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mst3kproject · 2 years

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Hercules and the Tyrants of Babylon

So the last few entries have been, for various reasons, pretty depressing. I was determined to find something a little bit lighter, so I thought I'd offer you a nice colourful slab of My Cheese Steak. Our Hercules of the Week is a man named Peter Lupus, who looks a lot like Sylvester Stallone and uses the ridiculously David Ryder screen name of Rock Stevens.

The Babylonians used to take slaves from Greece all the time, but it's getting harder and harder now that Hercules is in town. Apparently on one of their raids, the slavers captured his girlfriend Queen Asperia, and now he's pissed. King Vaneek of Assyria has also learned that Asperia is among the slaves, and has decided to buy her and marry her in order to be king of Greece, too. Queen Taneal of Babylon drugs him and wheedles the secret out of him, and her two brothers, King Salmanazar and King Azul, agree with her that Asperia has to die... but secretly each is plotting to marry Asperia himself and murder his siblings to claim the throne! Meanwhile, Hercules and King Vaneek find themselves in an 'enemy of my enemy' sort of situation, but that doesn't mean they like each other, either. We all know that the only ones leaving this movie alive are Hercules and Asperia, we're only watching to find out how they get there.

As Hercules and Maciste movies go, Hercules and the Tyrants of Babylon is pretty entertaining, honestly. Costumes and sets never look real but they're very pretty and do their job of placing us in an ancient, semi-mythical past. There's not a lot of subtlety to the characterizations – Hercules is heroic, Asperia is willing to suffer to save her people, Salmanazar is belligerent, Azul is shrewd, and Taneal is ambitious. I might complain about this, but it's about as much characterization as people in mythology usually get and so it works. There's lots of backstabbing (some of it literal) and machinating going on, but never so much that we can lose track of it all.

Both the plot and the visuals are full of wonderful b-movie bullshit. We've got Hercules throwing around sytrofoam rocks and trees – the people these hit know they're supposed to act as if they're very heavy, but sadly nobody was able to tell the horses. There's a bit where a guy in the Babylonian marketplace puts a snake on his head for no particular reason, which is the clear front-runner for episode stinger. Plot points hinge on people rasping out messages to Hercules as they're dying, always expiring before they can finish. Characters stand around arguing about who betrayed who first. Hercules arrives in Babylon in disguise and then immediately blows his own cover when he sees some injustice he can interfere in.

My very favourite of all these bits of nonsense is the completely inexplicable fact that Babylon has a self-destruct button. This takes the form of a giant wheel in a cave beneath the city. It has all these chains attached to it, and when the wheel is turned they will wind up and tear down all the buildings! Taneal tells us that it was built by Daedalus, who created the Labyrinth, but she never tells us why it exists. I guess it's supposed to destroy the city so that an enemy can't capture it? But in the last moments of a siege, who the hell has time to get a hundred slaves down there to very slowly tear the place apart? It makes no sense! I love it!

Hercules and the Tyrants of Babylon also stands apart from the crowd of such films in a number of ways – specifically, Herc never bends prison bars or drinks a love potion! Going into the movie I was sure we were going to get the usual thing where Taneal, having fallen for Herc's rippling pecs and rock-hard ass, would feed him a tincture and then be all smug about having stolen him from Asperia. To my surprise, the movie never even entertained the idea! Taneal is not above using her looks to manipulate men, but she has a lover and never even considers dumping him, not even for King Vaneek. Movies like this are so fond of using promiscuity as a shorthand for evil in female characters that it's kind of shocking.

(On a considerably less shocking note... do I even need to mention that all these Mesopotamians are played by white actors? Didn't think so.)

There's even a couple of really nice moments here. King Vaneek brings gifts to the rulers of Babylon, praising Salmanazar for his skills in war and Azul for his in politics... and then tells Taneal how beautiful she is and basically propositions her in front of the entire court. He, a sexist jerk, doesn't see anything wrong with this behaviour, but Taneal, already annoyed with her brothers for going behind her back, definitely does and you can see it on her face. This scene isn't referenced openly again but it lurks in the back of your mind throughout the rest of the film, as Taneal seeks to be rid of these foolish men who think they're above her. Her boyfriend is subservient to her as his queen and while the movie wants us to consider this a form of weakness on his part, Taneal clearly considers it appropriate and even sexy. This makes her the only one of the four royal villains who comes near to being sympathetic, and made it even more surprising that she never develops a crush on Hercules.

The other is in Salmanazar's attempt to find Asperia among the captive Greek women. He ties them all to poles in the middle of the desert and says the first to tell him who the queen is will be rewarded. After a couple of days Asperia decides to reveal herself in order to end everybody else's suffering, but the other women take a page from Spartacus and all join in declaring that they are the Queen of Greece! In a way this succeeds, as Salmanazar gives up on this tactic in disgust and has them all released, but it's also a moment of tragedy, as Asperia despairingly realizes the people she's trying to protect are too loyal for their own good.

The only thing that kind of ruined the movie for me was that the climax seemed to come on way too fast. The rising action is fairly sedate, and so when everything suddenly comes to a head, it feels like it's just not time yet. This sorts itself out pretty fast, though. Once you realize that the dominoes are falling, it only takes a moment to get back into the rhythm of it.

There are several things I find myself thinking about while watching this movie, but the main one is that the Hercules and Maciste films are basically superhero movies with a coat of ancient Greek paint, and it's interesting to compare them to their modern counterparts. The general formula of a lone hero versus odds that would be insurmountable to anybody else is intact. Multiple villains and a woman in need of rescue are standard. One of the things superhero stories have become somewhat infamous for in recent years, though, is the 'twist' ending, to the point of writers altering the story if they think the fans are close to figuring it out.

A lot of keys have been tapped about why this is poor storytelling and how it grew out of the 'no spoilers' culture online. My own main complaint about it is that a story isn't even about its end. Stories are about their middles – the beginning and the end are just that, but the part we enjoy is the journey from the one to the other. Hercules and the Tyrants of Babylon is a perfect example. There's never a moment when we're not absolutely sure that Salmanazar, Azul, and Taneal are all doomed and probably Vaneek too, and that Hercules and Asperia will save the Greek slaves and walk off into the sunset. The movie's job is not to subvert these expectations, but to fulfill them in an entertaining fashion.

This doesn't even mean the movie can't surprise us. We're not at all surprised that the three co-rulers are plotting against each other. Taneal tells us that their father wanted his three children to rule in concert – anybody who's even tried to order a pizza with siblings could have predicted how that would turn out! Nor are we particularly shocked that Vaneek orders his followers to kill Hercules once they've secured Asperia. The surprises come in the form these various plots take and how they're thwarted. We certainly didn't expect Taneal to try to murder her brothers by pulling the whole city down on top of them! Then the ending, when everything turns out exactly the way we expected it to, is not disappointing at all. It's satisfying and reassuring to see good triumph over evil.

Although, it must be said that in a lot of these films, evil ends up destroying itself – this is one of those, as the siblings all end up killing each other before Hercules can bring the city down on their heads. Rather than defeating the three tyrants, Hercules defeats thousands of ordinary Babylonians who were just going about their day and probably didn't know what kind of shit their rulers were up to. Nor, despite the title, does the movie bother to establish whether the three are particularly tyrannical... although they can be cruel to their slaves, so maybe we're supposed to assume they're not much nicer to the free citizens.

We're not supposed to think about any of that, of course, and one of the movie's successes is that for the most part, we don't. Hercules and the Tyrants of Babylon isn't a good movie, but it never pissed me off, its badness made me laugh, and I enjoyed it for as long as it lasted.

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