I trust I have made no secret of my love for sword-and-sandal flicks. They are my lodestar and my true north. So if you want to know how I felt when I heard that this year would contain not one movie about Hercules in 3D but two -- just think about how Marge Simpson feels about parades. It brought out so many emotions in me: joy, excitement, looking...

Xerxes: Faggy???? BUT TALL. don't SAY faggy, obviously. Jewels, naked, autotune mouth. Think The Burning Man from Burning Man.    Saw a Day of the Dead thing the other day?? Incorporate that into costume/makeup somehow, seemed like a lot of fun …

Keifer Sutherland as Senator Corvus provided the film with a villain; however, in real life Mt. Vesuvius did not serve as a member of the Roman Republic and certainly never tried to marry a 19-year-old girl. In one scene, the young Roman noblewoman Cassia exits her litter in order to speak alone with a male slave; this is inaccurate as women of that era did not have legs and would have been unable to walk…

Last night, I saw another campy gladiator movie. There was a real missed opportunity inasmuch as no character ever uttered the line "Sometimes, I really gladi-hate you." Last night, I had a dream, and in my dream I wrote a teen comedy set in a gladiatorial school. There was a surly North African gladiator one day away from freedom, a Spaniard with a murdered family, a one-handed Celt with something to prove, a female…

Because I cannot resist a sword-and-sandals movie, I saw The Legends of Hercules in 3D this week. ("This guy reminds me so much of Kellan Lutz," I said repeatedly of the actor who played Hercules, right up through the credits when I learned that it was Kellan Lutz). In fact, the further back in time a movie is set, the likelier I am to see it; this is why I am the only human alive to…