JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS' harpy temple location

On location: JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS (1963) The Temple of the Harpies!

Why build a set when you can use the real thing?

In 2006 we visited Sorrento, near Naples in Southern Italy. We stared into the mouth of Vesuvius and visited the well-preserved city of Pompeii. In 79 A.D. volcanic ash buried the city in a cataclysmic eruption. Walking around the streets and buildings, the preserved shells of fallen bodies brought home the scale of the ancient tragedy as if it were yesterday.

While visiting the ruined city of Paestum on another excursion, I got the feeling it had been used as a filming location in Ray Harryhausen's Jason and the Argonauts. In the scene where Phileas (Patrick Troughton) is tormented by two harpies sent by Zeus. Jason and his Argonauts arrive to talk to Phileas, who will only help if they stop the harpies from stealing his food.



I'd not expected to run into this movie location and hadn't prepared at all - normally I'd watch the film beforehand for clues. Because the scene was vague in my memory and I was only working on a hunch, I only got the details right after the visit. On the day, I decided on completely the wrong temple! The information at the site didn't mention anything about it.


Paestum used to be a Greek settlement, named after the god of the sea, Poseidon. Incredibly the layout of the city is still easy to seen, as well as many remaining structures (like a small colliseum) and three well-preserved temples that are still standing. Some of the best examples anywhere, even in Greece. The original architects had even built in various earthquake-defying features, enabling a film crew to run around on top of it 2,500 years later!



Out of the three temples at Paestum, the one on a slight hill - the solitary Temple of Athena (or Ceres) - looked possible, but I'd guessed wrong. Note that it only has six end columns.

At the other end of this World Heritage Site, furthest from the site entrance, are two temples standing side by side - the Temple of Poseidon (or Neptune) and the Temple of Hera (also called The Basilica).

The Temple of Poseidon (on the right) is the more impressive, as it's more complete than the older temple behind it. But it's the Temple of Hera (on the left) that was used in the film. The above two photos are taken from the backs of the temples, from the east. But the filming was either done inside or from front...

These two shots (above) show the front of the temple from the west, before and after they erected a fence that keeps the visitors out.

The Temple of Hera has nine end columns, seen here in the film. But I didn't pay it much attention on the day we visited, because it stands so close to the Temple of Poseidon - I always thought of it being isolated in the film - but in several scenes you can see the neighbouring temple in the background (below)...

Also visible in the background of some shots are mountains, which indicates that the west end of the temple was used for filming. While it's not actually on the coast (the scene of Jason's arrival was faked with a trick of editing), in terms of realism, Jason and his men still arrive at the temple from the direction of the coast.

This overhead shot shows the Temple of Hera (on the left) with the sea in the distance. In 550 BC, the coast would have been closer. 

This location is also used earlier in Jason and the Argonauts. Harryhausen recreated the interior of Poseidon's temple for the opening scene where Jason's mother is murdered. In the film it’s a set, but the original building where those events took place were in that temple next door!

This view looking north shows the ground in front of the Temple of Hera where the film first shows Phileas at a table when the harpies attack. The Temple of Poseidon is behind it. The stone dining table and the fallen columns outside must all have been props. All three temples at Paestum are missing their roofs. The Temple of Hera is the only one also missing the arched decorative roof supports at the front and back, leaving a completely flat surface for Argonauts to run all around the top - making this temple the best of the three for catching harpies...

The columns were all about thirty feet high, making it very dangerous for the stuntmen running around with the Harpie nets. 

The wide flat tops of the columns match the close-ups in the film. 

Some of the filming took place inside the temple. Note the remaining columns inside the structure - they're also visible in this modern view (below) looking inside the temple from the front, towards the mountains.

It’s hard for me to precisely explain the fun of visiting old movie locations. But they're the only physic remnants that remain of many movies. We'd visited Paestum to see ancient temples, which was exciting enough. But it turned out we'd also seen an actual ‘set’ from Jason and the Argonauts, which is very exciting. Especially since it looks much the same as it did in 1963. In contrast, some of the locations for the legendary skeleton fight, like the cliff where Jason jumps, are now underneath multi-storey hotels. 

