HERCULES IN THE HAUNTED WORLD

1961
Italy
aka Vampire gegen Herakles (WG), Hercules in the Centre of the Earth (GB)
SPA Cinematografica
Director: Mario Bava
Screenplay: Alessandro Continenza, Mario Bava, Franco Prosperi, Duccio Tessari
Cinematography: Mario Bava
Music: Armando Trovaioli
Cast: Reg Park (Hercules), Christopher Lee (Licos), Leonora Ruffo (Dianara), Giorgio Ardisson (Theseus), Marissa Belli (Arethusa), Ida Galli (Persephone), Franco Giacobini (Telemachus), Mino Doro (Keros), Rosalba Neri (Helena), Ely Draco (Jocasta), Gaia Germani (Medea), Raf Baldassarre (Head Mercenary), Elisabetta Pavan (Tamar), Aldo Pedinotti (Sunis), Claudio Marzulli, Grazia Collodi (Electra)

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This was Mario Bava's second film as director after the excellent Black Sunday (Maschera del demonio, 60), and it attempts to merge the gothic lyricism of that feature with the fashionable heroics of the peplum. It was not alone in attempting such a marriage; Giacomo Gentilomo's Goliath and the Vampires (Maciste contro il vampiro, 61) was similar in both look and feel (and interestingly sometimes credited to Sergio Corbucci, who would later add baroque trappings to the western and create Django (66)), as were a range of comparatively inferior (but often fun) others such as Umberto Scarpelli's Giant of Metropolis (Il Gigante di Metropolis, 64) and Vittorio Cottafavi's Hercules and the Conquest of Atlantis (Ercole alla conquista di Atlantide, 61) (also starring Reg Park).

Pulling elements from a bizarre jumble of Greek myth, this sees Hercules returning home to his fiancée, Dianara, only to find that she is a virtual zombie, driven to the point of chronic introspection by the death of her father. In fact, she is under the spell of her uncle, Licos, who has taken advantage of her supposed illness to assume regency of the throne. He is also a part time vampire.

Accompanied by his bequiffed pal Theseus, our pumped-up protagonist ventures into the underworld in an attempt to find the magic rock that will revive her. After a number of adventures this is accomplished, but not before his friend has fallen in love and eloped with Persephone, the favorite daughter of the despotic god Pluto. This causes a famine to fall upon the land, and while Hercules is charged with righting the situation, Licos is growing ever closer to realizing his ambition of becoming an all-powerful ruler, an ambition that will be fulfilled when he drinks the blood of Dianara during a rapidly forthcoming eclipse.

Haunted World is an extremely strange film. It works best as a kind of bizarre hallucinogenic dream in which things happen in streams that are at the same time illogical and yet appropriate. At one moment people are seen to be underground, the next they are swimming in the middle of the ocean. Locations melt into one another until all places become one, endless landscape populated by familiar - and yet distorted - figures. Archetypal characters appear in odd forms: Procustes (who liked to make his customers fit his beds by lethally stretching or shortening their bodies) is now a stone man, a masked sibyl recounts the story to the beat of some virtually oriental gesticulations and Sunis the son of Poseidon is last seen running after his horses which were more commonly used to rip his victims limb from limb.

In fact, these encounters act as virtual interruptions to the base of the storyline. This is always a problem with Italian genre cinema - witness the dull police procedural segments Freda's The Devil's Commandment (I Vampiri, 56). The main point of these sword-and-sandal productions were the stunt sequences, the battles, fights and swordplay. Here they often appear rather primitive (especially from the viewpoint of a time in which digital effects are even widespread in low-budget productions). In fact, it is a worth questioning as to whether Bava meant some of his effects and sequences to be somewhat eccentric. The Procustes character is especially hilarious, and always elicits a laugh, as does the climax in which Hercules chucks a giant polystyrene monolith on top of Chris Lee in an almost camply bathetic style. The fact is that these moments of unexpected humor heighten the general feeling that creating a semblance of authenticity is the furthest thing from the director's mind.

This is further carried by the performances that are, to say the least, passive. Reg Park ambles his way through things with the occasional expression when it is really needed - but definitely looks the part more than most of the other post Steve Reeves musclemen to appear in such stuff. Leonora Ruffo is supposed to be somnambulant, and manages with an almost alarming authenticity. Giorgio Ardisson is simply weird and even the reliably hammy Lee is relatively withdrawn. They are not supposed to be any more than ciphers, and the way in which they seem to be human driftwood reflects not only the incapacity to form their own destinies away from the manipulation of their gods, but also away from the framework of the dream in which they appear. It could also be contended that the poor dubbing actually aids this film - it just separates these figures further from the shores of naturalism.

This overall feeling of surrealism is merely confirmed by Bava's astounding use of coloured filters and smoke to render even the most ordinary of sets extraordinary. At no time is the sky blue, Grey or dark - it is always a shocking red or cloudy orange (making it even more difficult to determine whether they are under or over ground). Mist crawls everywhere, sucked into all empty spaces like the earth's breath. Perspective is cast aside - sometimes with deliberately absurd results. Bava flings the images of his heroes around with abandon. Is it possible that someone with such an acute grasp of camera trickery could include the doll figures jumping of precipices in anything but an intentional way?

Haunted World succeeds because of its very alienness. It would be impossible to give a plot summary and adequately impart the nature of the film because it is almost totally dependent upon its atmospherics and disjointed nature. As a whole, it remains in the mind as some kind of mental seizure, a succession of unforgettable images - the undead rising from their tombs and flying at their victims, the face of the villain appearing in a pool of blood - amongst a tangle of disconcertingly designed non-authenticity.

Matt Blake