This was a pretty entertaining bit of inconsequential fantasy from the '60s. Basically, super-strong Hercules must travel to Hades to rescue a princess. This leads to unfortunate consequences when his pal Theseus falls in love with Persephone and steals her from the shadowy depths.
A low-budget effort from director Mario Bava, who nonetheless creates a quite visually inventive and entertaining "epic." It stars Reg Park as Hercules and Christopher Lee as his nemesis, Nico.
I'd really like to talk more about it, but I watched it "instantly" on Netflix and, well...
Here, watch this preview:
Looks terrible, doesn't it? The digital copy Netflix offers is about that bad, with a few added detriments. The copy Netflix uses is clearly a dub from a VHS tape, which is already taken from an inferior print. So along with the film scratches, every once in a while some magnetic distortion shows up, at times obscuring the entire image. (Haven't seen that since the '90s.) There's a 20-minute patch where roughly a quarter of the screen is obscured by horizontal white visual noise. Also, as you can imagine, the sound is terrible.
This sums up how awful it is. The movie is offered in 16:9, but it's clear that they just chopped the bottom and top off of a 4:3 version, itself already cut down from the original. You only get about 56% of the original picture!
I would love to see a high-quality version of this film. Apparently there's a DVD released by Fantoma which is pretty good. The Netflix "Watch Instantly" version is one of the worst ports I've ever seen.