A good site for more views of Paestum here, at Sacred Destinations). 

(Sorry about the poor layout of this article - Blogger really doesn't like me updating old articles...)

(This is an expanded article, now including my own photos, originally posted November 27th 2006)

CALTIKI - THE IMMORTAL MONSTER (1959) - the Italian Blob

CALTIKI: THE IMMORTAL MONSTER
(1959, Italy, Caltiki - il mostro immortale)

How many Blob movies have you seen where someone loses an arm?

This is an update of my 2006 review, now that I've watched the region 2 Italian DVD from NoShame. This is Caltiki's first time on an official DVD release. I was hoping that the 50th anniversary would yield a release in the USA, but it's looking unlikely...

Each time I watch Caltiki - The Immortal Monster, I'm astonished that it hasn't had a better history on home video – it’s one of the best black and white horror films, indeed sci-fi films, to come from Italy. It’s firmly in the genre of 1950s American monster movie, strongly reminiscent of The Black Scorpion, short on science and long on fiction...

On an expedition in Mexico, a team of scientists discover a lost cave uncovered by a volcanic eruption. Deep underground is a statue to the immortal god Caltiki. Nearby is an undergound lake containing the immortal god Caltiki! As the huge slimy blob makes a break for freedom, the party discovers that it has touch like acid, as one member loses an arm and another loses face (reminiscent of a similar scene in Hammer Film’s blobby X-The Unknown from 1956).

The Prof gets a sample off his best mate's disintegrating arm and takes it back home for closer study. He stores it in a goldfish tank in his basement! As the danger grows, you at least wish he'd put a couple of heavy books on the lid. There it starts to grow, putting the Prof’s wife and daughter in deadly danger, not to mention the rest of the world!

The plot takes a few amusing wrong turns: coincidence dictates that the scientists discover Caltiki's secrets just as it wakes up for the first time in 1300 years. Also, during the hero’s final race to the rescue, the police arrest him for speeding and throw him in jail! The film grinds to a halt as he tries to talk his way out.

But it’s not the plot that’s interesting, the blob looks fantastic! There’s some amusingly cheap miniature work, (despite the darkness of night-time scenes) including some toy tanks that wouldn’t even get into a Godzilla film. But the blob on the attack is sensational. It’s movements are fascinating, and the face-dissolving effects almost belong in Cabin Fever – goodness knows what shock effect they had on audiences 50 years ago.

Similarly shocking is a scene where a dancing girl amuses a lucky crowd of Mexicans in a woodland campsite. Besides her sultry and athletic dancing, her incredibly short tattered skirt does little to cover her up, leaving little to the imagination. The 1960s were fast approaching...

Famously, future horror maestro Mario Bava created most of the special effects and completed the direction of this film – the year before his masterpiece Black Sunday (aka The Mask of Satan) propelled him and leading actress Barbara Steele to success. Bava’s ambitious, low budget, special effects make the story look a hundred times more interesting than it could have been. Like I said, some of the miniature work doesn’t stand up today, but the majority of it is marvellous, giving us horror-fans plenty of blob action. I’m assuming that Tim Lucas, the editor of Video Watchdog, goes into more detail about the making of the film in his gigantic book about Bava.

I recognised the lead actor, John Merivale, from the wonderfully sleazy Circus of Horrors, made the following year. It adds to the madness of the production that an Englishman starred in an Italian movie partly shot in Mexico…

The non-blob scenes are just as watchable because of the amusingly cliched emotional dramas and the hysterical acting. The two female leads are suitably overdramatic, trapped in a complex love quadrangle with the Prof's best friend, Max. He's played by Gérard Herter, who almost climbs the walls as his blob-infection cranks him up into psychotic madness. He also does some amusing 'head acting' snuggled up in a hospital bed.

