[ IMDB | Stream (Amazon) | Stream (Dailymotion) | Stream (Speedflix) | Stream (Vimeo) | Stream (YouTube) | Wikipedia ]
It is listed in IMDB as 95 minutes. Amazon’s is 1:35:55 and cropped on the left. Dailymotions’ is uncropped but only 58:30, which is absurd. YouTube’s copy is 1:35:40 and a slightly better print, but has large watermark in lower left. Speedflix’s and Vimeo’s are 1:35:33 but a little poorer quality, Speedflix’s is very low resolution. I went with Amazon’s. It’s a shame that Dailymotions was so much shorter and yet was the only uncropped offering.
- Review from the blog Not This Time, Nayland Smith
- Review from the blog Mark David Welsh
Credits:
- Director – Antonio Leonviola
- Soundtrack – Armando Trovajoli, also worked on Kill Bill: Volume 1
- Mark Forset – Maciste (pronounced “Majestus” in movie for some reason), also in Hercules Against the Mongols (1963), Hercules Against the Barbarians (1964), Hercules Against the Sons of the Sun (1964), bodybuilder
- Moira Orfei – Queen Halis Mojab, also in The Beast of Babylon Against the Son of Hercules (1863), Hercules vs. the Giant Warriors (1964), daughter of circus performers, performed in and owned her own circus
- Paul Wynter – Bango (probably a misprint)/Bangor, bodybuilder
- Raffaella Carra – Princess Salirah, famous singer and TV personality, albums on Discogs
- Kahab – high priest and father of Kathar
- Kathar (Katan in movie) – leader of the army and intends to marry the queen
- Robert Miali – Loth
Notes:
- The female lead in these movies is usually a blonde and she becomes the love interest of Maciste/Hercules/Goliath. Here, Princess Salirah is played by a blonde actress, Raffaella Carra, but she has brunette hair and is the love interest of Loth instead.
- The “great wheel” which the prisoners toil at is reminiscent of the early scene in Schwarzenegger’s Conan the Barbarian where he and others are forced turns a wheel, presumably for some purpose. Eventually Conan becomes so strong he can turn it on his own. Here, though the mechanism is 10 times larger, Majestus and Bangor, then just Majestus, manage it themselves.
- African or north African location? The mole men dress in “primitive” grass skirts and play bongos, the mole women wear their hair in a style similar to those I found on the site Here’s Everything You Should Know About the Berber Tribe. But, like the grass skirts, it may just be cinematic shorthand for “tribal”.
Story:
Majestus pulls a whale from the sea, presumably for supper, when he spies “mole men” on horseback (figures wearing white wigs, horned helmets and masks, and long white capes) chasing other, non-mole men on horseback. The mole men kill the soldiers one by one before Maciste can intervene. He re-purposes the whale spear dispatches most while the few survivors perish as they are exposed to the rays of the rising sun. One of the dying victims of the mole men recognize Majestus and begs him to travel the his village that was just attacked and save his daughter. As he enters the destroyed village he finds the daughter, Henared, wandering in shock. All of the villagers but her had dbeen killed or captured when the mole men appeared out of the evening mist.
Majestus has his quest.
In search of the land of mole men, he finds a camp of them in the jungle with a prisoner, Bangor, tied to a tree. Majestus frees Bangor and they kill most of those in the encampment, while the remaining flee to safety. Bangor, black, pledges to be Majestus’s servant in payment for freeing him. Majestus replies: “Every man who is born is born free. They are neither slaves nor masters.” After which Bangor notably looks into the camera (presumably at the American audiences of the 1960s).
When Majestus rises the next morning to find the mole men and free the captives, Bangor joins him. They come upon horses but no riders in a clearing. Underground, we see the mole men using bamboo shafts sticking up from the ground to listen to the two. Maciste, however, suspects their deception and loudly declares his plan to camp there for the night. Katan, the leader of the mole men army, was shamed by his defeat the previous night and so plans their capture in order to redeem himself. Though Majestus is aware of the soldiers’ approach, feigning sleep, he lets himself and Bangor be captured in order to be led to the imprisoned villagers. In the underground city of the mole men, he is brought through the mines (evoking Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom’s mining scene, much like in Hercules the Invincible (1964)) and he and Bangor are jailed with the villagers.
