A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.
... View MoreGreat movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.
... View MoreBlistering performances.
... View MoreWhile it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.
... View MoreGeneral Amilcare (Hamilon) kills King Lotar with the help of the king's niece Mila. Hamilon and Mila take the throne as the new dictator King and Queen. The King wages war on their peaceful neighboring country, killing the woman and kids, enslaving the men. The Queen is torturing her cousin Diana (King Lotar's daughter). Suddenly a hero appears, his name is Ursus. Ursus is captured and enslaved for only for awhile then sentenced to a slow and torturous death but Ursus breaks free. Now Ursus and Lotar will fight in the pits of a volcanic cavern! This is the 3rd film of the Ursus trilogy. It's your standard or typical B-Move Peplum of the time era. I found it a little entertaining at times. The arena scenes are the best, just mindless watching them in their costumes battle then Ursus challenged Hamilon. The ending was OK when the people battled the soldiers and the battles that took place underground in the cavern.3/10
... View MoreA fairy-tale flavored adventure movie with Ed Fury and A. Micantoni. What I believe to be the worthiest of mention are Hamilan the usurper's role and the spooky score. Also the tournament, and then Ursus enslaved.Micantoni, who plays the usurper, reminded me of Wallach, and made the best of his scenes; he has one of the couple of the best one-liners of the movie: his comes after he has killed his wife, who refused divorcing him. The 2nd belongs to Ursus, when he thanks one of the guards for his advice.The setup reminded me of the political westerns that were being made in the same decade, with the social awareness: here, a village of shepherds being attacked by the soldiers from across a lake, in a fight for resources, then a military coup, almost like one of those very fashionable for a time political westerns made in Europe ; but these are also from the fairy tales. Anyway, the story is well handled (though Ursus' idea of avenging the peaceful shepherds is to defy single-handed and challenge the new king, which promptly results in his arrest; the fact being that Ursus doesn't have a plan for avenging his people, but entrusts himself to a whirlpool of events, his single plan might of been of course to defeat the king in the arena, supposing that the sovereign would of taken up the challenge). The cast has a lot of clergymen, more pious and cautious than just, and a prophet; anyway, the high priest proves of some help to the insurgents.The landscape is mainly dreadful, but I think I recognized the waterfalls from another s & s movie.By the early '60s, the European kids seem to have got a peculiar education by movies like this, which is a fact perhaps less analyzed sociologically.
... View MoreThis is yet another peplum with the muscle-bound Ursus for protagonist; of the four I watched during this epic movie marathon, it is perhaps the least – but, by this point, the over-familiarity of the plots (and set-pieces: once again, the hero is made to perform a show of strength involving large animals) had begun to make itself felt! So, we get a usurper to the throne abetted by an ambitious woman (Claudia Mori, future wife of celebrated Italian personality Adriano Celentano) and a deposed princess whom the villain secretly covets; Ursus, too, is once again protector of the peaceful farming community living in the shadow of a mountain housing a volcano (worshipped as a god and guarded by a group of elderly priests). The villain finds both other units in his way and has them decimated – but Ursus, with the help of the princess (both of whom had been led to distrust one another until saner minds prevailed), determines to right the many wrongs committed. As with most examples of its low-brow ilk, the film cannot fail to provide intermittent (albeit unintentional) hilarity: the oddest case involves the hero cowering from a string of arrows (fired by the enemy on horseback) which never come!; a woman engaged in casual conversation with Ursus' aged(!) sidekick suddenly drops dead, the first victim of an assault on the village; and, when Ursus and the old man are captured and tied to the obligatory grind-stone, it is the latter who is mercilessly whipped in an effort to coax the hero into submission! In the end, the only noteworthy touches here are atypical ones – a jousting tournament(!) in which Ursus fights (and wins) incognito a' la Robin Hood or GLADIATOR (2000) and the various entrances in the form of weird faces within the volcanic cave itself.
... View MoreActually they are five muscle men tossing make believe rocks but in a run of the mill film of good guy freeing oppressed people you take what you can get.The action is good but the story is average and the same one we've seen in just about every film like this. Worse its paced much too slowly. The dubbing is interesting as voices change depending on whats being said. Its a bland exercise that is best summed up by its semi volcanic eruption- its not quite the spectacle anyone hoped for.
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