Pacier, gorier and better shot than many of Hollywood's 1950s sci-fi monster movies, this was finally made available in both the Italian and English-dubbed version on an Italian DVD. Though John Merivale has been looped by an American actor for the English version. This region 2 DVD is anamorphic widescreen, whereas all previous TV versions notably cropped the sides of the picture considerably. This is the clearest version I've seen, but there are stil some severe problems with contrast in the early day-for-night scenes, huge clouds of darkness sometimes swallowing parts of the image. The intricate matte paintings in the Mexican scenes lose detail in the darker shadows. These are probably film faults on the original print, maybe even the negative, but I guess an Italian release is as close to the source as possible.

The original Italian titles are at the start, but the US release title sequence is also available as an extra, as well as a US trailer giving away all the best shots. The interview with Luigi Cozzi is unfortunately not subtitled, and the accompanying booklet is all Italian text too. The cover art uses the original Italian poster art (above).

I'm just happy to finally have a widescreen DVD of this classic early monster.

DVD Talk reviewed the DVD when it was first released. It's hard to get hold of now, but if you're good at Italian, try here...

DON'T TORTURE A DUCKLING (1971) - extraordinary Lucio Fulci thriller

DON'T TORTURE A DUCKLING
(1972, Italy, Non si sevizia un paperino)

After watching Mike Baronas' Paura DVD tribute to Lucio Fulci, I was hungry for some of Fulci's films that I hadn't yet seen. I'm very glad I started with this one.

With the customary oblique title, I'd assumed that this was a typical Italian slasher, with half-naked models being terrorised and creatively knocked off. I was surprised when Don't Torture a Duckling turned out to be as good as the early Dario Argento thrillers, with a unique setting and an uncomfortably edgy plot that's still topical and challenging today.

In a remote hilltop town in southern Italy, seemingly ignored and bypassed by a new motorway, a series of child-murders turns the local people into a lynch mob. The victims are all young boys. The police have plenty of suspects, but little evidence, and so the killings continue...

The ancient hilltop sun-bleached town is a great-looking location. Carefully but dynamically photographed, Fulci tells his story with long, precise shots, using the zoom lens like a highly-trained sniper.

Barbara Bouchet is the only face in the cast I recognised - this beautiful actress gets a far better part here, than when she played Miss Moneypenny in the James Bond comedy, Casino Royale (1967). Here she appears unnervingly confident during an extended nude scene with a young co-star. In fact the whole cast work admirably well in a variety of intense scenes, even the child actors, who Fulci has no problem getting performances from.

While this is essentially more a murder mystery than Fulci's later supernatural horrors, a couple of startlingly vicious scenes pushes it firmly into horror territory, topped off with a voodoo doll motif. A prolonged and nasty chain-thrashing pre-dates the opening scene of Fulci's The Beyond (which is newly released on DVD).

The child murders are comparitively restrained, but obviously shocking. The thankfully unrealistic use of dummies lessens a couple of nasty moments, but elsewhere, the make-up effects look painfully real.

Fulci appears to be attacking small town mentality, the police and the church, but his messages aren't heavy-handed or intrusive, just playfully subversive if you dig into the subtext!

Altogether, this is a unique story, in an unusual setting, with some inventive surprises for the genre, all beautifully shot and slickly told. My only reservation could be that the dialogue is dubbed into English (when most of the cast are Italian). But in the 70s, dubbing was widespread and far more skilfully done than it is today. It's also typical for the period.

This recent DVD release from Blue Underground appears uncut, and is presented in a beautiful 2.35 widescreen transfer. What are you waiting for? Yeah, I know it isn't very seasonal.

Do you want to know more?
More about Lucio Fulci films here...

PAURA - LUCIO FULCI REMEMBERED - VOL 1 (2008) - new DVD

PAURA - LUCIO FULCI REMEMBERED - VOL 1
(2008, USA)

The late Lucio Fulci directed some essential Italian horror films, my favourite of which is the extraordinary Zombie Flesh Eaters (1979). While he was a cult figure, and received some attention overseas before he passed away in 1996, he never had much respect in his own country.

