Ladies and gentlemen – the Governor of California.

Hercules is restless. His father, Zeus, wants him to settle down and start behaving like a child of Olympus. Hercules just wants to hit the Earthling nightlife and party hard. When Hercules’ constant nagging gets on Zeus’ last nerve, he decides to punish the headstrong demigod by… sending him to Earth. Hm. The Greek gods knew reverse psychology. Kinda puts a whole new spin on, “Don’t steal the fire, Prometheus.”

In 1970, Arnold Schwarzenegger arrived on America’s shores as just another poor immigrant with nothing to his name. Well, nothing except the title of Mr. Universe. And a really slick agent. And a contract to star in a new Hercules flick – despite the fact that Mr. Schwarzenegger (credited as Arnold Strong) spoke very little English and had little experience as an actor. Yup. Just another guy trying to make something out of nothing.

Ladies and gentlemen – the Governor of California.

Zeus sends Hercules to Earth using the mighty power of his lightning bolt – which looks suspiciously like a piece of rebar that’s been bent into a zig-zag and painted gold. He drops Zeus into the middle of the sea where he’s rescued by a freighter bound for New York. The captain fits Herc out in a snappy sailor suit and makes him part of the crew, and Herc shows his endless gratitude by jumping ship the first chance he gets.

It isn’t long before Herc – with the help of his new friend, Pretzy – gains fame as the “Strongest Man in the the World.” He sets himself up in a swanky apartment, gets romantic with the daughter of a local college professor, and attracts the attention of some bad elements – the Mafia and the Lord of the Underworld, to name just a couple. And things aren’t made any easier when Juno (wait – isn’t she supposed to be Hera in Greece?) sends Nemesis to strip Hercules of his godly power and turn him into just another mortal.

Ladies and gentlemen – the Governor of California.

The popular story is that the producers behind Hercules in New York (aka Hercules: The Movie, aka Herc Goes Bananas) had to be convinced that Arnold could speak English fluently before they would sign him. Arnold’s agent practiced him on a few lines of English, then put the producers on a phone and let Arnold play a parrot for them. It’s not hard to believe – the producers decided to overdub Arnold’s voice for the original theatrical release. In one of the niftier features to ever appear on a B-movie DVD release, you have the option of listening to either the overdub or to Arnold’s original language track – for all except one scene. Apparently, the producers had already decided to overdub Herc’s voice when it came time for him to do his Tom Joad impersonation over Pretzy’s radio (“You’ll see me, Ma. You’ll see me…”) because the only audio available for the scene is the original theatrical dub.

The actors can’t seem to believe that there’s a camera rolling. Arnold stumbles over his lines while attempting to act like he understands what he’s saying, Ernest Graves seems to spend most of his time as Zeus wondering just how he got himself into this abomination of a film, and Deborah Loomis is either too entranced by Arnold’s flexing or too in love with her own hair to bother with real acting. A highlight of Loomis’ performance is a scene where she watches Herc wrestle a bear and – after what seems like an eternity of corny hyperventilating – runs out of steam, pauses and looks to the director for permission to collapse into the phoniest swoon in all movie history.

Ladies and gentlemen – the Governor of California.

The acting is pretty uniformly wooden – with the exception of Arnold Stang, who seems thrilled simply to be included. As the lovable schlub Pretzy, Stang is easily the most convincing actor in the movie – although that could be considered damning with faint praise. The only person who comes anywhere close to Stang’s performance is Lipton, whose Pluto is less a dark lord of the underworld and more a fashion-obsessed, effete man-about-town. Or perhaps Tony Carroll, whose muscle-bound Monstro spends the entirety of his short time in the movie flexing and lifting weights – a role he was destined to play.

As far as comedies go, Hercules in New York is fairly lackluster. The intended parody of sword-and-sandal flicks winds up with just a few brief giggles. But the incompetence behind the movie, the shoddy filmmaking, and the obvious rush-job of production makes for some fantastic guffaws, keeping this mildly entertaining movie afloat where it can still come back to haunt the current Governor of California.