THE GIANT OF METROPOLIS (1961)

Obro (Gordon Mitchell) is the leader of a small group of tribesmen traveling to Metropolis, a big city on the island of Atlantis, to warn the town's rulers that their perverse experiments with nature will only lead to the earth rebelling and getting its revenge. Using Atlantean science, King Yotar is in the midst of resurrecting his dead father Egon using the "great miracles of science," and then he plans to transplant Egon's brain into the head of his young son Elmos, in theory giving him eternal life but stealing his childhood. (Yotar mouths Nazi ideology when he claims that the sacrifices of others don't matter as long as science is served.) When Obro and his men approach the city, Yotar unleashes a magnetic wind storm that rips the flesh off of most of the men, leaving only skeletons, but Obro survives. Yotar surmises that it's because Obro has something special in his blood that makes him super-human (in addition to many muscles). Obro is captured and Yotar wants to run experiments on him to see about creating a "perfect being." Yotar's queen Texen and her step-daughter Mecede more or less stand around expressing disapproval of Yotar's twisted science worship, especially taking issue with Yotar's isolation of Elmos. The living-dead Egon begs to be allowed to die. Meanwhile, Obro is put through a series of physical tests: he battles a brutish sub-human, is attacked by cannibal pygmies, and undergoes a tortuous trial by light, a light with weight, heat, and coldness. Eventually, the astronomers of Metropolis realize that Yotar's experiments have "changed the equilibrium of the solar system," shifting the axis of the earth, and they predict the destruction of Metropolis, and all of Atlantis, by earthquakes. Soon, Obro, who has escaped from Yotar's forces, begins committing acts of terrorism at night with the help of Mecede, who is now his lover. As the fate of the city becomes clear, Obro accuses Yotar of being "blinded by science," and there is an uprising among the citizens, though ultimately it's too little, too late, and Atlantis is destroyed, with Yotar and Mecede left standing on a beach looking helplessly at the destruction.

Crazy flick alert! This is a myth-based muscleman movie that is also fantasy and science fiction, and is filled with psychedelic colors a few years before that became a trend. The title is tricky: the land is called Metropolis in the English dub I saw, but it’s clearly intended to be Atlantis. One reviewer calls the city Metropolis, presuming it's the capital of Atlantis, and that works for me. The muscly Mitchell is maybe a skosh too old for the part—he was nearly 40 and, though his body is still in great shape, his age shows on his face, which oddly was not a problem in the Atlas/Maciste movie he made the same year. The rest of the cast is adequate if not much more; for the record, Rolando Lupi is Yotar, Bella Cortez is Mecede, and Liana Orfei is the queen, and no one else really gets a chance to make much of an impression—unlike in most peplum films, the hero doesn't really get a sidekick. It’s a shock to the system to see the usual dusty sword-and-sandal landscape replaced in the first ten minutes by a huge modernist city set, kind of a cross between brutalism and art deco. The sets are indeed fabulous and even when the use of miniatures is obvious it remains fun to watch the visuals. Some of the sets are rendered in glowy pastel colors that bring to mind the look of the later HERCULES IN THE HAUNTED WORLD.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the movie is the theme of how we are damaging our earth. At one point, an old man known only as the Cavedweller, warns, "Don’t ask the earth to withstand more than it was meant to." Though the 'tampering in God’s domain' angle is clear, I was never certain how Yotar was depleting the earth, but still, the message is one which is still relevant. Also still relevant: a sexy dance with a busty woman in a bikini and two loinclothed men, one white, one black. I'm not sure if the dance means anything, but like the rest of this weird movie, it's fun to watch. Mitchell's physique is impressive but there are far too many scenes of him kicking the asses of dozens of armed men with no help. In a few shots, Mitchell basically just pushes some poor slow-moving saps out of his way and they fall to the ground, defeated. The giant of the title is not a character but a statue of an Atlas-type god under which lies the entrance to Obro's hideout. And [mild spoiler!], it seems like the young boy doesn't survive, despite being carried out of the destruction by Mecede. There are several YouTube prints; beware the non-letterboxed versions, which are both distorted and muddy. [YouTube]