Three Stooges Meet Hercules Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		3.5
Audio		2.5
Extras		0.0
Overall		2.5

Three Stooges Meet Hercules Blu-ray Movie Review

The Stooges get some muscle.

Reviewed by Martin Liebman May 2, 2015

Note: 'Three Stooges Meet Hercules' is currently only available as part of volume two of Mill Creek's Three Stooges Collection.

The Three Stooges -- Moe (Moe Howard), Larry (Larry Fine), and Curly Joe (Joe DeRita) -- are hard at "work" in a drug store where they're mixing up various concoctions that have explosive results. But their next door neighbor Schuyler Davis (Quinn Redeker) is at work on something even more explosive, something that rocks the very foundation of the world around him, including the drug store: a time machine. He's on the verge of a major breakthrough, and the Stooges take it upon themselves to make the machine work while Schuyler is away. After snipping wires here, attaching them there, and getting twisted around a bunch of them, they make the machine work. Schuyler and his girlfriend Diane (Vicki Trickett) return just in time to be sucked backwards in time with the Stooges to ancient Ithaca where they encounter, amongst other figures, the mighty Hercules (Samson Burke) who is enlisted to help rescue a kidnapped Diane.

A little worse for wear.

Three Stooges Meet Hercules may not be a particularly remarkable or noteworthy Stooges film -- it was released when Stooges movies enjoyed something of a comeback in the late 1950s and early 1960s and included movies like Have Rocket, Will Travel and The Outlaws IS Coming -- but it's one of the more pleasurably entertaining ones. Like Have Rocket, this film sees the Stooges swept away to another place (and here time) where their misadventures remain grounded in comedy basics but are allowed some wiggle room as the shenanigans are influenced by an abnormal outside source, allowing them to explore beyond the confines of the true here-and-now in which they exist. The movie is, at its core, classic Stooges, however, with plenty of simple bits and great chemistry that made them arguably the finest comedy act in entertainment history.

Three Stooges Meet Hercules Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Three Stooges Meet Hercules features a 1080p transfer that's largely in-line with all of the other Mill Creek Stooges releases. It looks quite nice outside of some shoddy stock footage and random pops, speckles, and vertical lines that appear. In general, the grayscale is attractively balanced and black levels are deep. Light grain swirls throughout, accentuating plenty of sharp, well defined details on clothes, faces, terrains, and various bits of background elements.

Three Stooges Meet Hercules Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Three Stooges Meet Hercules features a Dolby Digital 2.0 soundtrack. All of the sound is pushed towards the middle. There's no sense of side stretch or any immersion. Dialogue is adequately clear, music satisfies with solid baseline clarity, and various crashes and other sound effects come through efficiently, if not with a fair bit of hollowness or simplicity.

Three Stooges Meet Hercules Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

This Blu-ray release of Three Stooges Meet Hercules contains no supplemental content.

Three Stooges Meet Hercules Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Three Stooges Meet Hercules offers a number of good, hearty laughs by way of its out of place, out of time environment. Mill Creek's Blu-ray release looks good, sounds fine all things considered, and is unsurprisingly free of extra content. Recommended.