Made at the tail-end of the peplum cycle, this cheapie offering makes previous entries look like expensive masterpieces in comparison! Amidst the few cardboard cave sets that this movie offers we have a familiar plot playing out, involving the typical ingredients of: - an evil queen (what else?) who commands over a hidden/secret kingdom; loincloth-clad, sweaty muscular heroes; and of course the expected uprising that eventually occurs. Before this happens the viewer must endure endless scenes of people drinking potions of forgetfulness/paralysis/mind control which subvert the personalities of minor cast members and turn them to the opposite sides until it's time for them to turn back - it's very obscure and not very interesting to be frank.
The cast don't really fare very well here, with turns from peplum regular Ursula Davis and Anthony Steffen (later a spagwest icon) being overshadowed by the poor performances from the leads. Claudie Lange is extremely poor as the evil queen, the stilted dubbing just adding to her wooden performance. However it's the presence of the two meat head brothers Maciste (who possibly helped inspire Ruggero Deodato to cast the 'Barbarian Brothers' in his sword-and-sorcery epic THE BARBARIANS) which really fills the screen. First up is Richard Lloyd as the wooden, Steve-Reeves-beard-sporting, incredibly muscular lunk Maciste the Elder, who spends half his time fighting evil and the other half turning a huge water wheel like Conan. Then there's Mario Novelli as the even-more-wooden, Kirk-Morris-hair styled, slightly less muscular lunk Maciste the Younger who spends much of his screen time in a coma. The pair couldn't act their way out of a paper bag between them, but at least they're surprisingly athletic when it comes to the action.
And yes, the action is what it's all about in this movie and the only thing worth watching. The first inkling of what's to come occurs when Maciste the Elder visits a picturesque waterfall and finds himself surrounded by some very silly "Leopard Men", lithe-and-muscular (to make the Macistes look bigger of course) guys with leopard masks, gloves and boots who run around striking people with tridents and whipping slaves (there's heck of a lot of slave whipping in this film for those who enjoy that sort of thing). After a scrap at the shore, Maciste and his enemies end up waist-high in the water where he continues to take them out with well-timed wrestling manoeuvres. After hefting up a huge stone door (without the aid of an 'open sesame'), Maciste the Elder goes on in a rock-lobbing frenzy, taking out the enemy left, right and centre before bars fall from the ceiling and he finds himself at the mercy of a shoddy collapsing spiked ceiling which wouldn't exactly give Indiana Jones nightmares.
The only other action sequence of interest is the finale, in which Maciste the Younger must fight befuddled brother Maciste the Elder who has been turned over to the dark side thanks to a bubbling potion. After the grunting sweatiness has ceased and the younger Maciste is added on to a huge waterwheel as homoerotic decoration, Maciste the Elder is slipped a vital potion and soon his dumbly heroic persona returns. He frees his brother and the pair take on the various whip-cracking Leopard Men, impaling a dozen with tridents and in my favourite scene actually taking a lumpy sledgehammer to the bad guys and teaching them a lesson they soon won't forget! Otherwise, THE INVINCIBLE BROTHERS MACISTE is a cheap and often tedious movie only for those die-hard peplum lovers who don't begrudge a movie its many flaws.
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