Mike Baronas picked up on this recently while producing DVD extras for several of Fulci’s films and, spurred on by not properly meeting his idol, he felt he had to pay tribute somehow and also help people know more of what he was actually like. As Baronas explains in his introduction and liner notes for Paura, he’d ideally like to have done this in a book, (maybe as a companion piece to Beyond Terror by Stephen Thrower, which focusses on Fulci’s films rather than the man himself). While there’s no chance of a book at the moment, Baronas and co-producer Kit Gavin made this DVD to get something out there.


I met Mike Baronas briefly at the Pittsburgh HorrorHound Weekend, where he accompanied Al Cliver and Ottaviano Dell'Acqua, both stars of Zombie Flesh Eaters. Now I’ve had a chance to see his DVD.

Not knowing anything about the project, I was initially disappointed at this not being a documentary about Lucio Fulci's life. It's more of a packed DVD with extras - 88 tributes to the man himself. There are three groups of interviews - collaborators, actors and peers, as in horror movie directors and producers in the Italian film industry who knew Fulci or knew of him.


The memories and anecdotes are honest, sometimes giving a little too much detail, like his tobacco-chewing habits! But the more you hear, a rounded, honest and complete picture emerges of what Fulci was like and how he worked. Many actors and co-workers talk of him very fondly indeed. It’s a fantastic testimonial.

Paura also serves as a valuable overview of many familiar names in Italian horror, some whose names I’ve often heard, but whose faces I've never seen. Such as Ruggero Deodato (Cannibal Holocaust), Lamberto Bava, Luigi Cozzi, Michele Soavi and many, many more. It's also fascinating to see so many actors from this very seventies genre, nearly thirty years later.


On the main menu page, it’s worth seeking out a slightly hidden extra that takes you to an introduction from Baronas. His quest to re-establish Fulci in the canon of great Italian directors has sent him round the world collecting these interviews. His presentation, which explains the events that motivated him, are preceded by an astonishing gallery of photos of him together with each of the contributors.

The DVD is then best experienced in three options of ‘Play All’. Each interview is introduced by photos and a list of their credits In Fulci films. Though the accompanying music gets rather repetitive despite the rarity of the photos. There is nearly four hours of material in all.


This is a labour of love, aimed squarely at Fulci fans who want to get to know the man better. Having watched it, I can’t wait to see his films again.

The Paura DVD is available on this site. There’s also a review here, with screengrabs.

THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY (1966) - see it

THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY
(1966, Italy/Spain, Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo)

If you only see one spaghetti western, make it this one…

This was one of the earliest epics that really engrossed me. Even on TV, I was totally immersed in the story for two and a half hours. Thankfully it used to be shown on a channel without advert breaks. The story, the characters, the music and the spectacle all help make this my favourite western.



This was the third in the 'Dollars Trilogy'. I know, no dollars in the title, but it’s so similar to A Fistful of Dollars and For A Few Dollars More that they’re always considered together. There are familiar faces from the first two films, though Lee Van Cleef, introduced as Clint Eastwood’s older wiser mentor in For A Few Dollars More, becomes 'The Bad' here. Even in by wild west standards, he shows a marked lack of conscience. As a prison camp commander (director Sergio Leone is keen to remind us that p.o.w.s were interred even during the Civil War). 'Angel Eyes' (Cleef) uses relentless torture to get what he wants, muffling the screams with a band of prisoners.

While 'Blondie' (Eastwood) is more clearly defined as ‘The Good’, he’s still motivated by money, with a cruel streak of humour. ‘The Ugly’ is Tuco, played brilliantly by Eli Wallach. Not a shining representative of Mexico, but for that matter Clint isn't a shining example of all that's American.


