Cinema of Swords

#10, The Advent of Hercules

Cinema of Swords

A Popular Guide to Movies about Knights, Pirates, Samurai, and Vikings (And Barbarians, Musketeers, Gladiators, and Outlaw Heroes)

By Lawrence Ellsworth

Welcome to the Cinema of Swords Substack! This series is a companion and expansion to my Cinema of Swords hardcover (Applause Books, 2023), which collects over 400 tasty mini-reviews of screen swashbucklers from the Silent Era through The Princess Bride.

This Substack builds on that foundation, continuing forward with reviews of swordplay movies and TV shows from the ‘90s to the present. Every week I’ll present two to four illustrated reviews on a common theme written both to inform and to entertain.

If you enjoyed the contents of the book, this weekly series will give you plenty more of the same. (And if you haven’t seen the book, look for it wherever you do your book shopping!)

The Advent of Hercules

If you were watching TV in the late ‘90s, it was pretty hard to avoid Kevin Sorbo’s Hercules series and its spinoffs, even if you wanted to. Despite its modest budget, unambitious stories, and mostly indifferent acting, this likeable family-friendly series nonetheless found an audience devoted enough to sustain it through six TV seasons. There was clearly a hunger for solid fantasy adventures, and Hercules fed that demand.

Hercules 1: Hercules and the Amazon Women

Rating: ***

Origin: USA, 1994

Director: Bill L. Norton

Source: Universal DVD

This is the first of the five 1994 TV movies that would lead into the Hercules: The Legendary Journeys series the following year. Set in a mythic time of non-specific ancient Mediterranean cultures, it features Kevin Sorbo as a genial and easy-going Hercules, with Michael Hurst as Iolaus, his genial and easy-going sidekick. It starts out pretty low-key, with Herc arriving at Iolaus’ generic ancient market town for his friend’s wedding, and as they head out to visit Herc’s mother and Iolaus’ fiancée, they could be any two surfer dudes going to a bachelor party. They do have to fight a random Lernaean hydra that Herc’s evil stepmother Hera puts in their path, but they make such short work of it that Herc barely breaks a sweat.

At his mother’s house Herc’s father Zeus (Anthony Quinn) pops in for a good-natured leer at Herc’s still-lovely mother, and it’s sobering to compare the strutting alpha-male villain Quinn played in Ulysses (1954) with the aging roué he plays here, not so much the father of the gods as their tired grandpa. But he never tires of sleeping with mortals—that’s the one thing Zeus can’t get enough of.

Herc learns of a village threatened by “monsters” from a man who escaped the place and in no time he’s off on a quest to save it, with Iolaus in tow, wedding or no wedding. Soon Hercules learns the truth: the village is inhabited entirely by men and boys, and the monsters are Amazons, warriors from a parallel village of women and girls who have been taught by Hera to hate and fear all men. Films about Amazons always deal with two themes: the problem of endemic sexism in the ancient (and by extension, the modern) world, mixed with the ever-popular male fantasy of domineering women who insist that you have sex with them. Despite the obvious thematic contradiction, this film (as usual) offers the viewer both.

As Hercules, Sorbo is pleasant and large, but seems to lack any other attributes that would suit him to the role. In fact, except for Queen Hippolyta (Roma Downey), who is determinedly fierce, none of the cast are working very hard here. (Lucy Lawless, the future Xena, has a bit part as the queen’s commander Lysia, but it’s too brief to make much of an impression.) The direction and production values are mediocre, but surprisingly what this TV movie does have going for it is a solid story; the writers are earnest about offering a solution for the male/female conflict, but just as Hercules is moving the game toward a non-violent conclusion, Hera sweeps the pieces off the table, fighting breaks out, people are killed, and the amiable demigod is in a heck of a fix. Where can the son of Zeus turn to straighten things out without breaking necks? You’ve probably figured that out already.

Hercules 2: Hercules and the Lost Kingdom

Rating: ***

Origin: USA, 1994

Director: Harley Cokeliss

Source: Universal DVD

The theatrical tradition of Hercules having an obnoxious comic sidekick is so persistent that I wouldn’t be surprised if it dated back to classical times. The sidekick in this entry is the spunky young Princess Deianeira (Renee O’Connor), who kicks so hard that the producers brought O’Connor back to play Lucy Lawless’ sidekick Gabrielle in the Xena spin-off series.

Hercules (Kevin Sorbo) is hanging around in a generic ancient market town eating a bowl of soup when a fairy-tale giant, complete with ludicrously immense club, rips the roof off and announces that he’s looking for the son of Zeus. There’s a spiffy giant-fighting scene until Herc takes out the brute, who’d been sent by his nemesis Hera. Moments later a dying messenger staggers into town, tells Herc he must come save the lost kingdom of Troy (no, not that one) from Hera’s tyranny and expires. Of course, no true hero can turn down a dying request like that, but if Troy is lost, how to find it? Herc asks his father Zeus (Anthony Quinn) for help, but Zeus doesn’t want domestic trouble with his wife Hera, so all he’ll say is that Herc must ask Queen Omphale for the One True Compass.

