You have strucked Hercules!

Hercules in New York (1969)
I still can't quite bring myself to Red Sonja, so let's continue to use the chronological order excuse and sidestep that for the moment with the one movie Arnold made that could possibly be worse than Red Sonja.  Never seen it before, and don't know whether to expect complete camp & cheese, or something far more sinister like a Steve Reeves Herc movie that tries to take itself too seriously.  

That thankfully turns out to not be a concern at all, and I'm quite flabbergasted to find that Arnold is not the worst actor in this.  Heck, he's easily in the upper half of the actors here, and there are some seriously wooden performances being turned in left and right.  Yes, I'm looking at you, Gods of Olympus... 

Some moderately amusing action scenes in this one, although I'd be hard pressed to say which was better of the drawn-out-gangfight-with-long-wooden-plank, Central Park fight-a-dude-in-a-bear-suit, or the chariot-pursued-by-mobsters-in-a-stationwagon chase scene through downtown Manhattan.   Why pick just one when you can have all that and more!

I watched the version with Arnold's audio intact and I apparently should turn pro as an Arnold interpreter since I found him perfectly understandable.  Not saying he's particularly well-spoken, but I can at least clearly understand him and it's so much more palatable than the 70 year old English professor they got to do the dubbed audio.  All in all, this wasn't as horrible as I feared and you can already see the charisma of Arnold showing through.  Let's just give him a quick 12+ year time-out from acting for the weightlifting scene reaction shots (ugh) and then let's try him out again.

Ahnold Quotient - 5
While there's no denying he's about as big as we ever see him, there's very little Ahnold going on here.  Accent is crazy, looks are goofy, but nothing really over the top.  Fun to see how eager to please he is as an actor though.

Rewatchability - Very, very rarely
I won't say I'll never watch this again, because it could be fun on a lark every now and again just to see how far he came, but I can't see regularly watching this.  It's not really Arnold's fault, it's just seriously not a good film.