Hubrisween 2016 :: V is for The Vampires (1961)

While clearing boulders from a field to make way for his plow by chucking them hither and yon, the mighty Goliath (Scott) is soon interrupted from this task, alerted that young boy is drowning in the nearby sea. (The lad might’ve been being attacked by some monstrous underwater mollusk but the shoddy print I streamed didn’t yield a whole lot here.) But while Ciro (Vitolazzi) is rescued and resuscitated, up the beach a spell their village is currently being overrun and massacred by a band of moorish pirates led by Amahil (Aikens). And the women they don’t kill are taken prisoner and forced onto their ships, including Julia (Ruffo), Ciro’s older sister and Goliath’s fiance.

And as they set sail for the island of Salmanak, the elderly are tossed over the side to the swarming sharks, while the younger and more nubile ladies are bled out a bit, with their blood collected in a golden chalice that Amahil takes to his master, Kobrak, whom we don’t see except for a gnarled and clawed hand as he accepts this blood sacrifice, which kicks up an evil wind so fierce and malevolent it frightens the hardened pirate away.

Meanwhile, Goliath and Ciro see the smoke from the burning village but arrive too late, find the bodies of their families, and piece together from the few survivors that these pirates were only interested in killing the men and stealing the women to be sold as slaves in Salmanak. And so, to Salmanak they go, where Goliath is a little stunned by the grim sideshows they encounter (-- one involving a greased pole and a bed of spikes) and an unnatural fear that seems to grip the locals. He also stumbles upon a slave auction and recognizes the women are from his village. All hell breaks loose, then, as the immortal insurance adjuster’s worst nightmare intervenes, rescuing Magda (Incontrera) from the block and reduces the town square to rubble.

Pursued by soldiers, the fugitives find refuge in the home of Kurtik (Sernas), whose alchemist lair is apparently littered with petrified corpses! Here, Magda gets them up to speed on what happened to Julia. Seems the beautiful maid not only caught the eye of Amahil, she’s also drawn the interest of Omar (Feliciani), the Sultan of Salmanak; and then there’s the Sultan’s concubine, Astra (Canale), who’s also trying to get her hands on the girl; as is Kobrak himself for myriad reasons, mostly for leverage against the legendary Goliath. 

And to add even more confusion it should be noted that both Amahil and Omar want to rid their homeland of the plague of Kobrak, which we’ll detail in a minute. But Astra is secretly in cahoots with the vampirish Kobrak, who fears an alliance by the others with Goliath could spell the end of his reign of terror, and so she does her best to secretly short-circuit this at every turn. (Just ask the Sultan’s rebellion-leaning grand vizier. Make that his “former” rebellion-leaning grand vizier.)

But all Goliath really cares about right now is getting Julia back and, as far as Magda knows, Amahil still has her, having separated her from the others on the pirate ship. Luckily, Kurtik knows where Amahil hangs out but Astra beats them to this cantina, kills the pirate, and secrets Julia away, leaving Goliath and Kurtik to deal with the palace guards she sics on them. 

Meanwhile, back in the sanctum sanctorum, Magda provides a massive plot dump when she peruses some of Kurtik’s ancient scrolls, which reveal the origin of Kobrak, an evil sorcerer, who is hellbent on world domination; and who lives on the fresh virgin blood of the captured women -- stock that will always need replenishing, hence his need of the pirates, and he turns all the conquered men into mindless zombie warriors as he amasses an army of the undead. 

Yeah, apparently, all those desiccated corpses around Kurtik’s lab are Kobrak’s victims he’s trying to restore but lacks a certain ingredient to finish the process. Unfortunately for Magda, her unearthed secret will die with her as Kobrak materializes out of the ether, an impressive sight as we finally get a full look at him in his GWAR-like armor, and slays her.

Meanwhile, meanwhile, despite his best efforts, Goliath is captured but easily breaks out of the palace dungeon and blunders into the Sultan and Julia, the latest addition to his harem thanks to Astra (-- as to what Astra’s grand plan is here, well, I’m open to suggestions). Here, the Sultan calls off his guards and has a parlay with the mighty warrior, wanting him to join his fight against Kobrak. Again, Goliath refuses, taking Julia and flees the scene, leaving the Sultan alone, making him a perfect target for Kobrak. And after he kills him, Astra alerts the guards, saying it was Goliath who killed their king and to bring him back dead or alive -- but preferably dead...

