|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
| Science-Fiction |
|
|
| Horror |
|
|
| Fantasy |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
HERCULES RETURNS
Rating: 
Australia. 1993.
Director – David Parker, Screenplay – Des Mangan, Based the Live Movie Show Double Take Meets Hercules, Producer – Philip Jaroslow, Photography – David Connell, Contemporary Footage Music – Philip Judd, Production Design – Jon Dowding. Production Company – Philm Productions.
Cast:
David Argue (Brad McBain), Mary Coustas (Lisa), Bruce Spence (Sprocket), Michael Carman (Kent), Voices of Des Mangan and Sally Patience
Plot: Brad McBain quits his job on a cinema multiplex chain, disliking his boss Kent’s money-hungry attitude. He finds an old abandoned cinema and decides to open it as a friendly, more intimate theatre. He has the idea of opening with the last film to screen there, which turns out to be an Italian Hercules film. But on the opening night they find that Kent has sabotaged them by delivering an unsubtitled print of the film. And so Brad and his staff are forced to improvise all the voices themselves.
This Australian film has been developed out of the live comedy theatre gimmick of dubbing spontaneously off-the-cuff comic lines over old films and tv shows. Former radio DJ Des Mangan and Sally Patience form such an Australian cabaret called Double Take. Here their comic send-up of the Hercules films has been adapted into a film itself. The original film in question was Hercules, Samson and Ulysses (1964).
The Hercules films were well in need of a good send-up and certainly needed all the bubbling homo-eroticism beneath them brought out into the open. But the result on screen here is an extraordinarily crass film. It plumbs the lowest of the Australian penchant for vulgar, lowbrow humour – all jokes about vomiting, beer, dubbed-in farts and the like. The characters are all morons who speak in high-pitched squeaky voices. And the homo-erotic joke is something that actually gets overplayed to the point of being quite offensive. There are few films that have been so thuddingly and persistently moronic in their approach.
Copyright Richard Scheib 1999-2012
|