‘The Adventures of Hercules II’ or — Completely Deranged, Even by Italian Standards?

It’s immediately apparent that Luigi Cozzi might’ve had a smaller budget for ‘The Adventures of Hercules II’ (1985), the sequel to his ‘Hercules’ (1983), as the opening ten minutes consist entirely of recycled footage from the first movie. Sure, it could, technically, be classified as a recapping of previous events but it’s undeniably to pad out the running time.

Having liberally borrowed from his own movie Cozzi then goes on to liberally borrow (outright steal?!) from other films, specifically ‘Forbidden Planet’ (1956). It’s not that he’s inserted unadulterated footage from the sci-fi classic and more that his special effects team have rotoscoped the effects of the monster from the Id as a money-saving exercise. Bizarrely, it kinda works artistically speaking, if not exactly legally.

Further cost-cutting measures are also evident by the fact that Cozzi’s location work contains zero effects work in order to depict fantastical settings, so a beach is simply a beach and a forest is simply a forest, so there’s a little less magic this time round.

Yep, half an hour in and ‘The Adventures if Hercules II’ was certainly lacking some of that insane charm that made its predecessor such a delight.

And then William Berger pops back up as the resurrected evil King Minos and the movie… how can I best put this?… loses its god-damned mind!

It’s as though Cozzi has been holding back the craziness, and maybe saving the bulk of his budget, for the film’s second half because as soon as William Berger starts firing lasers from his eyeballs ‘Hercules II’ utterly defies description. But I’ll try my best anyway.

For example — there’s a truly astonishing scene where Urania travels into outer space to communicate with the Little People and is treated to a guided tour of the universe. Suddenly the Cozzi we all know and love is firing on all cylinders with his distinctive multi-coloured starfields ravishing the senses. It’s a moment so transcendentally beautifully I was on the verge of breaking down into tears witnessing the sublime glory of it all.

And it just keeps getting crazier!

By the time we get to the climactic battle between King Minos and Hercules we’re in territory so visually overwhelming and chromatically extreme it makes the stargate from Kubrick’s ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ (1968) look as optically stimulating as an unpainted brick wall. This battle, not surprisingly, takes place in outer space where King Minos, having transformed into pure energy, turns into a massive, glowing Tyrannosaurus Rex. Hercules responds by transforming into a massive, glowing gorilla and it’s at this precise moment we realise Cozzi has got his special effects team to rotoscope the entire T-Rex fight sequence from the original ‘King Kong’ (1933) only in retina-blasting fluorescent neon. It’s like watching ‘King Kong’ AND Olivia Newton-John’s ‘Xanadu’ (1980) at exactly the same time, which might be just be the greatest idea anyone has ever had in the history of cinema. And I haven’t even mentioned all the explosions or the fact that it’s not even the big finale!

‘The Adventures of Hercules II’ might not be as consistently entertaining as its predecessor but dear god, it’s just as wild and just as fun and when it decides to go bonkers it does so on a level unimaginable by any mortal being. This film is further proof that ‘The Godfather Part II’ (1974) is not the greatest sequel ever made.