Movies that would have benefitted from a little bulge

I love movies - love them - and I hope I can be forgiven for blogging about them a little bit

There are some movies that could have stood for a fellow like Victor Mature to be the "and more" for the ladies.

Some movies wouldn't be better off with a few healthy, muscular and virile male leads, however. For instance, the MAGNIFICENT SEVEN had the incredible Steve McQueen to ramp up the flick's testosterone quotient.

(On an unrelated note, I lived for many years in France and Turkey, and I always found it amusing how Europeans (and to a lesser extent, Asians) love and value the Western genre and we Americans tend to take them for granted. With the exception of pseudo-Westerns like No Country for Old Men, Westerns are more or less dead stateside, which is a shame.)

ATLANTIS, THE LOST CONTINENT (1961)

What I find the most interesting about George Pal is how sterling his reputation is, despite the fact that his ratio of hits to misses is of downright Chevy Chasian proportions. Remember how long it took Scorcese and Spielberg to recover, respectively, from the flops of NEW YORK, NEW YORK and 1941, and how totally wrecked Michael Cimino's career was by Heaven's Gate? Pal's Tom Thumb was a poor excuse for family entertainment, his Doc Savage was a lousy campstravaganza in the style of the Adam West Batman TV show (after which, I am certain, Pal died out of shame), and the low watermark had to be Atlantis, generally considered to be George Pal's worst movie.

Atlantis sounds really great on paper: a love story between a Greek fisherman who rescues an Atlantean princess, set around the destruction of a sexy, decadent civilization that looks like a cross between Ancient Greece and the Jabba the Hutt palace scenes in Return of the Jedi.

What I find lacking is the absence of real beefcake and man-candy, especially since this seems to be a requirement for man-sized movies about guys in sandals and little skirts. The male lead was almost as surprisingly uninteresting as Brad Pitt's unfunny and unsexy turn as Achilles in TROY, and it's a tribute to the male actor's dullness in Atlantis that for the life of me I just can't think of his name. It doesn't help the female lead was equally boring and also something less than a knockout: she was like the frumpier, more prudish older sister of a Bond girl.

Atlantis, the Lost Continent is something that almost never happens: the people in front of the camera are unknowns that remained unknown (and lack even the basic cult following of someone like John Phillip Law or Nancy Kovacs), while the person behind is a household name like George Pal. The only other example of this would be the fascinating eighties adventure teen flick Young Sherlock Holmes, which was produced by Spielberg and Henry Winkler and directed by Barry Levinson (prior to his Oscar for Rain Man).

To be fair, Atlantis had more off the wall George Pal innovation, who even in his worst movie had much more imagination than even the better Italian Sword n' Sandal pictures. Take the bizarre Moreau like animal men, and a scene inside an iron-age submarine. What I find surprising is how the Italians did a lot more with less when it came to charismatic and sexy actors that liven up a screen: take the entire career of Steve Reeves, the handsomest and most perfect man who ever lived, or a supersexy exotic showgirl-dancer like Chelo Alonso. I've also seen more than my fair share of Turkish movies, and what Turkish movies lack in anything resembling production value, they make up for with attractive and personable men and women. It's something you don't need a big budget to have, which inexplicably Atlantis lacks. If ever there was a movie that needed a big Greek muscle stud, it would be this one.

On a final note, there was one project of George Pal's that could have saved his reputation, one of movies' great What-Ifs: Time Machine II. The idea of George Pal doing a sequel to his greatest masterpiece should be enough to get any science fiction fan's pulse racing, but also claymation master Ray Harryhausen would have been on board to make all the weird creatures! Why it never happens I'll never understand.

That's my big one: which movies do you think would have benefitted from a little muscle? Fire away in the comments section below.