For a sword and sandal movie, Goliath and the Dragon has about the most convoluted and ridiculously hard to follow plot that I can remember. It was kind of like watching two or more different movies at the same time where the pieces just never seem to fit into a cohesive whole. Based on what I did get out of it, King Eurystheus (Broderick Crawford) has it out for Goliath. He kidnaps Goliath's brother Illus and, when that doesn't work, he kidnaps Goliath's wife. King Eurystheus also has the hots for a babe about a third his age who just happens to be in love with Illus. To win her over, King Eurystheus takes the reasoned approach of having her imprisoned as well. In the meantime, Goliath is off doing battle with a three-headed dog, a giant flying bat creature, a wife-snatching centaur, and a dragon that can't seem to decide whether it's a stop-motion creature or a big, goofy looking puppet. In the end, Goliath literally brings down the walls of King Eurystheus' fortress and, with the help of an army from Thebes, saves the day.

Overall, Goliath and the Dragon is a real mixed bag – hence my very average 5/10 rating. There's a lot about the movie I enjoyed. The beyond cheesy fight scenes with the various creatures I mentioned is an obvious place to start. These scenes are just plain old fun. I also enjoyed the scenes of prisoners being crushed by a trained elephant. You don't see stuff like that everyday. Watching Goliath tackle the elephant was a hoot. But when Goliath and the Dragon is bad, it's real bad. Some of the acting is painful. Mark Forest, the requisite body in this sword and sandal epic, is about as wooden as you'll find in one of these movies. He moves in a very unnatural manner that looked odd to me for lack of a better word. And what's Broderick Crawford doing in this movie? He's so out of place I often felt embarrassed for him. Another big negative for me is how deathly dull much of the movie is. When Goliath's not fighting some creature, the movie can be terribly sleep inducing. Too many unnecessarily confusing plot points, too many characters I didn't know or care about, and too many scenes with nothing going on – not the sign of a what I'd call a good movie. Like I said, Goliath and the Dragon is a real mixed bag.

"Goliath and the Dragon" was one of two peplum films featuring Hercules (the other being "The Loves of Hercules') released in 1960, following the success of "Hercules" and its sequel both starring Steve Reeves. The original Italian title for this film is "La vendetta di Ercole" ("The Revenge of Hercules"), but U.S. distributor AIP changed the hero to Goliath for the American release, and added a stop-motion animation dragon not included in the Italian cut. Italian-American (Brooklyn-born) bodybuilder Lou Degni, billed as Mark Forest, takes over the role from Reeves. Forest starred in a dozen or so peplum films including "Maciste in the Valley of the Kings" released this same year and played Hercules again in 1964's "Hercules Against the Sons of the Sun." He is a more than passable stand-in for Reeves, impressively built if not quite as classically handsome or well-proportioned and able to pull off the macho arrogance of the character. The oddest thing about this film is the casting of American actor Broderick Crawford, with an enormous and distracting scar across his face, as Hercules's (or Goliath's ... whatever) nemesis. Crawford growls his way through the movie and generally seems like a grumpy old man. At least he gets to use his name, which neither the film nor the writers nor the lead actor nor the hero do -- co-writer Nicolo Ferrari is credited with the bizarre pseudonym Archibald Zounds Jr.! (Apologies to anyone actually named Archibald Zounds, Jr. or Sr.)

The story is particularly baroque, involving forbidden romance, double-crossing courtiers, an over-large cast of characters that becomes cumbersome to keep straight, and some vague plans to defeat Hercules and conquer Thebes, but the overall motif (in keeping with the Italian title) is revenge, with Hercules at one point destroying the statue of the God of Vengeance after it falls on him -- twice! The real attraction here, though, is not the complicated plot but the dizzying array of cheesy monsters Hercules gets to fight, beginning with a sequence in the "cave of horrors" where the big man defeats a three-headed beast that is probably supposed to be Cerebus, though not identified as such (another pseudonymous indignity) and a very strange man-sized bat-like creature that at first I thought was a unique take on the dragon, but as it turns out a more conventional (though, frankly, pretty hilarious) dragon turns up later. Along the way, Hercules also defeats a giant bear-like monster and spears a centaur, who is the most convincing and strangely affecting of all the creatures that populate the film. The bat-thing and the bear-thing are clearly stuntmen in silly costumes, but the dragon (aside from the brief stop-motion sequence) is a giant puppet that Forest does a great job trying to battle convincingly. Other peplum tropes include the obligatory dancing girls and Hercules practically tearing down a city with his bare hands. Though much cheaper looking and cheesier than the two Reeves films that preceded it, this is actually pretty fun and peppy peplum entry helmed by director Vittorio Cottafavi.