Colossus and the Headhunters (review by Doug Smith)
As if we didn’t think Italians were weird enough, along comes this here movie which, if watched without wearing protective gear, will leave you a bitter person, filled with hate for the rest of your years. Trying to cash in on the whole Hercules craze of the late fifties and early sixties, the producers decided to make this film, which features the beefy, sweaty, way too oily Colossus in the heroic lead role. Don’t get confused, though. For some damn reason or another, the crew that did the dubbing decided not to call him “Colossus” and just stuck with the Italian name of “Maciste” (pronounced “my cheese steak”). Like most Italian films, it’s rather difficult to tell just what the heck is going on at any given moment. All I know is, there’s something about some guys escaping from an exploding island and then landing on a different island, which has two races of people, one race being good, the other being evil headhunters. I think that makes sense. Hell, I don’t know.
Kirk Morris, whose acting is more wooden than his body, plays Cheese Steak. Laura Brown plays the non-evil (I think) Queen Amoa. The rest of the cast is made up by people. I have no idea who they are or what characters they play. All that’s really clear is that there’s a bunch of Italian people running around and some of them have lines and some of them don’t and some of them give us very gratuitous buffalo shots.
The movie begins with a big, cardboard set being blown to smithereens and a bunch of guys in saggy diapers that leak run around, trying to figure out what to do. All of the sudden, and without explanation, our hero appears in all his curly-haired glory. He manages to lead a small group of islanders to a raft. Why they didn’t head for that in the first place is beyond me. At any rate, soon enough they’re sailing along and it becomes pretty obvious that they hired mostly skinny cast members in order to make Colossus look bigger. Introductions are made. Cheese Steak meets Ariel, the leader of the group of islanders, who so wants the land-living Eric to fall in love with … er … wait. Wrong Ariel. They eventually find land. The end. I wish.
Unfortunately for the castaways, they go ashore right into the hands of a group of people living on the island. Everyone is taken prisoner except for Colossus, because he was apparently off doing something else. I really have no idea what. Sure, I could watch the movie again, but you try to sit through repeated viewings of this film. Anyway, Cheese Steak is off doing his own thing and manages to get speared in the shoulder by a couple of guys from a whole other group of people (this group being the evil headhunters). After he comes to, he walks around a little bit and happens across a babe with a bow and arrow. She’s all set to send an arrow through his thick, beefy skull, but it turns out he makes her quiver. (Get it?) Cheese Steak passes out and the girl brings him back to her people, who she rules over.
Now, as it turns out, the group of people that the aforementioned girl rules is the same group who captured the first group to appear in the movie, and they’re fighting with the headhunting group. And there’s just basically about three groups and it’s really hard to tell what any one of them is doing at any given moment and it just ends up being a really bad movie, almost comparable to “Batman & Robin.” This is also one of those movies where the men wear shorter skirts than the women, so be prepared. I give it a half-yak for effort. Wait, no, I don’t.