1983 Hercules, Italian Space Operas, $word$ and $andal$

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Sort of spinning this off of the George Lucas Crimes in the 90s thread where I was freaking out about how good "Starcrash" is. I just watched "Hercules", by the same director, Luigi Cozzi. This is some new weird kind of film, European post-new wave post-Star Wars exploitation or something. The cinematography is always beautiful, the colors are always glowing. There is so much rotoscoped animation and poor-man's ILM optical compositing going on in every scene. These films are so beautiful, yet the content is so lovingly Grindhouse and b-movie they are dismissed as cheap trash.
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Best way to sum it up: Tits & Lasers.
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LOL I guess it isn't all that "new" in a number of different ways.

Dig Hercules throwing a bear into outer space:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOJoLaxokzM

Maybe this is the film version of glow-fi or chillwave or whatever. Notice how some of the scene is almost like looking straight into a disco light machine.

For some reason he later throws a log into outer space, and it uses Star Wars-style spaceship sounds and compositing:

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3Rh2pfdxPU

Don't want you to be lonesome here, bro. Just blind ordered Starcrash as part of a Scream Factory sale and subsequently realized that Cozzi was also responsible for the amazingly batshit Hercules movies I saw snippets of in the Golan & Globus documentary. I get the impression that I've stumbled onto something really special.

hah yes Hercules is great fun! seeing Thor: Ragnarock recently really brought back memories of this movie. its so zany and trashy, so comic-booky, yet you can tell they had some kind of a budget for special effects.

fwiw Cozzi filmed a second film while shooting Hercules called The Seven Magnificent Gladiators (a reworking of The Seven Samurai). i've only seen it on TV but found it entertaining in a Saturday-afteroon kind of way. it's most of the same cast but zero special effects.

Style

Most of Cozzi's film become "increasingly silly and strange" as the plot continues.

pretty otm, from his Wikipedia page.