Maciste in Hell

Riccardo Freda takes the strongman film somewhere no other peplum went: a foggy 17th-century Scottish village where a woman is burned as a witch, and then down through a trapdoor into an honest-to-god gothic underworld. Kirk Morris's Maciste, dropped in with no explanation, wanders a hell of cobwebs, chained damned souls and writhing torment to break the curse laid on the village above. Freda, who all but founded Italian gothic horror, shoots the underworld like one of his haunted-castle films, so the muscle-and-sandals stuff keeps colliding with real macabre atmosphere. It makes very little narrative sense and looks terrific doing it. A peplum for people who thought they were bored of peplums.