412-Hercules and the Captive Women

Film Year:  1961
Genre:  Adventure, Fantasy
Director:  Vittorio Cottafavi
Starring:  Reg Park, Fay Spain, Ettore Manni, Luciano Marin, Laura Efrikian
MST Season:  4

The Movie

“Today is dedicated to Uranus!”

Utterly confusing Hercules caper.  Admittedly watching it through this particular series isn’t doing the film any favors, as it has undoubtedly been edited down and the riffing talks over much of the dialogue.  What can be deciphered is that we have Hercules hitting the high seas and heading into random misadventures, including saving a woman from being eaten by an island, fighting a chameleon monster, and escaping the lost city of Atlantis.  But can he conquer his greatest foe, sleep apnea?

Of what can be said about these foreign sword and sandal movies, they’re some of the more interesting productions ever featured on the show.  They’re colorful and ambitious.  As for the movie itself, it’s probably the least interesting Hercules movie featured on the show.  It’s not as entertaining as Hercules and Hercules Unchained, nor as boobish as Hercules Against the Moon Men.  Hercules and the Captive Women offers some fairly cool albeit wonky set-pieces.  The shapeshifting monster in particular is a gas.

It’s not good, but I can think of worse ways to spend my time.

The Episode

The gimmick in the theater for this particular episode is that Gypsy is invited to watch the movie.  How fun is it?  Not very.  Gypsy has about two real riffs, and the rest of the time she either stares blankly at the screen or starts questioning the idea of MST in general, to which Servo and Crow dismiss her while Joel tries to support her.  Gypsy’s presence is a distraction.  Not only is she larger than the others, which means she covers a good chunk of the movie, but attention is drawn away from the movie as the jokes start spending a good amount of time at her expense.  Maybe if they played it for less awkwardness it might have been funnier, and while I get why they display Gypsy as not being very good in the theater, it’s pretty much just not the funniest skit they could have pulled together.  Luckily Gypsy doesn’t even last until the first commercial break, when she begins to realize the movie isn’t very good.  Then she bails.

The rest of the riffing is hit and miss.  There are some highs, sometimes unintentional hilarity from the film itself (I laughed hysterically at the sequence where Herc fights a shapeshifting monster), but then there are lulls of quips that just don’t spark much of a reaction.  It might not be their fault, as the movie itself is probably the least noteworthy Hercules movie they’ve tackled, but there seems to be less of an effort to rise to the occasion.

The host segments don’t do much for me.  Things like the Hercules action figure and the good natured brawl are cute, but I never really laughed during them.  The invention exchange is a swing and a miss.  The theme is babies, and while the props are creative, the Deep 13 invention of a lawn mower baby buggy looks jumbled together without a real joke while Joel’s womb headphones are more clever than they are funny.

What Hercules and the Captive Women boils down to is a cubic zirconia in the crown jewels of Hercules episodes that just feels run of the mill instead of fun.  Add in the opening gimmick that kind of backfires, and this one just doesn’t deliver.  But Hercules movies are never boring, and often just lavish and/or goofy enough to keep interest in the audience all by themselves.  If the theater work is on autopilot, at least the movie picks up the slack.  Hell, the many conversations in this movie about Uranus alone make it worth at least a gander.  Joel and the bots reacting to the statement “The Blood of Uranus” alone is a treat.

Average

The DVD and Blu-Ray

Shout Factory released this Hercules not-so-classic on their Volume XXIX set, which included a solid print of the episode itself as good audio.  On the extras side we start out with an intro by Joel, who claims admiration for the Hercules films as well as reflecting on the experiment itself.  Interestingly enough he also gives an explanation why Gypsy is in the theater for a brief period, as the crew felt the opening narration of the film was too difficult to work with and felt they needed a gimmick to keep the episode fun until it was over.

Up next is a featurette on Steve Vance, who does the poster artwork for Shout Factory’s DVD sets.  It’s a trip through the interesting process he takes to create such neat treats for MST fans to hang on their wall.  Also included is a gallery of posters that Vance has made, up to this volume of course (he has made more since).  There are seventy in total.

The episode was also released on blu-ray, believe it or not!  It was featured as a bonus feature on Film Detective's Blu-ray release of the uncut film.  The presentation is soft and fuzzy, leading me to side with the DVD as the superior version of the episode, though the uncut movie looks great.  Other bonus features include an introduction by Frank Conniff (which is actually ported over from Shout's release of the original Hercules), a documentary on the influence of the Italian Hercules films called Hercules and the Conquest of Cinema, and a dry audio commentary by film historian Tim Lucas, which has interesting tidbits but is kinda boring.  There are more features on this blu-ray, but the DVD has the superior episode presentation.