Hercules in the Haunted World (1961)

[Mofo Rising]

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:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxiDuTd51XU

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.

[RCMerchant]

Wow-that IS awful! Not the movie itself-which is pretty good as far as sword and sandle stuff goes (plus Christopher Lee!)-the picture quality.
I bought a vhs copy of METROPOLIS some time back. The transfer looked like it came from a print as old as the film itself. It was totaly unwatchable. It was so murky-the whole thing looked like it was in a thick fog. I actually threw it in the garbage.

[JaseSF]

There's actually a nice DVD of this movie out there from Fantoma..

[Mike From BBandBCs]

This looks simply awesome though I've never heard of it. I just added it to my netflix, thanks!

[Hammock Rider]

I'm a sucker for peplums. This is one of my favorites. It's head and shoulders above most of them. Mario Bava and Christopher Lee in a Hercules movie? What's not to like?