Born Gordon Merrill Werschkul, Gordon Scott was working as a lifeguard at the Sahara Casino in Las Vegas when he was spotted by a Hollywood talent agent in 1953. And due to his amazing physique he was soon signed by producer Sol Lesser to replace Lex Barker as Lord Greystoke in Tarzan's Hidden Jungle (1955). It was Lesser who changed his last name to Scott, feeling Werschkul sounded too much like [Johnny] Weismueller, who served the role well in eleven films from 1932 to 1948, and gave us his legendary war-hoop. Scott would continue with the role through a series of five films and patched together TV pilots, slowly morphing the character from the inarticulate man-ape to the more educated version which was more in-line with author Edgar Rice Burroughs’ source novels.

Tiring of the role but finding himself typecast, Scott pulled up stakes and headed to Italy at the behest of his friend and fellow body-builder, Steve Reeves, who was making a name for himself in a series of muscle-man epics like Hercules (1958) and The Giant of Marathon (1959), which spawned a ton of spin-offs and cash-ins. And for Romulus and Remus -- released in the States as Duel of the Titans (1961), director Sergio Corbucci wanted Reeves to play both brothers who united Italy and founded the city of Rome but Reeves balked and suggested they bring in Scott instead. 

The very same year, Scott would star in two Maciste films: Samson and the 7 Miracles of the World (1961) and Goliath and the Vampires a/k/a The Vampires (1961). Now, Maciste was an Italian folk hero whose cinematic history dated back to the silent era, which was later co-opted into the sword and sandal and styrofoam boulder peplum-boom of the 1960s before it petered out, replaced by the Spaghetti Western. In most instances when these films were imported, the American distributors would rename the character, calling him Hercules, the Son of Hercules, Samson or Goliath.

Scott does a pretty good job with the character, too, bringing the muscle and the mayhem as Goliath and Julia escape into the desert, survive an extended DEEP-HURTING sandstorm, and once more have their hash saved by Kurtik when they stumble upon the cave of the Blue Men -- a bunch of knights decked out in costumes plundered from the set of The Undersea Kingdom (1936), who are indeed blue, as Goliath and the Vampires takes a gonzo left turn from hybrid horror and sword and sandal epic to sci-fi. How? Well, let's begin with how Kurtik keeps referring to Kobrak’s army as robots. He’s also managed to capture Astra in the interim and extracts the location of Kobrak’s secret lair by threatening her with some spiffy go-motion sock-puppet monsters. But once he gets that info, Goliath refuses to let Kurtik kill the prisoner, a decision he will come to regret and rejoice in that order.

See, while Kurtik heads off to do … something, and Goliath leads a battalion of Blue Knights into a spooky primordial forest to flush out Kobrak, Julia is left alone to guard Astra, who quickly turns the tables and then takes her prisoner by a short-cut, apparently, to Kobrak’s lair. The villain then sucks all the life out of Julia, turning her into one of those unliving statues. And did I mention he also sent his army of “robots” into the woods, who quickly rout the Blue Knights, killing all of them, including Ciro, and capture Goliath, who is now set to be converted into one of those mindless automatons by making him a pendulum inside a giant bell? (Just roll with it.) Ah, but here Astra pays her debt by supplying him with wax to plug his ears, allowing him to survive the constant bell-whacking; and so, the treatment doesn’t stick and Goliath engineers his escape, taking Julia’s stiffened body and the antidote with him.

Back in Kurtik’s cave, the good wizard is pleased to see Goliath return safely, and doubly-pleased when presented with the antidote. But as he’s about to open the flask and apply it to a stiffened body, Astra implores him to stop, saying it's a trick and he’s about to release poison gas. Wait, you ask. Where did she come from? Eh, it doesn’t matter, I guess, as Goliath answers these accusations with a tossed spear, which Astra catches with her abdomen. And then things really twist up in a knot when another Goliath shows up, carrying the body of Julia.