Queen Halis Mojab of the mole men kingdom summons the captive Princess Salirah before reviewing the newly captured prisoners. The queen’s advisor, Kahab, takes her to the prisoners who are turning “the great wheel” (see Conan notes above). The queen takes lascivious note of Maciste and Bangor (“those two interest me”). Back in their cell, the handmaiden Tulak visits and warns Bangor that at tonight’s feast of the full moon, held above ground, he and Majestus will be forced to fight each other.
At the festival, female attendants (in possibly north African garb, see notes above) surround the queen as she presents the challenger that must be defeated: a man in monster gorilla suit. Katan is still injured so another soldier enters the cage to fight the beast and is quickly killed. The queen then forces Majestus and Bangor to fight. Bangor takes a dive and, after the queen has Slirah thrown in the cage, Maciste enters to fight the beast. During fight Tulak frees Loth who helps Maciste escape with Salirah after the man/gorilla is killed. Loth stays behind to buy them time but is almost immediately defeated. Katan and his soldiers then give chase but are outsmarted. Only Katan survives and after he returns dawn approaches and the mole men must again go underground.
Maciste takes Salirah to the Sacred Waterfall, and leaves her at the Sacred Grotto with priestess who protects it.
Back at the underground city, the guard who let Loth escape is punished to death by being tied on a platform as the ceiling slowly opens and the sunlight burns him down to his skeleton. We then learn from a private conversation between Kahab and his son Katan that the queen is not a mole person but was actually captured during one of the surface raids on a village. Kahab hopes that Katan can become her king so that their offspring can eventually live above ground. They’re to be the Adam and Eve of the new, ex-mole men.
Foreshadowing her origins and the climax of the film, the queen confesses to Tulak her yearning of the sunlight. Bangor is used as bait and helps the mole men recapture Majestus. As punishment, Bangor and Loth are bound beneath blades attached to heavy weights and Majestus must save them as more and more weight is added. The queen admires his strength and so Katan, jealous, boasts that it was he who in fact captured Majestus. The blade scene is surprisingly dramatic and in the end Majestus saves them, but his reward is only that his sacrifice is delayed until the next full moon.
Impressed by his strength, the queen later that evening dresses as a soldier and frees Majestus. She asks him to be her king and realize Kahab and Katan’s plan. They overhear and release the sacred lions into the throne room. Maciste saves her and Kahab blames the keeper then kills him before he can rat on Kahab. Later, while Majestus is unguarded, Katan sends in poisonous smoke as he sleeps and then makes it look like he escaped with Salirah. While this ruse is going on, Bangor is being tortured to tell them where Majestus took Salirah and only once they bring in Tulak does he give up Salirah’s location at the sacred waterfall. Queen and Katan go after her but it’s so close to sunrise that no other soldiers will follow. More foreshadowing.
Maciste is passed out and tied to a conveyor belt headed towards a rock-crushing machine (I mean, the are underground). He frees himself and holds up the weight to stop from being crushed, this is actually controlled elsewhere by the “great wheel”, which is pushed by dozens of slaves, who are no match. Eventually the gears break and he and the slaves are free. Slaves and prisoners eventually overrun the guards while Majestus push the wheel, first with Bangor, then alone, open the gates and subsequently, somehow, collapse the caves. All are free.
Above ground just before sunrise, Katan realizes he must kill Halis Mojab because she’s a traitor (?). His love stops him. As the sun rises he is turned to a skeleton and she, marvels at the sunlight and sacred waterfall, realizes she is not in fact a mole person. Unfortunately, her marvelling distracts her and she falls over the cliffs of the waterfall (Majestus had noted them earlier in the film, foreshadowing etc.).
The five heroes gather and poses for the final shot.
