The 10 Worst Greek Mythology Movies Of All Time

Greek — and Roman — myths remain fascinating to audiences, and no other proof is needed than to remember that Sir Christopher Nolan is bringing back "The Odyssey" with an all-star cast. Elsewhere, names may get jumbled or outright changed, due to the Roman Empire gradually cannibalizing (syncretizing) any and all religions they came across. While Egypt's mythology really got put through the wringer, Greeks saw their Gods changed as well: Zeus became Jupiter, Ares became Mars, etcetera, regardless of how well the legends fit. But centuries later, the Greeks returned to prominence, helped in no small part by how well these stories could use the new wave of special effects and color film.

Ray Harryhausen and his magical stop-motion figures brought Perseus (Harry Hamlin) to life against monstrous Medusa in "Clash of the Titans" while Italy pushed the sword and sandal epic into the foreground with a rash of movies all about Hercules. Sword and sandal movies aren't usually mythic; they lack the defining feature of mythic movies, the gods themselves. But they're a ton of fun, too, and all of this paved the way for decades of future interest. Unfortunately, not every homage to the gods of Olympus is a good one. At least they can be funny in their own right. These are the ten worst movies that tried to feature famous Greek myths. Don't look straight at them, you just might turn to stone.

It's easy to look kindly on the camp cheesiness of a young Arnold Schwarzenegger muscling around New York City, and really, we endorse doing it. Nonetheless, "Hercules in New York" is not a good movie, and the original poor dubbing of Arnold — whose film premiere isn't even credited with his proper name, but instead, absurdly, as Arnold Strong Mr. Universe — doesn't help its case a whit.

The premise is actually pretty on par for the imperfect Greek Gods: Zeus yeets his kid to the land of mortals because Herc won't stop whining about it, at which point Hercules goes on so many wild adventures that, once again, Zeus's perpetually irritated wife decides to have him killed. Naturally, everything turns out okay for Hercules, but first he has to *checks notes* wrestle gangsters after he cleans up a strongman tournament. Sure, we'll go with it. It's weird, bad, and frankly a little insulting to the Governator, but of everything to come on this list, at least it's also fun.

We're not saying it's easy to pick on Dwayne "The Rock" aka "Scorpion King" Johnson, but we might suggest he does make it pretty simple for us sometimes. In his attempt to collect every publicly available strongman hero in the catalog, it should be no surprise that he grabbed a Hercules movie along the way. It's also probably no surprise if you forgot it existed.

Still the final film directed by Brett Ratner, who evaporated after a bevy of sexual assault allegations in 2017, "Hercules" is... well, it's not the worst throwback to those Italian sword and sandal flicks to exist. There's some decent special effects and a remarkable cast that includes Ian McShane ("John Wick," "Deadwood"), Rebecca Ferguson ("Dune") and the late John Hurt embroiled in a war against the Thracians. Less enthusing is that it's based on the work of a legendary English comic writer, Steve Moore, and yet used little of what was good about it, nor bothered to pay him for his work.

How do you adapt Homer's epic "The Iliad" and leave out the Gods, whose machinations put many of the central events into motion? Apparently you cast Brad Pitt as Achilles, speedrun a ten-year war into a couple of weeks, and hope for the best. "Troy" is almost successful at this gambit, we suppose, mostly because it is quite glitzy and doesn't demand much of your attention. But a closer look reveals flaws that go deeper than what's wrong with Achilles' heel.

Without the gods, and with a breakneck pace that leaves characters feeling lifeless and unchanged, it becomes a strange bit of hindsight to realize that the screenwriter is one David Benioff and that he received plenty of critique at the time for trying to jam a lot of events into a truncated time period. Shame he didn't learn from his experience, mutters the burned "Game of Thrones" fan. Worst of all, "Troy" skimps on one of Achilles' signature story beats: his grief (romantically charged) over the death of Patroclus.

It's forgivable if you find the flashy, CGI-laden version of "Clash of the Titans" watchable, even fun. Of course it's forgivable! It's a movie, not a crappy political opinion. But if you grew up with the original version, featuring Harry Hamlin in his prime and Ray Harryhausen's creature effects at their peak, let's start with one of the biggest offenses against Athena the remake has in its arsenal: This version has a mere fifteen seconds of Bubo the mechanical owl. We do not forgive.

Other offenses include that haphazardly applied bronze filter that desperately screams "we know everyone liked "300," please like us," and a star-studded cast of absolute mistakes for the few Gods of Olympus shown. They sound good on paper; Liam Neeson as Zeus, Ralph Fiennes as Hades, Luke Evans as Apollo. But the flat depictions of the gods in the script translate to flanderized tropes: Fiennes is Voldemort again, Neeson growls, Evans is just sort of there. Sorry, Evans.

Every millennial and younger who grew up with the "Percy Jackson" books just read that title and clenched up. "The Lightning Thief" is a prime offender in that painfully broad category: Youth Fiction That Deserved Better Treatment. For every "Hunger Games," there's five "Maze Runners," that's all we're saying. And the first "Percy Jackson" film is firmly in that latter category. It's bad mythology, too, and that's an offense against Rick Riordan, the series creator.

Mr. Riordan is all too happy to chime in, noting that the production pretty much ignored all of his suggestions, instead adding the usual crop of busy nonsense, aged up late teens, and edgy dialogue to a story that was meant to bring twelve year olds into a world of gods and monsters, adding new challenges as they grew up. Worst of all, it excludes major story beats fans loved, from changing Percy's challenges to outright excluding a confrontation with Ares, who gets an uncredited cameo by veteran actor Ray Winston. The fans deserved better than this. Thankfully, they got it — but only after suffering a sequel that we'll get to momentarily.

