Amazons and Supermen
(aka Superuomini Superdonne Superbotte, Amazons Vs. Supermen, Super Stooges Vs. Amazons, Barbarian Revenge, Amazons Vs. Superman, Amazons Against Superman, Three Fantastic Supermen)
1975; directed by Alfonso Brescia

This co-production between Italy's Erre Cinematografica and Hong Kong's Shaw Brothers studios doesn't sound like the best idea on paper, and the end results are even worse. Even the most masochistic cinephiles who are already well-versed in the shallow world of low-budget dreck are still going to have a tough time sitting through this.

Amazons and Supermen's loose shred of a plot has a charlatan named Darma (Aldo Canti), who is posing as a god to get freebies from the local villagers, enlisting the help of strongman Moog (Marc Hannibal) and kung-fu expert Chung (Yueh Hua) to take out a pesky clan of amazons. To get to this point in the story, though, one has to sit through about an hour of positively abysmal slapstick, most of it featuring a bumbling group of bandits.

If you don't get that most of this movie is supposed to be comedy, well, don't worry, because the soundtrack is punctuated by all manner of whimsical and goofy sound effects. And by whimsical and goofy, I mean irritating and annoying. By about the sixtieth time a slide whistle played while someone jumped, I wanted to take an icepick to my earlobes -- a feeling that is not helped by a score that sounds like it was composed by someone overdosing on NyQuil and subsequently passing out on their synthesizer, and an english dub that seems to have been voiced by people not even talented enough to appear in a Hanna-Barbera cartoon.

To its' credit, Amazons and Supermen does offer up a good deal of action, most of it courtesy of Yueh Hua, who seems to be the only element used from the Shaw Brothers. Trouble is that it's almost impossible to see anything when it comes to the action scenes. A lot of the action is shot day-for-night, rendering the action into really little more than watching one dark formless blob take on another dark formless blob. This situation is not remedied at all by the extremely poor transfer featured on Rarescope's DVD, which looks like a fifth-generation print taken from an old bootleg of a showing of this film on Kung Fu Theatre.

RATING: 3