A’yep, the first Goliath was really Kobrak in disguise. Thus and so, we get a pretty spiffy doppelganger dust-up until the real Goliath rips the fake facade off of Kobrak’s face, revealing the greatest luchador vampire mask of ever. And as Kobrak tries to flee, Kurtik tosses a magical hand grenade at him, and with a fiery explosion, the evil one is dead, making one wonder why the hell Kurtik didn’t just do that in the first place. Anyhoo, with the real cure delivered, Kurtik is able to restore Julia and the others, reveals himself to be the true Sultan of Salmanak, whose first order of business is to erect a statue of the man who saved his kingdom.

Wow. Well, that was pretty nuckin’ futz. Written and co-directed by Corbucci along with Giacomo Gentilomo, Goliath and the Vampires is one of the strangest and grisliest peplum movies I have ever seen. It also makes little sense in spots, with massive leaps in plot-logic, quantum shifts in character motivations (-- yeah, I’m looking right at you, Astra), and a lot of action and plot twists missing from the screen altogether while other meaningless scenes and subplots go on and on and on and on and on. I mean, we could’ve been watching Kurtik capturing Astra instead of watching Goliath and his girl lost in that interminable sandstorm but, nooooo! But this might not be something lost in translation but could very well be the fault of American International, who weren’t afraid to stick foreign films into a Cuisinart to fit what they thought audiences would swallow easiest. 

And on that same note, adding even more fuel to this insanity is the schizophrenic soundtrack, which I think is mostly the work of Angelo Lavagnino but with a few Les Baxter spazz-jazz cuts mixed in, most notably a fairly modern sounding belly-dancing sonata. Considering the disparate sources, kind of amazing how well it all works.

Mario Bava’s Hercules in the Haunted World (1961) is an obvious influence as is Corbucci’s signature nihilism and high body count, which he would expound upon further in his westerns, Django (1966) and Navajo Joe (1966). The opening village massacre even rivals the one from Hercules, Samson and Ulysses (1966). And aside from the Gorgon in Medusa vs. the Son of Hercules (1963) Kobrak is probably my favorite all-time peplum villain. An impressive sight visually both in his armor and out of it, he proves a worthy opponent with his magics and astral-projection. I love his modus operandi of bleeding out his women prisoners and converting the men into a desiccated army of faceless zombies. (Again, kudos to the costume designer.) The scenes in the fog-enshrouded forest when his army materializes piecemeal, marching forward in unison to the beat of the soundtrack is some top-notch stuff. And when they quickly rout the Blue Knights, setting most of them on fire, is the stuff of nightmares.

Speaking of nightmares, many a film like this has been ruined by saddling the hero with a kid sidekick. Here, not only does the kid sidekick die, he dies most horribly by doing the exact opposite of what the hero told him to do, secretly tagging along on the raid. And his death meant nothing, living long enough to tell Kurtik that his men were dead and Goliath has been captured, to which Kurtik merely shrugs and says, yeah, we’re basically screwed.

The film was produced by Dino de Laurentiis, meaning there was plenty of money to be spent on the production, which resulted in a lot of amazing sets, most of which Scott destroyed quite spectacularly, especially his escape from the dungeon of the palace, where he uses a disgorged pillar as a battering ram. The extended fight sequences are well staged, and there were a lot of them, even employing a little wire-fu to give Goliath’s punches a little more impact.

This was a first time viewing of Goliath and the Vampires, and while I kinda gave up on the plot as it constantly kept pretzling itself and got mired down by a couple of subplots that could’ve been easily flushed altogether, I found it to be visually impressive and highly enjoyable with the villain and production design kicking it into my top five peplums encountered thus far. Again, you wouldn’t think bringing Gothic horror to this kind of pecs ‘n’ fists-fest would work but it does. 

And before I finish this review up I will once more plead the case for someone out there to make an effort to rescue these features from the hell of Public Domain and release restored copies of these peplum movies in their original aspect ratios so we can finally flush the chopped and cropped and washed-out TV and video prints that litter this world wide web once and for all. Because I, for one, feel this gonzo genre deserve to be seen and seen properly. Like most flash in the pan genres, most were pretty terrible but some were pretty good. Some of them were even pretty great, like Goliath and the Vampires.

What is Hubrisween? This is Hubrisween. And now, Boils and Ghouls, be sure to follow this linkage to keep track of the whole conglomeration of reviews for Hubrisween right here. Or you can always follow we collective head of knuckle on Letterboxd. That's 22 down with just four more to go!

