Hercules vs. Moloch (1963)

Original title: Ercole contro Moloch

aka The Conquest of Mycene

Once, in semi-mythical ancient Greece. The second version of he city of Mycenae – the first one burned down because of some godly business between the Earth Goddess (never named anything else in the English dub of the film at hand) and the town’s other patron god, the evil Moloch – is striking fear into the hearts of the other city states of Greece. Ruled by the evil queen Demetra (Rosalba Neri with very fetching white streaks in her hair), Mycenae seems militarily unbeatable, pressing the rest of the Greek world for the delivery of hostages. Hostages, mind you, that tend to disappear completely never to be seen again, for Mycenae MKII houses the earthly incarnation of Moloch. It has taken form in Demetra’s son, and living gods need sacrifices, as you know. This particular living god dwells in a cave below the city with “his favourite slave girls”, is fond of Bava colours, torture, and disfiguring beautiful people who aren’t his slave girls. Moloch isn’t exactly well-loved by all of Mycenae's populace, however, and most of the commoners would really rather return to the worship of the less cruel and hands-on Earth Goddess. They’d also rather see young Medea (Alessandra Panaro), daughter of the old king who wanted a life without Moloch for his people and Demetra’s step daughter, sit on the throne, but since the military, the nobility and the priests are all under Demetra’s (and Moloch’s) thumb, there’s little hope for a successful revolution at the moment.

The last Greek town standing against Mycenae is Tyros. Alas, its king has taken rather too long with a policy of outward appeasement and secret attempts at building an alliance against Mycenae. Eventually, after Tyros’s best potential ally falls, there seems little hope of anything but to also deliver hostages to their enemies. Things aren’t quite as hopeless as they seem, though, for Tyros’s crown prince Glaucus (Gordon Scott) has a plan. It’s not a terribly good plan, mind you, for it mostly consists of him becoming an incognito hostage going by the name of Hercules (so we can get the proper, cash-grabbing name into the film’s title) and trying to see if he can’t find allies in Mycenae while attempting to gain the trust of Demetra.

Fortunately, the Earth Goddess is with the good guys.

I thought I had basically seen all the peplums worth seeing (and quite a few not), but along comes Giorgio Ferroni’s Hercules vs. Moloch to prove me wrong. Not that I’m complaining.

Anyhow, this one’s a pretty great little movie, even though its not-actually-Hercules main character doesn’t do random hearty manly belly laughs and generally leaves pillars in peace to do their thing. Well, at least one has to admire the chutzpa used to get Hercules into the movie’s title.

The film stands at what could be a somewhat awkward point between the more fantastically minded branch of the peplum concerning itself much with mythological beast (that is to say, guys in monster suits and sometimes dubious, sometimes wonderful bigger monsters), gods, and half-gods, and the more mundane business of palace politics and revolutions, spending certainly more time on the latter, less fun part of these films to boot. However, Ferroni actually integrates these elements well, finding reasons for the palace intrigues in the supernatural stuff, solving some of the problems arising during the course of the plot through a very cool moment of literal deus ex machina perfectly appropriate to ancient Greece, all the while making the film’s world convincing as one in which the Gods are actually real. Even though Moloch junior probably isn’t much of a god.

The film turns out to be genuinely good at both sides of the equation, with fights and battle scenes of a quality not always found in peplums. Ferroni must have had a rather high budget for the genre, too, for the battle scenes and fights actually feature a decent amount of combatants and horses (some of which may or may not come from library footage, but if so, it’s excellently integrated) involved in what looks like actual fight choreography. There’s a good amount of sets and locations, too, and while they aren’t exactly lavish, they also never feel cramped and too much like cardboard, the filmmakers demonstrating a good eye for filming around the holes in the illusion.

And even though the Moloch parts of the film are not quite as plenty as I would have liked, the guy is a perfectly creepy Gothic horror type villain, wearing an excellent creepy mask, cackling while he’s disfiguring women and ranting about wanting to destroy all beauty, and living in a most excellent multi-coloured cave full of women pressing themselves against walls looking intense.

At this point in his career, Gordon Scott had become a very capable leading man too, striking the correct righteous poses for the properly righteous dialogue he gets as the most righteous manly man around, going through the usual stylized romance (with Medea, as if I need to tell anyone who has seen even one of these films) with the proper stylized conviction. He’s also a pretty convincing fencer and screen fighter here, making up for the rather low-powered Hercules he is playing by doing the business of people who aren’t half gods with a nice degree of intensity. Rosalba Neri for her part makes a pretty great evil queen, doing the sexy evil glowering, the increased unhingement, and all the other expected bits of business with fun enthusiasm.


All in all, it’s a pretty wonderful achievement, Ferroni and company turning what could have been a complete dud in the wrong hands into a very fun peplum.