and lets her in on his plan. He makes contact with the Mycenaean resistance, led by the soldier Euneos (Michel Lemoine), who is ashamed at his inability to stand up to Penthius and his cabal.
The strong theme of peplum films in this period, of the emergence of individual and communal liberty from dictatorship, subjugation, and superstition, is certainly in evidence throughout Hercules vs. Moloch, with Scott’s Glaucus as its suitably jut-jawed, well-groomed arbiter. The other constant refrain of the genre, that of physical strength as avatar for moral strength, is also dominant: Glaucus earns appreciation and respect through his prowess, for, when ushered into Mycenae, he wrestles and defeats an abusive soldier before Demeter. The Queen, impressed and lustful, pardons him and appoints him Captain of the Guard. An interesting undercurrent therefore inflects Hercules vs. Moloch as most of the unhappy Mycenaeans regard him as a stooge and traitor, even as he tries to use his accidental position of power to quietly leaven their brutal repression. Glaucus quickly uses up his advantage when he stops Penthius from raping Medea (Alessandra Panaro). Penthius gets revenge by reporting the incident with his and Glaucus’ roles reversed, and Glaucus is quickly stripped of rank and imprisoned. He then has to fight through an elaborately tricky gladiatorial match where he and other tribute males are chained to the females. They have to fight off attackers without pulling their chained partners from the small stages on which they’re perched, on pain of the ladies being riddled with arrows. Later, Glaucus manages a cool escape when he’s entrapped in a tiny cell with high walls, so that Penthius can mock him from on high; fortunately the cell proves just wide enough that with arms and legs splayed against the walls, Glaucus can walk his way up to the (fortunately, easily dislodged) bars.
Ferroni’s feel for symbolic intensity isn’t entirely squandered, although for the most part Hercules vs. Moloch is agreeably and functionally one-dimensional, in a fashion that would be forgettable but solid enough for viewing on a dull and rainy eve. Familiar weaknesses of this fare are certainly in evidence: the acting is mostly static and cardboard in declamatory exchanges, not helped by the dubbing, although the major leads are certainly dessert for the eyes. There are some of the worst fake punches in the history of cinema, but generally the interpersonal combat scenes have the familiar, meaty immediacy required of peplum. To the same degree, the waving spears and trundling chariots of the army battles are boring and flatly directed. Combat scenes are augmented with stock footage, hordes of milling extras, and a couple of gleefully awful models, whilst Carlo Rustichelli’s uncharacteristically tinny score blares with disregard for intimacy and nuance. But Ferroni’s sense of design and staging, with a constant flow of lovingly arranged, geometrically balanced shots, and the sustained drama of the fairly strong story, keep the film afloat. The script, written by Ferroni, Remigio Del Grosso, and Arrigo Equini, offers a clear and consistent series of narrative doublings, squaring off positive and negative versions of masculine qualities throughout, manifest between the poles of Glaucus and Penthius, with Euneos between as the castrated product of a repressive society trying to man up. Ferroni goes a step further in also mirroring feminine qualities, with Demeter contrasted by Medea and Deianira’s regal resistance. Demeter’s desire to exterminate her younger rival evokes variations on the Snow White myth like last year’s Snow White and the Huntsman where this substratum was turned into the central theme, with Ferroni struggling to avoid a mere lapse into matriarchy-as-unnatural-horror refrain like so many ‘50s stories (e.g. Devil Girl From Mars, 1954). Psycho-sexual and political motifs are entwined throughout; the corrupt order is associated with various forms of domination, hierarchical displacement, and the perverted progeny which results.
Ferroni manages to keep in focus the patterns in which Greek mythology often communicated communal values through personal symbolic battles: the successes of Theseus in killing the Minotaur in a victory over sacrificial religion, and Jason over nature worship by thieving the Golden Fleece as a means to dislodge dictatorship, signal in each case the end of an old order and the birth of political government and abstract religious devotion. Here a natural order is restored, as the narrative segues into supernaturalism: although Moloch as a Minotaur variant is specifically demystified, Asterion is struck down by lightning as he moves to sacrifice Medea, the punishment by the Earth Goddess for profaning her servant. This is an ironic pay-off, as Demeter forced Medea to be consecrated as a virgin priestess for the goddess as way of permanently removing Medea as both a political and sexual threat: the blowback is therefore harshly apt, and the cleansing rain that falls hard upon is the signal for the destruction of Demeter’s regime. The association between Demeter’s drive to maintain political control with the aid of her military and priestly collaborators/drones, and clear her immediate space of pulchritudinous rivals, is translated into the misshapen flesh and murderous erotic rage of Moloch, her son, who inhabits labyrinthine caves beneath the city along with his cabal of priestesses: Moloch, grotesquely malformed, wears a dog mask and rules over his personal cultish religion of sadism, twisted offspring of a twisted order. The political power of Mycenae is entirely constructed around pleasing his appetite for destroying physical perfection, for which the tributes sent to Mycenae are destined. In an early scene, Penthius gifts the monster with the most beautiful of his own slave girls, and Moloch rips her face open with his sharp fingernails and pronounces: “Your beauty no longer offends me.” As in several Italian horror films of the period, like Il Boia Scarlatto (1964) and La Vergine di Norimberga (1963), the motif of the masked torturer with a homoerotically perfect body and disfigured face lording over a secret torture chamber where he gets to work out diseased and confused sexuality, is certainly in evidence here.
Whereas the bulk of Hercules vs. Moloch is mild, Ferroni’s direction and the mostly blasé film grammar suddenly gains energy, and the entertainment factor kicks up a notch, whenever Moloch and his bizarre cabal enter the frame. Ferroni stages some fluidic tracking shots that depict Moloch’s victims riddled with arrows in fresco-like scrolls of Sadean delight (echoing the artistic friezes of the victims in Mill of the Stone Women). His camera dashes along tunnels in pursuit of Moloch’s priestesses, after bursts of rhythmic editing and mirroring shots depict the priestesses emerging from their dark abodes to commence their ritual accompaniment to Moloch’s predations. Moloch’s underground grotto is decorated by skeletal trees and sulphurous walls, through which his priestesses, left agreeably free of disfigurement and who enable his cruelties, gyrate and leer with savage delight like satanic groupies, as they pound on bongo drums and dance scantily clad through variegated hues of green and red light, in celebrating carnage as prelude to orgiastic delights. Aptly and deliciously, as Glaucus leads his victorious, ludicrously plumed macho men into the grotto, the priestesses dash about, unleashing fire and brimstone that brings the tacky arbiters of civilisation down around their ears, in a complete dissolution of sense that presages rebirth, a celebration of a descent back into primal irrationality, before the drama can resolve conventionally with Glaucus dully wrestling the unmasked Moloch. There’s still a malefic beauty and wild, disorientating élan to these brief scenes that jolts Hercules vs. Moloch out of the routine and into a realm that suggests Ferroni, if he had, like Bava and Leone, fought for a niche to rule, would have found more opportunities to exercise his weirder, more pungent gifts.
