After my look at Pumping Iron, a friend recommended I give Hercules Goes to New York another glance, a cheapie starring the current leader of the world's 5th largest economy.
The general effect of the movie is actually kind of depressing. Let me explain that. The movie was made is 1970, a full half-decade after the peplum boom ended and the only way that Hercules and other muscle heroes would be relevant is by poking fun at them. It's sort of like how Shatner and Adam West and other irrelevant actors past their expiration date reinvent themselves as self-parodies living up to their campy image.
I don't find this funny...I find it tragic. For that reason, as heretical as it sounds, I never much liked Blazing Saddles. Just look when it came out: 1974, a year after the last truly relevant Western, the sentimental Sam Pekinpah's Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, which was the Hollywood Western's funeral, eulogy and last cry of defiance in one. In that context, Blazing Saddles is like a prop comedian seltzer-squirting a widow at her husband's wake.
When parodies are bigger than the actual thing it parodies, it's a sure sign something is no longer relevant. What I find amazing is that Blazing Saddles is often the only Western that people of my generation have ever seen!
I always thought the moment America stopped taking newspaper science fiction strips with any seriousness was with the Mad Magazine parody of Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers. Flash Gordon went from a strip with characters people love, to being an irreverent way for magazine writers to talk about an architectural style.
If you need another example, look at the hilarious Rent parody in Team America: World Police, "Everybody Has AIDS." There's such a thing as a parody that is so spot-on, it torpedoes the effectiveness of its target forever, and I'd definitely put "Everybody has AIDS" in that category. No wonder the ten years too late movie version with Rosario Dawson tanked.
Maybe I'm just not getting the joke of movies like Hercules in New York that reinvent their genre as parody, and instead I'm spending my time mourning the end of the peplum. A Norwegian friend of mine told me that there's much more of the Nordic character in me than the Latin, as Latins are a culture that enjoy life whereas I cry much more easily than I can laugh.
Then again, this movie is so weirdly done that with almost all the jokes you're not sure whether to laugh or not, if something is intentionally funny or just an elaborate translation mistake.
There is one bit of humor in the movie, though it's entirely unintentional. This has to go down in history as the most dated-looking film I've ever seen in my life. The best part has to be Arnold's tan cordoroy jacket/turtleneck sweater combo. Most people can guess when a movie is made (give or take three years) just based on how a movie looks, and this is one of the few films I've seen you can guess it to within the actual year.
Believe it or not, the most effective scenes in the film are actually ones where Arnold and his girlfriend are just walking around New York, enjoying each other. They're simple, quiet little scenes where the character of the city of New York is the star, and they're much to be preferred over Arnold stopping a forklift and going "a fine chariot, but where are the horses?" (THAT'S NOT FUNNY!)
The all-time winner has to be this scene:
I can't even identify the best part: the meat-smacking sounds when Arnold pounds that bear (only Harrison Ford has a more distinctive sounding punch) or the fact that, come the midway point, it's obvious the bear is down for the count and Arnold is just whacking it out of sadism. The merry bazouki music is a very weird, whimsical touch.
There was one scene where some New Yorker friends of Hercules got together and suggested that Hercules was just a demented guy that thought he was Hercules. For some reason, this struck me as a much more entertaining premise than the actual movie itself.
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