Hercules
Short description
This Italian-American fantasy adventure retells the myth of Hercules, the half-divine strongman sent to Earth by Zeus to confront King Minos, who seeks world domination. Hercules becomes the guardian of the princess Cassiopea and falls in love with her, but when Minos's daughter Ariadne abducts the princess, he sets out to rescue her. His journey brings him up against strange creatures and a sorceress, and he is aided by the benevolent enchantress Circe. The film blends classical mythology with science-fiction elements, pitting the hero against foes created through stop-motion animation.
Luigi Cozzi directs and wrote the screenplay, following his earlier films Godzilla, Starcrash and Contamination; a sequel, The Adventures of Hercules, came two years later. Lou Ferrigno, previously known for playing the Hulk on television, takes the title role, with Sybil Danning as Ariadne, Brad Harris as Augias, Rossana Podestà as Hera, Ingrid Anderson as Cassiopea and Mirella D'Angelo as Circe. The Cannon Group production, for which Golan and Globus served as producers, carried a budget of about 3 million dollars and took roughly 11 million worldwide.
Audience response has been weak: on IMDb the rating sits at 4.1 from about 4,900 votes, and on TMDB at 4.9 from around 126 votes. A critics' rating of 3.3 from nine reviews places it close to those scores.
What's left behind the scenes
- Initially, Bruno Mattei was supposed to work on the screenplay, but Cannon Films subsequently asked Luigi Cozzi to rewrite it completely. The reason was that the script written by Mattei simply did not appeal to the producers (as Cozzi himself noted, it was close to pornography). Cozzi completed it in just three weeks, and the studio, seeing such efficiency, offered him to become the director of the film. However, Cozzi needed to meet a very tight deadline, and, as the lead actor Lou Ferrigno was under contract and to avoid a significant increase in his fee, the director, as he himself noted, had to work at a frantic pace.
- At that time, Superman-style films were popular, and producers asked the director if he could make "Hercules" in a similar vein, to which they received the answer that if it was necessary for them, then yes.
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