Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #194 Hercules and the Circle of Fire (1994) — It Turns Out the Naming Rights! Membership Option Was For Real and Someone Is Now Five Hundred Bucks Poorer Presents Nat

Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.

Or you can be like three kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker or actor. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career.

This generous patron is now paying for me to watch and write about the cult animated show Batman Beyond and I also recently began even more screamingly essential deep dives into the complete filmographies of troubled video vixen Tawny Kitaen and troubled former Noxzema pitch-woman Rebecca Gayheart. I also recently began a series chronicling the films of bad boy auteur Oliver Stone.

Re-watching Terence Malick’s mesmerizing and transcendent 1998 masterpiece The Thin Red Line, I found myself thinking that it was a goddamn shame that Jim Caviezel is one of those lunatics who happily sacrificed their career for the sake of their far-right political beliefs because he really has an extraordinary presence.

I loved The Thin Red Line all the same but I suspect I would have found the Passion of the Christ’s star’s fairly central presence more distracting if I had re-watched it after I learned that Caviezel had recently appeared at a QAnon conference to discuss the terrible scourge of celebs torturing children for the sake of their sweet, sweet Adrenochrome.

That is some next level tinfoil-hat QANonsense. We knew Caviezel was crazy right wing and a total right wing crazy. We did not realize just how bonkers he truly was until the actor outed himself as a true believer in the darkest and most destructive of right-wing conspiracy theories.

It can be tough to separate an actor, artist or musician from their personal lives. Yet it can be surprisingly easy to cleanly separate performers from their unfortunate political beliefs and/or horrible crimes as well.

That’s because our brains want to be entertained. Our minds want to be able to get lost in fictional worlds without reality tainting everything and pulling us back into a real world full of ugliness and hatred.

Besides, if we can suspend disbelief enough to be able to believe that our favorite actors are the cops or space aliens or lawyers they’re pretending to be we should similarly be able to strategically forget if the same thespians are also Trump supporters.

This helps explain how I’ve been able to write up movies for this website involving real-life super-villains like Kevin Spacey, Bill Cosby and Michael Jackson without their offscreen transgressions rendering the movies unwatchable.

That bodes well for the next few entries in my Tawny Kitaen project because her career and that of professional Republican and Christian movie icon Kevin Sorbo are about to overlap extensively.

In the mid 1990s, Kitaen followed up a starring role on The New WKRP in Cincinnati with a series of guest appearances as strong-willed Deianeira on first a series of Hercules television movies (1994’s Hercules and the Circle of Fire, Hercules in the Underworld and Hercules in the Maze of the Minotaur) and then on several episodes of the ensuing series, Hercules: The Legendary Journeys.

I’m about to spend a lot of time with Sorbo so it’s a damn good thing that I am able to separate my moderate enjoyment of him as a thoroughly adequate beefcake adventurer from my visceral hatred of him as an obnoxious Trump supporter forever trying to own the libs and eternally failing.

I am a.big enough man to concede that Sorbo makes for an eminently passable Hercules here. He finds the right tone for the role, one that combines a winking self-awareness with a flair for non-ironic derring-do.

Hercules and the Circle of Fire, the first Hercules project Kitaen appeared in, casts the legendary beauty as the aforementioned Deianeira, a fetching mortal who teams up with Sorbo’s Hercules when the Goddess Hera steals the gift of fire from a now frozen Prometheus with the intention of killing all mortals, since they cannot live without it.

Incidentally, as a fan of The Critic, my brain cannot hear the word “Prometheus” without immediately flashing back to that wonderful moment in Jay Sherman’s student film where his “actress” utters, “Oh no! Pro-moh-theus!” in a dispirited monotone, only to be corrected on her pronunciation by an “actor” playing someone who just hung himself.

Judging by her accent and general demeanor, Kitaen’s character is apparently from the Southern California part of Ancient Greece. That’s true of Sorbo as well, but there’s a long tradition of Greek heroes of antiquity being played by American surfer types.

Hercules may be the strongest man in the world. He may be the most handsome man in all the land. Heck, he may even be the son of the King of the Gods, being the half-human, half-God progeny of Zeus (Anthony Quinn), and all. But that don’t impress Deianeira much.

She’s all about solving problems through thinking and communication rather than by beating up monsters but pretty much all of the problems they encounter over the course of their quest for fire are the kind that can only be solved through forceful punching rather than strategy.

I have written before about how actresses like Rebecca Gayheart and Tawny Kitaen are so otherworldly in their beauty that it’s easier to buy them as vampires or rock stars or heroines of ancient Greece than it is as normal people.

Nothing about Kitaen says ancient Greece but she has fun romantic comedy chemistry with Sorbo, even if her role in the proceedings is often limited to shooting Hercules supportive glances as he uses his brawn to smite various monsters, giants, warlocks and other assorted bad guys.

Hercules was inspired by the old-fashioned artisanship and campy adventure of Ray Harryhausen creations and Hercules b-movies Executive Producer Sam Raimi loved as a child. If the show had hit the airwaves a decade later I suspect it would be awash in cheap CGI but in 1994 at least the production favored practical effects that are charming in their conventional artistry.

In the course of their adventures Hercules and Deianeira encounter Phaedra (Stephanie Barrett) a sort of feral child and low-level trickster who is forever flipping around like a character in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

When Phaedra effortlessly and unconvincingly executes flips and leaps and stunts her actions are accompanied by a cartoonish “Whoosh.”

Hercules and the Circle of Fire explores, at times, what it means to be human and what it means to be immortal, and the sacrifices and disadvantages involved with each but otherwise it can be as deliciously, delightfully, intentionally broad as the 1960s Batman series.

When Hercules is making quick work of Hera’s guards, for example, all that’s missing are cartoon “Bam!”, “Slam!” And “Crash!” accompanying every forceful blow.

In the end Hercules ends up risking his immortality, something he feels ambivalent about, in order to save humanity while giving his goat-footed immortal friend Chiron what he wants most, which is to be human and age and die along with his family.

I enjoyed Hercules, within reason, by engaging on it on its level, as campy, tongue-in-cheek kitsch, a newfangled version of old-fashioned entertainment. That’s the strategy I’ll be taking into the next two Hercules TV movies I am professionally obligated to watch and write about, because it’s a lot more fun to lose yourself in this silly, escapist world then it is to ruin it for yourself by focussing too much, or at all, on what the actor in the lead role might be thinking, because the answer, alas, is nothing smart and nothing good.

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