QT4: Italian Epic Adventure Night.... bizarre stuff ahead

On this, the sixth day of 4th Annual Quentin Tarantino Film Festival, we attendees which are about to view Italian Sword and Sandal films salute you!

This was the most lightly attended night of the festival... to my eyes... It seems that ITALIAN EPIC ADVENTURES just doesn’t stir the native Texan to attend... Now, don’t get me wrong... the theater was about 70% full this night rather than it’s usual packed self.... But this genre typically has a really horrid reputation. Even the Steve Reeves classics... and the Reg Parks flicks or poor overlooked Peter Lupus... they just get the Dangerfield treatment in the hall of cinema.

“Oh... those are just Sword and Sandal flicks...”

I think it is funny.... all these people that think battles and hacking sword clashes are embodied solely by GLADIATOR and BRAVEHEART... sigh...

In the sixties, Italy was filming epic period films.... While DeMille and Anthony Mann and Mankiewicz and Kubrick and the rest of Hollywood produced lavish gigantic scale bazillion dollar budget films... Italy was producing these things on a weekly time frame.

Maybe not as thought provoking... maybe not acted with sterling British accents... Perhaps they were dubbed to a point near idiocy... but their action was thrilling... their scores fantastic... their babes... baber.

I’m very familiar with this Genre because these were my mother’s private soft-core erotic cinema collection... She watched her ‘sword and sandal’ films and delighted in glistening muscles and the vibrant costumes and pageantry. Gone are these times... Perhaps they will be awakened by the noise of GLADIATOR ‘round the world.

Quentin talked before hand about how these films preceded and led straight into the Spaghetti Westerns, which led to the Crime Films and then to the Horror films of Italian Cinema.

The one key thing of note that Quentin mentioned was that he bet us that this will be the only time in our lives that we see the two films he was showing...

THE HUNS and THE GIANT OF METROPOLIS.... He asked if anyone had seen either... The answer was a resounding... NO. I looked at Father Geek... and even he failed the test. Hmmm...

THE HUNS... The first thing you should know is there appears to be no Huns in the Huns... in reality it is about the Tartars. The film is also about the first female leader of the warrior tribe of Tartars.

The star of THE HUNS is a hon in and of her own right... Chelo Alonso... whadda babe. And her co-star is her costume in every scene. She comes right off the set of a science fiction film... weird flame like things sprouting every which way... This is a women empowerment film....

You see, Chelo plays Tanya, Queen of the Tartars... Queen Tanya... hahaha... Barbarian Queen Tanya... buwhahahahahaha...

I’m sorry...there is just something soooo, unQueeny about the name Tanya to me... I hear Tanya and I think about a blonde in animal skins jogging in a really dreadful but wonderful film of my youth.

That being said, the film has an excellent bloody stump... wonderful burnt corpse.... Did I mention Chelo’s two wonderfully pronounced co-stars? Did I mention her Frazetta figure, face and lips? Did I mention how she manages to pussy whip everyone into following her on her damn fool crusade? Well... I meant to.

Now, the greatest thing about the film is something that at first sounds incredibly stupid... but since in all likelihood you will never see this film... I’ll spoil it. You see... there is this advanced walled civilization that seems to possess great riches and wondrous advance knowledge...

Their great secret? GRAIN. You see... this is right there at that time, where hunting and gathering was the norm.... And I love the idea that something as simple as farming is revolutionary and completely alien to a warrior clan. How... it’s science fiction in thought and execution. How gunpowder is magic juju and all of that...

The movie tickled me.

Now... the next film... THE GIANT OF METROPOLIS... delighted me to no end.

THIS IS A LOST SCIENCE FICTION MOVIE. Quentin was trying to describe it.. but truly... words fail... It is only with my comic book knowledge that I can describe this film to you.

This movie is SUPERMAN but all screwy.

You see... Imagine if Superman left Earth to warn Krypton of its pending doom... He had superpowers, but noone cared.

Now saying that... visually... John Byrne saw this film before creating SUPERMAN YEAR ONE... And noone on this planet could convince me otherwise. You see... all of Byrne’s Krypton designs... clothing, buildings, weird instruments and instrumentality.... are all here.

And like in the HUNS... the title here kinda doesn’t make sense... because there is no GIANT in THE GIANT OF METROPOLIS. Jor-el’s costume is here.... as are the other Krypton clothing. And this isn’t a case of... HOLY SHIT HE RIPPED THIS OFF... this is one of those... OH COOL.... LOOK THIS IS WHAT HE SAW. Either that or there is some sort of cosmic coincedink.

Now having said that... there is major ass-whupping throughout... The Bad Guy is the damn star... Our hero played by Cameron Mitchell always looks like he was just told his parents died in a strip club naked on stage. A pained... concerned look.

THE PRODUCTION design is extraordinary.

The folks that made this film had a lot of fun... the scientific bs was also great.

The film is basically a doomed civilization story... There is brain transplanting, resuscitation of the dead, will control... weird glowy stick things, dwarf cannibals with sticks.... big dude with a giant jawbone of something or another. There is also some Crusher Creel wrecking ball swinging action.

The film is just so damn cool and weird that everyone I talked to afterwards was like.... WHOA! What was that?

Well... Sleep is coming for me... Spaghetti Western nite is next... and it was great... More on that... later....

If you can get here for Friday, Saturday or Sunday.... make the trek... storm the Alamo... It’s incredibly fun.