Colossus and the Amazon Queen (1960)

Very best movie i ever watch

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

Taken within the confines of the genre this is a humorous silly adventure. What sets it apart slightly from the usual run of the mill toga films is an odd jazz flavored score and the presence of Rod Taylor at the beginning of his career. Within a few years he's be working for Hitchcock starring in The Birds as well as appearing in other big budget films like The V.I.P.S. and The Time Machine something that no one else in the cast or any other of these sex and sandal flicks ever got remotely close too. Taylor was always a big beefy guy but he is positively dwarfed by Ed Fury, who physique is as usual in awe inspiring shape. Loaded with homo-erotic subtext and dreadful dialog watch this for its camp value and a star on the rise.

Comedic sword and sandal attempt has Aussie Rod Taylor playing a cheeky swindler, conned into travelling to an island on the promise of treasure, discovering that he and his companions are actually man-cargo being delivered to a race of lusty Amazon women for domestic and sexual servitude. Doesn't sound all that bad really. Trouble emerges when the warrior-who-would-be-Queen (Gray) falls for the burly Glauco (Fury), deepening a rift between her and nemesis Melitta (Rocca) that spirals into an internecine contest, further compounded when pirates discover the secluded hamlet.It's frolicking fun with a high camp quality that you'll either find amusing or dull. Taylor and Fury rarely have a moment without some form of slapstick or situation comedy, while beauties Gray and Rocca have an hilarious rivalry of which Rocca always seems to be on the wrong end. I thought her frequent stumbles were pretty funny in a corny sort of way, and Gianna Canale's horny Queen Regina constantly bemoaning her chastity vow ("does a kiss have a flavour?") also hit the right note. The three female leads also happen to be exceptionally attractive women to boot, which both Taylor and Fury seem to fully appreciate.Overall, it's a comedy without pretense, featuring a glamorous cast, some witty dialogue, epic sets and the usual colourful costumes. A funny take on domestic role reversal that's politically incorrect but unlikely to offend (e.g. the smug looks on the faces of Taylor and Fury after cheap attempts at groping their masters are rebuffed). Incidentally, there's also a great scene in which a portly, balding and bearded slave plays a kissing Casanova to an endless queue of frisky Amazons that shouldn't be missed for pure ham value.

It would be hard to imagine this film as anything more than a parody of the Hercules/gladiator genre, but it fails miserably even at that. I can't believe that the film makers had anything remotely sensible in mind when they patched this thing together, or if they even had an overall working outline of what they were trying to do. The result is a poorly executed picture that meanders between action and comedy, but the outcome is simply embarrassing.At least if you have to watch this to complete the fifty movie DVD set from Mill Creek/Tree Line Films, the lead characters are pleasing on the eyes. Ed Fury is the main muscle man named Glauco, who has an eye for Antiope, the would be queen who wants to replace La Regina (Gianna Maria Canale). Glauco's sidekick Pirro (Rod Taylor) is busy chasing down Melitta (Daniella Rocca), as the two women engage in a contest for the 'sacred girdle'. A band of pirates and a wrestling bear also make appearances for reasons that seem entirely irrelevant.The other point has to do with the musical score, it really had no connection to the events happening on screen; most of the time it had a 'Gilligan's Island' feel to it. The thought just occurred to me that watching the picture in reverse probably would make just as much sense as watching it normally. However I use the term figuratively, there's no way to watch this film normally.

This movie is cool! It's kind of dumb but it is really cool. Like, there are these dudes, and they are like, Gladiators & stuff?? And they go on a boat somewhere, I don't know where, and it like, crashes & stuff. The guys all find themselves stranded on this island, you know, and it's like BABE CITY!! There are only hot Italian B-actresses on the whole island, and they all dress like the sluts in CALIGULA only nobody gets cut in half or has Macolm McDowall put his ring where the sun don't shine on them. I like all female society movies, especially when they are populated by creamy, olive skinned, sharp nosed and firm bosomed Italian actresses who's voices are dubbed into English. So I consider myself lucky: I hope someday you get to find a movie that looks like it was pretty much made with you in mind.So like, these Gladiator dudes are kind of funny. They have all these heroic missions and are all like, former soldiers or something who treat each other like they are closer than brothers. And they all dress like Freddy Mercury from that Queen tour after NEWS OF THE WORLD, which was such a cool album. But what I mean is that, like, they all run around in tights and leather tunics, have big spears and big muscles and always look sweaty or oiled, yet not one of them is gay. Not even by a long shot. The movie is even kind of a silly comedy at times with wacky noise effects and a talking parrot, but there isn't any of the stuff that Oliver Stone found so necessary. And everywhere you look, BABES!!And what babes they are. Jessica Simpson and Scarlett Johanssen and Natalie Portman are like, twits from the underclass study hall compared to the graceful, full figured 1960 era knockouts populating this very sexist and male oriented entertainment. The women throw themselves at these guys, sometimes quite literally, and since there are only about eight of them and a whole island full of these women I would expect that we'd see a working example of that male to female ratio thing that Peter Sellers talked about in DR. STRANGELOVE about needing women with exceedingly attractive characteristics, which sort of makes sense if you hope to re-populate the world with the President and maybe the guys who run Haliburton. Maybe this is where they got their inspiration for Strangelove's speech. Because with an estimated female to male ratio of about 35 to 1 -- and all of them hot -- these Gladiators had better not be gay, or else there are going to be a lot of unhappy faces in the morning.Look for this movie on a 50 Movie/12 DVD box set from Treeline Films called SCI FI CLASSICS: It's a mucky fullframe English print that looks like someone used it to hang their laundry on before the video transfer was done, but it beats the hell out of anything that's been released this year in the theaters so far, and there are what, 48 more to go??7/10