| The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review |
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HERCULES RETURNS
Rating: 
Australia. 1993.
Director – David Parker, Screenplay – Des Mangan, Based the Live Movie Show Double Take Meets Hercules, Producer – Philip Jaroslow, Photography – David Connell, Contemporary Footage Music – Philip Judd, Production Design – Jon Dowding. Production Company – Philm Productions.
Cast:
David Argue (Brad McBain), Mary Coustas (Lisa), Bruce Spence (Sprocket), Michael Carman (Kent), Voices of Des Mangan and Sally Patience
Plot: Brad McBain quits his job on a cinema multiplex chain, disliking his boss Kent’s money-hungry attitude. He finds an old abandoned cinema and decides to open it as a friendly, more intimate theatre. He has the idea of opening with the last film to screen there which turns out to be an Italian Hercules film. But come the opening night they find Kent has sabotaged them by delivering an unsubtitled print of the film – and he and his staff are forced to improvise the voices themselves.
This Australian film has been developed out of the live comedy theatre gimmick of dubbing spontaneously off-the-cuff comic lines over old films and tv shows. Former radio DJ Des Mangan and Sally Patience form such an Australian cabaret called Double Take. And here their successful comic send-up of the Hercules films has been adapted into a film itself. The original film is Hercules, Samson and Ulysses (1964).
The Hercules films were well in need of a good send-up and certainly needed all the bubbling homo-eroticism beneath them brought out into the open. But the result here is really an extraordinarily crass film. It plumbs the lowest of the Australian penchant for vulgar, lowbrow humour – all jokes about vomiting, beer, dubbed in farts and the like. All the characters are morons who speak in squeaky voices. And the homo-erotic joke is something that actually gets quite offensive. There are really few films which have been so thuddingly and persistently moronic in their approach.
Copyright Richard Scheib 1994
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