After a long vacation with those Argonauts guys, Hercules returns to his hometown of Thebes with his new wife Iole (along with her sheer top and constantly shining headlights, hubba-hubba) on his arm and his buddy Laertes's (inventor of the homing pigeon) son Ulysses playing the Robin to Herc's Batman... only without the little green elf booties… but no less gay… and I don’t mean the “lame” gay, I mean the “oiled up Greco-Roman nekkid wrasslin’” gay... Anyway, the three ride toward town on their covered wagon (!?), with Iole rocking their theme music on her lute. If this was dental surgery, this is the point where I'd be tapping on the Dentist's arm because he's drilling into my nerves and it's fucking killing me. After a skirmish with the demigod Antaeus (you know, that big guy who gets revitalized whenever he touches the ground), Herc makes it to Thebes only to discover that his old buddy and political hookup Kind Oedipus has since given up this thrown to his two sons Polinices and Eteocles. P & E were supposed to take turns ruling the city in one-year intervals, bur current ruler ET ain't givin' up his seat. Of course this peeves off Polly, so the two prepare their armies to go to war. When Hercules learns the story, he offers to talk to ET himself, but he only gets 6 days to start convincing. If he's anything like me, he'll sit around violating Iole and catch up on all the shows he TiVo’ed while he was out Argonauting it up, before eventually having a sit-down with ET sometime late into the 5th day. As for Oedipus, he Humpty Dances off this mortal coil and retires to Hades... which Christians call Hell... and Americans call Florida.

When he receives (or rather takes) an audience with ET, the red-headed ruler (so, he's Irish?!) caves in almost immediately and leaves behind his throne under the impression that he plans to head to Egypt in search of a good tiger trainer... uhm, okay amigo, whatever you gotta say to make it look like you didn't just punk out to the hero. But, while on the way with Ulysses to negotiate the transference of Thebes into Polly's power, Herc makes the mistake of drinking water out of the eye socket of a massive stone head. According to a booming disembodied voice, that's some major league not-good H2Whooooooooa old Herc's ingesting called "The Waters of Forgetfulness". If you think this liquid refreshment induces cheesy soap opera style amnesia in our hero, well, you're smarter than your friends give you credit for.

Beef-ules proves that no matter how big his muscles may be, he's still the lightest lightweight in Thebes, passing out shortly after his drink. A battalion of guys in red capes, frilly skirts, and pointy hats swoop in to claim Herc's body while Uly plays dumb (and mute) and is brought along too. Where are they going? To this chick named Omphale's place. She's one of those middle-aged cougar types who likes to wear tight spandex costumes like you’d find in an interpretive dance class, uses clichéd pick-up lines like the old "Haven't we met before?" when she’s on the prowl for fresh meat, and picks up a new boy toy every few weeks or so to prove to herself she's still attractive despite her age. It doesn't hurt that her posse of kidnappers drags these unconscious boy toys back to her either. You kinda feel bad for her previous boyfriends, because each one is killed when the newest one is brought in so they can become part of her creepy undead statue collection, but you gotta figure that if they were stupid enough to chug Roofie water out of a big stone face's eye socket in the first place, they're lucky they at least got to bang a hot older lady for a few days before getting the pin cushion treatment by her be-caped henchmen.

When Hercu-hunk awakens in Omphy's place, he finds a crop of bathing beauties, weird UFO type "wobbly saw" music, and no idea what the fuck is going on. Omphy tells him that he's actually the king of the surrounding lands and she's his hot wife. So, while he's enjoying the free food and interpretive dance sessions put on by Omphy's all girl revue, it's up to Ulysses to try and snap the big man out of his mental funk, while at the same time keeping up his "I'm just a hapless retard" schtick to the guards. Back in Thebes, ET sees Hercules’s disappearance as a desertion and has Iole tossed in jail as punishment for "conspiring" with her hubby to sell him out to brother Polly. Elsewhere, over in Ithaca, Laertes receives an S.O.S. from Junior, sent via carrier pigeon when Omphy's guards weren't looking, so he gathers a posse to set out and free the captured duo. Can Herc shake off his new piece of ass and her mind control stew in time to keep Thebes from all-out war, or will he wind up just the latest addition to Omphy's museum of embalmed ex-husbands? Not to say that these movies are predictable, but if it's the latter, I'll eat my desktop for dinner. Either way we all know there's going to be a point where Steve Reeves wrestles stuffed tigers, and that's really all anybody came to see, right?

There are three big problems I have with Hercules Unchained, and in standard, vanilla, missionary position style counting fashion, here they are: 1.) No monsters. The reason people watch moves based on mythology is for the monsters. No Chimera, no Minotaurs, no Gryphons, no Hydra, nothing. Granted, nigh-immobile extra-terrestrial golems may not be a big wedge of the Greek Myth cheese wheel, but at least Hercules Against the Moon Men had monsters! What does Hercules Unchained have? Douche bags in red capes wearing pointy hats and frilly mini-skirts, a chromosome deficient hillbilly goon, and some stuffed animals. I haven't been this disappointed since they took Crystal Pepsi off the market... don’t ask me kids, just Google it. 2.) The movie tries too hard to be "interesting". Instead of making a simple flick about Hercules trying to unite warring brothers, or stopping an evil witch who embalms her boyfriends, or saving Thebes from an evil general and his marauding army, our writer/director decided to pack as much fudge into this cinematic colon as humanly possible. The result? A clusterfuck. That's the worst kind of fuck too! Despite being the hero of the movie, there's so much going on here that there were large, important chunks of the story that had almost nothing to do with our titular demigod. The whole drama between Polly and ET could've been told in a whole other without Herc, especially considering his complete lack of involvement on the outcome. Blah. 3.) The title. At no point was Hercules ever "chained". Sure, if you want to make the excuse for the movie that Herc was "chained" by the evil queen's magic potion, I guess his breaking of that spell could be considering his "unchaining", but why should we have to keep making excuses for movies? Why does part of our entertainment have to include trying to make movies suck less in an effort to make us feel like we haven't been wasting our time and money? My point being that Hercules casually tosses around the occasional statuary, bends a steel bar, hits a few guys, holds open a closing door, uhm, goes swimming, errrr, engages in mildly homoerotic foreplay with a stuffed animal that tears off his toga... you get the idea. He does all that shit, but at no point is he chained.

When all is said and done, Hercules Unchained is slightly better made than my prior bout with the do-gooder in Hercules Against the Moon Men, but it's not nearly as fun to watch, and thus not as entertaining. A very lackluster way to put the '50s to bed if you ask me... and though you technically didn't ask me, the fact that you read the review is close enough to asking me that I can say "Nyah Nyah!" with conviction. Oh yeah, and if you're wondering whether the Mario Bava credited as the cinematographer here is that Mario Bava that directed Bay of Blood along with a million other movies, that Mario Bava, it is. Something to add to the homemade horror geek Trivial Pursuit you've been working on during your lunch breaks for the last 3 years. Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got a date with a Bionic Commando cartridge and need to get a jump start on blowing into my NES so I can make it work... Sally forth!