John Lyttle on cinema

How odd that the home-dubbed version of Hercules Returns, currently doing the rounds courtesy of Aussie stand-up duo Double Take, should be, among other things, a mild, yet incessant excerise in slapdash homophobia. Lord knows, it's not just that the original Hercules movies, a trash staple of the Sixties, were infinitely funnier in their already badly dubbed state, but that body-builder Steve Reeves' ponderous muscle-flexing in these Italian-made, Joseph E Levine promoted toga parties also belongs to the annals of camp.

Ask any thirtysomething gay man who remembers nagging Mum and Dad into taking him to see gladiator epics. The Hercules movies were a seminal (in every sense) childhood experience. All that well-defined flesh pressed close together at the oars of some cardboard slave ship, all that appalling lip-synching, navy blue eyeshadow and tacky decadence; here was the latent seed of a sensibility. At that age you couldn't define what it was; still, the combination of incipient lust and lurking laughter made the chosen feel inexplicably at home.

Not that everyone can't share in the joke. Later attempts to revive the cult - Arnold Schwarzenegger in 1970's Hercules in New York, Lou Ferrigno in 1983's Hercules - may not have panned out, but Arnie hit the jackpot with Conan, who was only Hercules with big hair, and the entire crazy male body fascism of the Eighties began. And is with us still, a pumped-up parody of a fantasy that pretends to be heterosexual but has its roots in gay libido and a cheaply made epic that even now manages to be spontaneously wittier than any number of Australians and their scripted ad-libs.

(Photograph omitted)