The mid 2000s were a tough time for the nascent Tom Hardy, fresh off being derided across the galaxy for "Star Trek: Nemesis," but there's no doubt he still put in the work. He puts in the same dedication into "Minotaur," a dog of a movie that feels like a 1997 SyFy special. With him are Tony Todd and Rutger Hauer, and these B-movie heroes and Hardy's efforts can't save what's coming.

Despite the fairly simple story of the Minotaur (arrogant king makes deal with Gods, wife gives birth to monster, hero solves the problem), "Minotaur" turns all of this into a sloppy ahistorical mess. Tom Hardy isn't Theseus, he's Theo. There's no King Minos, only Todd's King Deucalion, who sends sacrifices in to feed the beast. Everyone else is some garble of mythological simplicity: Ariadne is now Raphaella, Hauer is Theo's dad and rural village chief, Cyrnan, and he's supposed to be King Aegeus, you know, the guy the Aegean Sea is named after.

There's no inherent problem with mixing legends with fresh perspectives — 1999's "13th Warrior" does it to a degree that's only improved over the years — but "Minotaur" is so out of whack that whatever story it's trying to tell would have been best improved by canceling this thing in pre-production. Unfortunately, it exists, and you can watch it. Not that you should.

Now this is just rude. "The Lightning Thief" was bad enough, but 20th Century Fox just could not stop leaving money on the table. So they took Riordan's second novel, "Sea of Monsters," with its fun riff on the adventures of Jason and the Argonauts, Golden Fleece and all, and turned it into a soulless shell of a movie that, if this last decade has held any kindness for you, you forgot existed.

Amusing cast additions like the ever-charismatic Nathan Fillion as Hermes (stepping in for Dylan Neal in the original) and Stanley Tucci as Dionysus (replacing Luke Camilleri) can't help the deficiencies in the script. Deficiencies that could have been addressed as simply as, y'know, following Riordan's already simple and enjoyable books. Fortunately just a few years later, the threat of a third movie would be neatly replaced by Disney's acquisition of 20^th Century Fox, and they, wisely, let Rick Riordan take the reins on whatever happened next. "The Lightning Thief" has been redeemed as a successful first season on Disney+, and "Sea of Monsters" will undoubtedly receive its redemption this December.

Hey, remember Renny Harlin? The once-infamous director of "Cutthroat Island" has been making a comeback in the horror scene with entries in "The Strangers" franchise, so, maybe you do. But what's more pertinent here is that he managed to release "The Legend of Hercules" six months before Dwayne Johnson's slightly less bad "Hercules" flick, and if you're aware of this movie, we're deeply sorry.

Starring a minor guy from "Twilight" (Kellan Lutz) and not much of anyone else, this "Hercules" is a straight "Gladiator" rip-off with a little Grecian flair. And we do mean little; the cheaply CGI'd Nemean lion is as funny as the fake baby in "American Sniper," and the rare godly intervention would've looked better with "Heavy Metal" rotoscope. Ugliest of all is that this thing was made to cash in an extra few bucks on the 3-D craze: the already sloppy cinematography won't stop throwing things at the screen. This is a genuinely bad, irredeemable film with an insulting layer of misused mythology, with a truly bizarre sex scene involving an invisible Zeus. It's all so crap not even Hera bothers to get mad about it.

Most bad mythology films are bad in a harmless way that washes off. The utterly unnecessary "Wrath of the Titans," however, can cause grumpiness and outright hostility in viewers already pissed at how useless the remake was. While the major players return, with Sam Worthington's Perseus now a dad and Liam Neeson's Zeus doing more shouty nonsense, etc., the plot is meaningless. Perseus doesn't get up to much else in mythology but the whole thing with Medusa and the sea monster, so the screenplay is made out of... well, nothing, really.

There's no mythological basis for the Titans' jailbreak (this isn't Ragnarok, folks), nor does it suggest anywhere in legend that the lack of prayer will kill the Gods. The only source for that is a sailor's tall tale that implies that with the rise of Christianity, the Gods are powerless. Which has no place in a movie where Hades (still Ralph Fiennes) is still slap-fighting his big brother over the same issues they had before the Titans got locked up. And as the Gods still die at the end despite Perseus' victories, one asks, how the hell did they think they were going to pull a third movie out of this mess? Thankfully, they didn't.

What happens when you put the Titanomachy, the Minotaur, an enchanted Skyrim bow, and a ton of incoherent cinematography in a roaring hot bronze bull? You get a movie so hatefully crap that merely mentioning it in this writer's house is going to start a brawl. It's an unfortunate third outing for director Tarsem, whose "The Cell" is a camp delight and "The Fall" is an underrated beauty. But "Immortals" isn't even junk food. It's the cinematic equivalent of Panera Death Lemonade: Everything will go real fast, but you're gonna feel like sh*t at the end.

The order of events is incoherent and pointless to summarize. For one example: Mickey Rourke is playing King Hyperion, which is a Titan's name, but his storyline is vaguely that of King Minos. But Hyperion's only bull boy is some weird barbarian guy wearing an unwieldy cage mask. Oh, and Hyperion (who lets the Titans out with the Skyrim bow for whatever reason) cooks some women to death inside a bronze bull, probably because Tarsem thought it would look rad. That's all this movie rides on, vibes. Okay, vibes, and Henry Cavill as a mangled version of Theseus. We concede he tried his best. His best, in this slop of chrome-hued effects, isn't enough to make this movie worth a single faun poop.