Hercules in the Haunted World

Mario Bava directs a peplum and turns it into something that looks like nothing else in the cycle. Hercules descends into Hades to save his beloved, and Bava renders the underworld in his signature gel-lit reds and greens, all fog, glowing rock and gothic dread. Christopher Lee plays the villain.

The story is standard sword-and-sandal, but Bava's visual imagination transforms it into a genuine dark fantasy, closer to his horror films than to the muscleman pictures around it. It is the one peplum a horror fan should see.

Bava making a cut-rate genre picture into a thing of strange beauty.