Quest time! On the way Herc meets Deianeira and saves her from sacrificing herself to yet another god, which gives Herc a chance to make his speech about how mortals should depend on themselves. Deia attaches herself to the hero, who makes his way to the generic ancient market town ruled by Queen Omphale (Elizabeth Hawthorne). There he gets the monarch’s attention by putting himself up for auction in the slave market for one night’s service, and for his services he wins the One True Compass. This is a genuinely cool little clockwork device that leads Herc and Deia to a remote seashore, where they are abruptly swallowed by a flap-jawed giant sea serpent. Surprise!

Herc and Deia’s adventures in the serpent’s cavernous guts are rollicking fun, and give us an opportunity to point out that this series’ special and creature effects are created by the WETA Worskhop of New Zealand (where all episodes were filmed), several years before their fame as the consummate world-builders behind Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. WETA’s budget here is minuscule but they give big bang for the buck, providing effects both clever and charming.

Soon enough Herc and Deia find lost Troy, whose people have been exiled from the city by Hera’s magical warriors, and Deia, to no one’s surprise, is revealed as the lost city’s lost princess who must lead her people in retaking their city—with the help of a few Mighty Feats of Strength from Hercules, who in a twist is now Deianeira’s sidekick. Kevin Sorbo’s performance is as flat as usual, but otherwise this fantasy tale, though obvious, is decent entertainment.

Hercules 3: Hercules and the Circle of Fire

Rating: ***

Origin: USA, 1994

Director: Doug Lefler

Source: Universal DVD

The pacing flags in this third entry as the story focuses on, of all things, character development. What’s that doing in a Hercules flick? But the series wants to introduce a new sidekick who’s also a romantic interest, Tawny Kitaen as yet another Deianeira (if you know your Greek myths you know why they keep recycling that name). And as this Kitaen person completely out-acts Kevin Sorbo’s Hercules—though admittedly that’s a low bar— it seems like a good idea to give her some decent lines to speak. She does alright with them, too.

Herc’s wicked stepmother Hera is up to her old tricks again, this time plotting nothing less than the death of all life on Earth by stealing the Eternal Torch from the titan Prometheus, freezing him and snuffing every fire in the world. Unless Hercules can put things right, everything is going to get deadly cold, but Daddy Zeus (Anthony Quinn) flat out refuses to help, and even tries to forbid Herc from taking the Eternal Torch quest. As if, Daddy.

Deianeira is the headstrong headwoman of a village where all the fires have gone out, and when she learns Herc plans to do something about it, she is determined to go with him because he obviously needs someone with brains to match his brawn. And this checks out, as when Herc battles the giant Antaeus (“Why can’t I ever meet any nice giants?” Herc laments), it’s Deia who figures out that the giant’s mother is the earth-goddess, so the only way to beat him is to lift him out of contact with the ground and keep him there until he’s exhausted. (Antaeus is the best fantasy creature in this episode, a big, gnarly stump walking on its roots.)

Alas, the quest is dragged down by the aforesaid character development, as Herc ruminates on the nature of immortality and on the unhealing wound that he, an immortal, accidentally gave to his immortal pal Cheiron (here a satyr rather than a centaur), and What Does It All Mean, anyway? Deia tries to be polite during all this whining, but to be fair, she’s also falling in love with the big lug.

Besides Antaeus, the only other light in this dim entry is Phaedra (Stephanie Barrett), who instead of being a Cretan princess as in the myths is a young feral dryad, a girl with sandals of speed and a mischievous look in her eye. She repeatedly misleads Herc and Deia on their quest without the least remorse, for reasons we won’t spoil, and happily she goes entirely unpunished for her misdeeds. Alas, the rest of us must slog through to the quest’s obvious ending and hope for a better story next time ‘round.

Next Week: Wuxia Horrifica, the haunting tales of the Bride with White Hair. Don’t miss it!

About Lawrence Ellsworth

Lawrence Ellsworth is the historical fiction nom de plume of Lawrence Schick, author of The Rose Knight’s Crucifixion and editor of The Big Book of Swashbuckling Adventure. See my website at swashbucklingadventure.net.

My current ongoing project is compiling and translating new, contemporary editions of all the books in Alexandre Dumas’s Musketeers Cycle, a series that when complete will fill nine volumes. Volume 7, Devil’s Dance, is currently being published in serial form on the Substack platform. Volumes 8 and 9 are forthcoming. Check out the series at musketeerscycle.substack.com.

As Lawrence Schick, I’m a writer and game designer primarily associated with narrative or role-playing games, a career I’ve pursued for over forty years, starting in the late 1970s working for Dungeons & Dragons co-creator Gary Gygax, moving into video games in the ‘80s and then online role-playing games in the ‘90s. I was lead writer and “loremaster” for The Elder Scrolls Online for over nine years, and most recently I’ve returned to D&D as the Principal Narrative Designer for Larian Studios’ smash hit Baldur’s Gate 3.

Copyright © 2023 Lawrence Schick. All rights reserved.