Goliath and The Vampires (1961) Ambrosiana Cinematografica :: American International Pictures / EP: Dino De Laurentiis / P: Paolo Moffa / D: Sergio Corbucci, Giacomo Gentilomo / W: Sergio Corbucci, Duccio Tessari / C: Alvaro Mancori / E: Eraldo Da Roma / M: Les Baxter, Angelo Francesco Lavagnino / S: Gordon Scott, Leonora Ruffo, Jacques Sernas, Gianna Maria Canale, Rocco Vitolazzi, Mario Feliciani, Vanoye Aikens, Annabella Incontrera

Favorites :: Behind the Scenes :: Nobody Cry When the Giant Robot Monkey Die: Damage Control and the Aftermath of King Kong '76.

As much grief as Dino De Laurentiis and Carlo Rambaldi got for the colossal failure of the much ballyhooed giant mechanical gorilla for the 1976 version of King Kong, the execution of those giant animatronic gorilla hands was actually quite good. A bona fide miracle, perhaps, for, as the legend goes, due to an accelerated production schedule (-- the reasons for which would take a whole ‘nother post to explain), the hydraulics to run them were so complicated, they weren't really finished when filming began. And when they finally got them kinda sorta working, the crew wanted to show them off to their producer. And when De Laurentiis walked into the studio, the giant arm extended toward him and flipped him the bird. And while De Laurentiss broke up over this, so did the arm. It seized up and the obscene gesture remained as is for almost a week.

But as erratic as the hands were, the full-sized mock-up proved even more temperamental than Bruce the mechano-shark did in JAWS (1975). In theory and design, it was an ambitious, technical marvel. In the execution, well...

Now, the arms and robot were designed by Rambaldi but were engineered and built under the supervision of Glen Robinson. Originally, De Laurentiss tried to commission some aerospace engineers to manufacture the robot but they required nearly a year and a half to complete it. Thus, it was up to Robinson, who had it built in less than five months. Built? Yes. Working? No. Well, not quite. When finished the contraption weighed in at nearly six tons, filled with some 3,100 feet of hydraulic hoses and 4,500 feet of electrical wire ensconced inside an aluminum skeleton, covered with an additional two tons of molded rubber and imported Argentinian horsehair, styled and stitched in by famed wig maker, Michael Dino.

In theory, the prop could walk, turn at the waist and move those attached arms (built separately) into sixteen unique positions as piloted by a half-dozen technicians manning twice that many levers each -- all of them Italians, who needed all instructions translated, which caused even more delays. And when it made its debut, in front of an anxious crowd at Shea Stadium, including several execs from Paramount, and they engaged those levers, Kong’s eyes started to move, then his mouth opened in a silent roar and the crowd went nuts. But this was soon followed by several screams and a lot of fingers pointing to one of the legs. (Other reports said it was toward the crotch.) Seems several hydraulic hoses had burst and Robo-Kong was hemorrhaging out gallons upon gallons of crimson-tinted fluid. Things never really improved from there, which explains why the contraption wound up with so little screen-time in the finished film – and most of that were just static long-shots. All told, a mere 25 seconds.

The animatronic hands fared a little better. They were six-feet across and weighed nearly a ton each. Again, the giant body was built to accommodate them but with all the added doodads and gizmos to run them, the main structure could barely support the weight -- so much so the technicians quickly nixed a series of  publicity photos of Robo-Kong holding Jessica Lange because of the stress factor of that much added weight and jostling on the tenuous joints.

In fact, after weathering that accelerated production schedule, including the widely circulated rumor that no one realized they had built two right hands until they were almost finished, causing even more delays while one of these was back-engineered into a southpaw (-- this apocryphal tale is sort of confirmed in Charles Grodin’s auto-biography), there were several close calls that could’ve led to a catastrophic injury.

Once the hands were unstuck and in nominal working order they decided to do another trial run. And so stuntwoman Sunny Woods crawled into the hand and braced herself while the contraption was engaged and the fingers slowly closed around her, and then started to lift her up into the air. But it had barely gotten more than 10 feet off the ground when the hand snapped at the wrist and several lines blew, causing the hand to lose pressure and to contract even further. Luckily, the safety bolts in the finger joints worked as designed and prevented the hand from crushing the girl, but left her dangling in mid-air. Thus the movie became a trial by fire for all involved, especially for Lange and Woods, who were essentially at the mercy of two pilot-less forklifts covered in foam rubber and horsehair for retake after retake for nearly 10 months of shooting. Lange would suffer much bruising and a pinched nerve in her heck when one of the fingers missed its mark and clobbered her in the head.

