In ancient Greece, evil King Hyperion (Mickey Rourke, chewing the scenery for all it's worth) is trying to get his hands on a mystical bow that will enable him to revive the Titans, put into what seems to be suspended animation following their defeat by the gods of Olympus. If Hyperion succeeds, he'll be able to use the Titans to help him conquer the rest of the known world. Zeus and the other gods don't want this to happen, but they're forbidden from interfering with the affairs of mortals, so Zeus tries to manipulate things by appearing in human form and befriending the heroic young peasant Theseus (Henry Cavill), who will serve as the gods' champion against Hyperion. After that, a bunch of running around and CGI blood-spilling ensues.
As I've probably mentioned before, when I was a kid one of the local TV stations ran those Italian-made sword-and-sandal movies every week, when they weren't running Tarzan or Roy Rogers movies, and I was a faithful viewer. IMMORTALS strikes me as a direct descendant of those movies. It might as well be titled THESEUS VERSUS THE TITANS. Sure, there are a lot more special effects, but the plot and dialogue are right out of those earlier films, so much so that it actually looked a little odd to me when the words matched the lip movements. I'm used to bad English dubbing in movies like this.
3 comments:
I’m interested to know the titles of the old films that you watched on channel 11, they sound like they might be right up my alley for good entertainment. I wasn’t as fortunate to have such entertaining TV while growing up, but the previews of Immortals reminded me of the 1963 version of Jason and the Argonauts. One of my co-workers at DISH told me that I would love Immortals since it’s similar to Jason and the Argonauts but with much better graphics. I don’t mind blood and gore so it sounds like Immortals needs to be added to my Blockbuster @Home queue.
It was a syndicated package that ran under the umbrella title "Sons of Hercules". According to the Wikipedia article on it here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sons_of_Hercules
there were 14 films in the rotation, which are listed on that Wikipedia page. I would have sworn there were more than that, but I was a little kid so it's possible it just seemed like it to me. If you search "Sons of Hercules" on YouTube, the theme song that ran with all the movies is there. Evidently there's a rock band called Sons of Hercules, too. I didn't know that.
I remember watching The Sons of Hercules every Sunday in NY when I was a kid. I loved those movies. There's a wiki on the series, which lists all the films.
RJR
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