"THE MINOTAUR, THE WILD BEAST OF CRETE".........THESEUS WEANS A HAIRY MUPPET OFF HIS ALL-VIRGIN DIET.......

The Minotaur, The Wild Beast Of Crete (1960)    We've never heard anyone wax nostalgic over the long lost Italian Peplum genre.......maybe because just about all of them blew chunks........

           'Sword 'n Sandal' became the easiest nickname for them........set in ancient Rome or Greece, they featured expressionless body-builders playing mythic heroes....(Hercules, Maciste, Samson, etc).

            These muscle-heads would spend their time fending off wicked temptresses, ogling arthritic dancing girls, and battling evil tyrants by picking up big plastic boulders and hurling them like over-sized snowballs........

             The more ambitious of these movies would pit the big guys against legendary monsters......but given the rock-bottom budgets of the peplum, the monsters usually looked like Halloween party rejects......

               Which brings us, of course to "The Minotaur".......all about the mighty Theseus (Olympic athlete Bob Mathias) taking on.......you called it.......an evil temptress, barely ambulatory dancing girls, an scheming, vile tyrant.......and the Minotaur, a shambling, huge hairy Muppet-looking beastie who's been gobbling up a steady stream of hapless virgins sacrificed to him.......

                The plot here carries all sorts of extra baggage...... to make Theseus's life a little more complicated, the evil Princess has a gentle-hearted twin (both bombshells played by Rosanna Schiaffino)......and par for the course in these movies, war breaks out between Greece and Crete, which means lots and lots and hard charging guys in togas get perforated by spears and arrows of outrageous fortune.

                   Before it's all over, as expected, Theseus must wander through the Minotaur's maze and  massage the Muppet's big black eyeballs with a flaming torch........and thereby rescue his designated sweetie, the kinder, gentler version of Schiaffino......(the bad one takes a red hot spear to the face and tumbles into a pit of hungry jackals......talk about overkill....)

                 And holy aqua-sex, we almost forgot to mention our hero's detour into the into the undersea lair of a hot-to-trot Goddess...…..she wants Theseus to hang around for an eternity as her forever boy-toy, but sorry.....he ain't havin' any,  True love calls, don't ya know...….

                  Before the arrival of the Spaghetti Western wiped the Peplum off the map in the mid 60's, we watched our fair share of these toga parties......but somehow didn't catch up with "The Minotaur" until a week ago.

                   We had a good enough time re-visiting the genre.......and this one had all the tropes neatly jammed into one movie........including a laughable, silly monster. (The movie even took time to let Bob Mathias strut all his Olympic skills, including a discus toss....)

                   2 & 1/2 stars (** 1/2) for this long forgotten example of a long forgotten genre.......the 1/2 star mainly for Rosanna Schiaffino's mythical ancient mini-skirt........