The three are gradually introduced, eventually meet up, and then race each other to a stash of army gold. But their journey, alliances and clashes are the treat. The story is far clearer than Few Dollars More, but still character-based and episodic. It contains many classic scenes filled with invention and humour...

A dangerous scam involving faked lynching. Torture by desert crossing. How to sabotage the Civil War. A gunfight in a town under bombardment. And the awesome, oft-copied, circular gunfight. If anyone wants to quote the visual language of a tense gunfight, it's usually from this film. The scene was parodied soon after in the WW2 comedy adventure Kelly's Heroes that also starred Eastwood.


I never tire of the soundtrack music, even after thirty years of listening to it. A key cue from the film’s climax took me by surprise in Las Vegas earlier this year. Outside the front of the Italian-themed Bellagio hotel/casino, a huge synchronised fountain display plays every half hour. I was thrilled to see them use 'The Ecstasy of Gold' from The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, a pretty ironic track, but I was delighted that this particular Ennio Morricone era is still recognised and paid tribute to, especially in such spectacular style.

The latest DVD Special Edition has reinstated scenes missing from the American release version that orignally appeared in Leone’s longer Italian release. This meant belatedly adding 15 more minutes of English language audio, using the actors to dub their performances over thirty years later. Unfortunately this makes the new scenes quite easy to spot, as Wallach and Eastwood’s voices have altered considerably. It’s also not the version that I grew up with and they add nothing crucial to the experience. These scenes would be nice as an option or an extra, but I’m not throwing away my copy of the original English language release. Once again, a film that I love is getting rare in the form that it was originally seen.
` `
The Good, The Bad and The Ugly is being shown around the UK and a Clint Eastwood retrospective is currently running at the BFI Southbank.

A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS (1964) - Italian style Western

A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS
(1964, Italy/Spain/West Germany, Per un pugno di dollari)

You won't see many Westerns in the Black Hole, but Spaghetti Westerns are a different genre altogether, one that I repeatedly make time for.

I was initially attracted to them for their gritty violence, unique music and Clint Eastwood's persona. The few Westerns directed by Sergio Leone are also laced with dark humour and feature very early examples of ultra-cool anti-heroes. His film-making is also very visual, realistically detailed, and elegantly constructed. Prime examples of pure cinema. Beautifully crafted European cinema, but entertaining rather than arthouse. The Italian perspective on a very American genre is critical, cynical, funny and often far more accurate than many Westerns made in the U.S..

In the seventies, Clint Eastwood movies were always in the cinema and his Westerns were regularly on late night TV. They were visually cropped to fullscreen and crudely censored for violence (mostly in line with cuts made for the cinema releases). But still they contained raw, regular outbursts of violence and a host of unlikeable characters, leaving audiences to side with the devil they knew.

I’ve always been very aware of music in movies, and here I heard for the first time some of the most famous ever movie soundtracks. Composer Ennio Morricone gained worldwide attention with these films and never looked back. After these Westerns, among the earliest jobs in his long, successful and prolific career in film music, are also the first three horror/thrillers directed by Dario Argento.

I then didn’t miss any more of Clint Eastwood’s films on TV and in the cinema. Throughout the 1970s, he was usually a reliable indicator of an interesting, hard-edged story. But before the 'Dollars Trilogy' - consisting of A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More and The Good, The Bad and The Ugly - Eastwood was only a TV star (as second fiddle on Rawhide) and an occasional bit player in movies (like a comedy lab assistant in Revenge of the Creature). He wasn’t first choice for the Man with No Name, but he was the most famous American star that Leone could afford for his first Western.

I repeatedly saw the film on TV, and only once in the cinema in a Dollars Trilogy all-nighter in the Ewell ABC in 1979. Since then, I’d never seen the film again in widescreen 2.35, and never ever seen it uncut. Finally I've watched the beautifully restored 2003 DVD special edition, and I can honestly recommend the film to even ardent non-Western lovers. It's art, action, cult, Italian, dark, funny, intelligent...


