Maciste nelle miniere del re Salomone

Reg Park had the body for these "Hercules" movies -- providing you like 'em bulky and beefy -- but he had neither the face nor the personality nor the talent. It takes nearly half-an-hour for him to make his first appearance here and when he does, he adds virtually nothing to the proceedings.

This means the movie must survive on its peripheral values and it does have a few of those. The African setting is at least a bit different and there's an impressively-large sculpture of an Egyptian head that can be retracted into a wall to reveal a secret passageway underneath. While Wandisa Guida makes for a rather glum heroine, Eleonora Bianchi adds zest to her role as the evil usurper and the unconvincingly-named "Dan Harrison" serves as an appealing young hero.

As usual in these affairs, there's a strong dose of male bondage-and-torture. Reg Park gets tied between two teams of horses which are supposed to pull him apart like a Thanksgiving wishbone, but a similar scene in Steve Reeves' "Goliath and the Barbarians" did a better job of it. Dan Harrison gets whipped in a dungeon but, strange, the bloody marks on his back don't change one bit no matter how many times the whip strikes him. Then Harrison is chained to the wall of an arena so that he can be both stabbed and crushed by a contraption which is slowly propelled toward him. It's part of the movie's problem with its leading man that in this scene, a sweat-covered Harrison -- stripped to a loincloth to reveal an adequate but unspectacular physique -- is far sexier and more attractive than Reg Park could ever hope to be.