In the end, this glorified paper weight cost the studio nearly $2 million. To salvage the film they had to spend another half-million on the gorilla suit worn by Rick Baker for the majority of the picture. And then another $300,000 was spent on the giant Styrofoam corpse used for the final shots of the movie.

It’s really too bad this crew didn’t have more time to tinker and perfect the over-sized gizmos they’d made. Some of what they accomplished onscreen with those cumbersome appendages was really quite admirable. And who knows what they could’ve done with that year and half instead of the five months they got. As is, the film still won an Academy Award for Rambaldi, Robinson and Frank Van der Veer (opticals) for their efforts but even this didn’t happen without controversy when several Academy F/X board members resigned in protest (-- including Jim Danforth, who reportedly hated the film).

One of the biggest sins of King Kong ‘76, aside from the lack of dinosaurs on Skull Island, is that at no moment while watching do you, for a second, despite a valiant effort by Baker, believe that you are watching a real gorilla and not someone in a monkey-suit. Baker implored them for a better design and to allow him to walk on all fours like a real gorilla but these were all nixed to match their more anthropomorphic prop, which they were still harboring delusions of using for the majority of the picture during pre-production. As yet another legend goes, when they realized the robot might not work out and started advertising for a gorilla man in the trades, Baker said he was “the only one stupid enough to do it."

Again, you cannot blame Rambaldi, Robinson, or their crews, or Baker, for the perceived failure to light up the box-office. The film actually made a tidy profit but failed to generate ticket sales the way JAWS had the year before, sending its producer on a slightly embarrassing quest to try and top it -- ranging from Orca (1977) to The White Buffalo (1977), where he failed again and again. But you gotta admire De Laurentiis’ enthusiasm and chutzpah. Sure, his mouth wrote a check his butt couldn’t cash, but even in this failure he succeeded. For in a brash display of ballsy hucksterism that would’ve made P.T. Barnum proud, the producer promised audiences that he would deliver a giant robot Kong onscreen and he did just that. Barely.

And as I wrote this piece up, inspired by that picture way up at the top, I got to wondering as to whatever happened to the giant robot once filming was completed. I do know that when things wrapped in New York City, the thousands of gathered extras pretty much destroyed the Styrofoam replica in a wild souvenir hunt. As for the robot, well, that’s where things get a little sketchy. There are tales of it appearing at several premieres around the world. And after that, it allegedly spent some time in a circus, where it was part of an elaborate stunt-show. 

There is also solid documentation that the robot went on a barnstorming tour of South America, where it would spend weeks in a traveling circus tent, where a master of ceremonies would command it to move to a stunned audience before a blackout. But as the hydraulics kept breaking down and interest waned, the sideshow angle was abandoned and the automaton was moved one last time to stand a silent vigil in the city square of Mar del Plata, Argentina, where it apparently stood for several years.

Exposed to the elements, stripped of its hydraulic and electronic guts, as the hair and latex started to rot away, rumors spread that the prop was essentially written off and hauled to some anonymous Argentinian landfill. However, this myth is dispelled by an article that appeared in the April 29, 1985, issue of the Henderson Times-News, which stated what was left of the robot was recovered and brought home to Wilmington, North Carolina, where De Laurentiis had opened a studio (De Laurentiis Entertainment Group (DEG)), perhaps all in an effort to stir-up some publicity for his proposed sequel, King Kong Lives (1986), that was currently in pre-production and due to be released one year later.

Is it still there now some thirty years later? Well, the Magic 8-Ball says the answer is once more unclear. Apparently parts of it, the head and one of the arms, were prominently on display at the studio but have since disappeared under dubious circumstances when DEG went bankrupt a mere three years later after a few high profile flops and was taken over by Carolco Pictures before they in-turn sold the lot off to Screen Gems in 1996. So, odds are the Kong robot wound up in landfill, only in a North Carolina landfill. A sad ignominious end, really, to something so notorious that could’ve been something really great.