Muscle Movie Madness

I have looked for quite a while for a book on the sword-and-sandal muscle hero movies of the 60s known as "peplum" (a Greek word for "tunic," the kind of costume most of the movie's characters wear). Heroes Never Die: The Italian Peplum Phenomenon by Barry Atkinson is a massive survey of the peplum genre. Wikipedia defines these films as "historical or mythological epics set in antiquity" and they usually feature a muscular bare-chested hero and evil kings and queens. This volume is clearly a labor of love, and I do appreciate having this as a reference work. But there are some problems here. Atkinson throws his net wide, including almost any Italian-made movie with a hero that is set in the past. This allows him to write about pirate films, Robin Hood films, and even a movie about the life of Christ--I'm imagining a muscular Jesus in a tunic kicking merchants' asses at the temple.

Lots of the films covered seem to belong to a different swashbuckler genre (cappa e spada) and many of them seem out of place here. Atkinson uses some strange criteria; straight-faced, he seems to claim that any movie featuring a hero who yells, "Follow me!" to a crowd probably belongs to the genre. He is also offensively dismissive of the gay audience, claiming that despite the near-universal presence of heaving male chests, oily nipples, and sweaty gyrations of the male body under torture, there is nothing homoerotic about these films, only in the mind of the viewer. Nevertheless, this is the only survey out there, as far as I know, so I'll keep it on my reference shelf until something else comes along.