The story is closely based on the 1961 Akira Kurosawa film, Yojimbo (The Bodyguard), where a renegade samurai enters an isolated village to discover two powerful families struggling to monopolise the local trade. Sanjuro, (Toshiro Mifune, also a star of The Seven Samurai), plays one family off against the other as they bid on his superior skills of swordsmanship, trying to break the deadlock and sway the balance of power. Yojimbo doesn't have as complex an approach as Leone's remake, but I did enjoy the unconventionally modern soundtrack. It was shot 2.35 widescreen. Leone went as far as to lift shots, dialogue, as well as story elements for A Fistful of Dollars.

The Man With No Name, played by Clint Eastwood, enters a small village on a mule and sees a woman being held prisoner while her husband is beaten up. They are some of the few villagers left in the middle of a power struggle between the Baxter family and the Rojos. Evenly matched in numbers and firepower, the two sides are attempting to corner the arms trade over the border between Texas and Mexico.

The Stranger soon discovers that there’s money to be made as he pretends to ally himself to one family, while maneuvering them against the other. To successfully encourage them towards mutual destruction, he must avoid suspicion from the dangerous Ramon Rojo, a clever and sadistic rifleman who’s just as fast as the Stranger is with his pistol…


The look and atmosphere of A Fistful of Dollars anticipates 1970s Italian horror. The music uses unsettling noise and chords of sustained intensity. The carefully composed widescreen photography flips between expansive, barren wastelands and unflinching extreme close ups. There’s no time spent on romantic subplots or verbose explanations of inner motives – the characters establish themselves in actions, not words.

The regular gunfights are presented like horror movie killings with terrifying music and messy unheroic deaths in the dirt. There's no traditional fistfight in the saloon, with collapsing furniture and comedy barmen. The only hand-to-hand combat is when Eastwood gets totally outnumbered, tortured, and his face is literally beaten to a pulp until his face is unrecognisable. The baddies kick him when he's down, stamp on his hand and don’t pull their punches. Unable to walk, he can only drag himself away. While there’s little blood, these films were instantly berated for being too violent, as if the West was won by fair and necessary means. The Dollars films predate and foreshadow Sam Peckinpah's gory The Wild Bunch - an astonishing benchmark in onscreen violence.

Snidely called 'Spaghetti Westerns' because of the Italian production crew, the films were mostly shot in Spain. To compensate for not being in the authentic locations, or even the right continent, Leone set the stories close to Mexico's border, but was scrupulous over historical detail, referring to period photographs. Onscreen, clothes look suitably like they've been dragged across the desert on a horse. The buildings and streets look realistically derelict and desolate.

Each of Leone’s subsequent Westerns then progress historically to tell the story of the West at key moments in the birth of America, in increasingly epic films that grew in budget along with their international success. Clint Eastwood's three Spaghetti Westerns quickly turned him from a TV actor into both a movie star and a director.


I’ve been watching the 2-disc special editions of the Dollars Trilogy and A Fistful of Dynamite, while reading the informative and photo-packed book, Once Upon A Time In Italy, by Sir Christopher Frayling.

I’ve enjoyed experiencing all my favourite westerns again. Despite the low budget, A Fistful of Dollars is even more exciting and interesting than I’d remembered it.

The two-disc special edition features a pristine restoration – the picture looks brand new, made from the original negative, though the aspect ratio isn't full 2.35 and the compositions looks tight on all sides, inline with most Hollywood DVDs from this film format. This is a shame, particularly with a cinematographer and director who carefully use every part of the frame.

The mono soundtrack has been enhanced into 5.1 stereo, which sounds excellent, though the redirected directional nature of offscreen dialogue is sometimes heavy-handed. The extras are well made and low on padding. Short interesting documentaries, trailers, and commentary. The films can be bought singly or in different Leone boxset collections.



A season of most of Clint Eastwood’s films is running throughout August and September at London’s BFI Southbank, including a national run of The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. A classic film you should see on as large a screen as possible.