The once great kingdom of Samar has been turned into a wasteland. When a meteor collided with a local mountain (in an opening sequence that looks like it was shot through a tub of Vaseline), it set off a monstrous volcanic eruption that killed everything within a mile of the impact and thusly fucked over Samar's tourism trade. In an attempt to recover their lost profits, the men immediately started sacrificing their women and children to the hungry volcano god in an attempt to appease him/her and bring commerce back to the land... and all it did was create a kingdom of very gay men with a very short social mortality rating. As such, enter Hercules!... not literally though, despite that last gay joke. Sorry to disappoint 10% of our male viewers out there... and probably another 5% or more that’s in denial... And sadly, for being the "rough & tumble" he-man of his day, it's a little disheartening to find that Herc shaves his chest like some male underwear model.

The prince of power (unless that's a trademark of Marvel Comics, in which case I guess dauphin of durability will work...) has been summoned by Claudius, the advisor to Samar's less-than-loved Queen Samara, to put an end to the evil baby eating monsters that now live in their volcano tourist trap. Though Claude's intentions are to put an end to the need for frequent human sacrifice and thus prevent an uprising by the increasingly unhappy proletariat (as I'm sure he's happy with his cushy position as the ruling class's house slave), he doesn't realize that Samara is actually in league with the space borne mountain monsters who have promised her an even better position as Queen of the World once they've wrestled the planet from mankind's hands! All she needs to do in return is provide them with human sacrifices, eliminate Hercules, and provide them with her own sister, Phyllis, for use in a sacrificial ceremony intended to resurrect their long dead queen, Selena! As such, when Herc pops up to do the hero thing, the welcoming party sent to greet him consists of Queen Sammy's personal guards, sent to kill the tanned Adonis before he can set sandals into her kingdom. The legendary beefcake puts a hurting on the posse of incompetents with relative ease (and various pieces of stage prop lumber) and continues on his way to the palace, where he hooks up with Claude and the old man's hot daughter Agar... not to be confused with John Agar... by any means...

No sooner does Claude bring the man-god up to speed on the crazy happenings going down in the neighborhood, then the geezer's AARP membership is voided upon his death at the business end of some spring loaded steel spikes while leading Herc through a supposedly secret underground passage! The hero is also dropped into a pit that's rapidly filling with water, but instead of using his head and waiting for the water to simply fill the pit until he can float back to the surface and climb out, Hardbody Von Muscleson goes into a ‘roid rage fit and smashes through one of the pit walls, freeing himself into another section of the cave... where one of those blaggietyblaggerisonbuergnombula beasties from The Pit emerges from the shadows to attack Captain Biceps!... and almost immediately gets its head soundly smashed in against the cave wall... I guess the crew didn't want to risk damaging the monster suit and possibly losing their deposit on it when they returned it to the costume shop.

Disposing of his budget Sasquatch, Sir Otto of the Big Pecs joins up with Agar, who then introduces him to the local revolutionaries down at the ol' beer hall. Sidetracking a little, on the topic of Agar and Samara, what the fuck is the deal with these two?! Samara knows that Agar is part of the alliance to can her from the throne and Agar knows that Samara and her henchman are the ones who killed her father, yet Agar continues to live in the palace and Samara lets her stay there?! You're telling me that, what, Agar was cool with covering up the death of Claude but doesn't think she could get away with killing Agar too?! And what about Agar? She lives in the damn palace and has a free pass to stroll the halls, why doesn't she just slip a shiv between the bitch queen's ribs and let that be the end of it?! Bah, stupid crappy writers and their stupid crappy writing for their stupid crappy movie... Speaking of Sammy, she's busy getting Phyllis's fiancé (and cousin... ew) Prince Derax out of the kingdom so he can't interfere in her whole "sacrifice her sister to resurrect the Moon Queen" plot, so she sends him out into the wastelands on an important mission... alone... and, despite being part of the group that's working to overthrow the bitch, the Prince doesn't suspect that he's being set up for a trap... I guess "Derax" is Greek for "devoid of common sense"... or "total jack-tard". Of course shit-for-brains is jumped as soon as he gets outside of the city limits, but lucks out of course when Stevie Six-Pack jumps in to do the good guy thing yet again. While Chucky Atlas is out-of-town, Samara initiates the round-up of the next batch of sacrificees, to which the underground rebels... sit around and watch, doing nothing to save their neighbors and loved ones. Come to think of it, a lot of this looks to be recycled footage from the opening of the movie, only with scenes of Muscular Martin spliced in to make it look new. To make matters worse, the guys doing the fetching of the victims all have ponytails pulled through the backs of their helmets like they're fresh off of downing a few kegs from the back of their pick-up truck and watching pirated Pay-Per-View wrestling at their buddy's trailer.

Mr. Dinty Moore Beef Stew proves himself to have an Achilles heel much like that of the mighty tuna when he's captured by Sammy's boys and their unstoppable fishing net, wrapping the son of a God up like the catch of the day. We also learn more about the golems from outer space, whose plan to resurrect Selena doesn't just involve bringing their favorite matriarch back from the dead, but also include her power to crash the moon into the Earth and make it completely uninhabitable for any living thing other than the Moon Men themselves... who will have to change their names to "the Earth Men"... and thus deal with the resultant problem of getting their mail afterwards... This of course sets off no warning lights for Samara, who doesn't wonder exactly how it is that she's supposed to survive on the dead Earth and continues to think that everything is peachy friggin' keen. Back to the titular demigod of our tale, Lawrence T. Hamfists is chained up in the center of a big iron maiden-mousetrap torture device that intends to snap shut on the beefcake and give him a few hundred new breathing holes. After five excruciating(ly boring) and torturous(ly tedious) minutes of the hero struggling against the device, the world's oldest steroid case finally busts it up, only to be recaptured and brought to Sammy herself. She tries to use a magic potion to make Chunkstud Beefington the Third her love slave, but despite his brawn the guy apparently has a functioning brain in there somewhere too, so he dumps the roofie when she's not looking, feigns interest in how her day was and pretends to want to go shoe shopping with her on Sunday instead of watching football. Again, Big John Studly could easily crush Sammy's head at any point, but continues to play along, selling out his friends and fellow revolutionaries and letting them die so he can go on pretending he's one of the bad guys now... what a colossal dick!

When Hunk-O condemns the captured Agar and Derax to death (by starvation...), this is enough to convince the Queen that the big lug's really on her side, so she makes like a James Bond villain and spills the beans. Ready to drop the ruse, Lord Bacne whoops on Sammy's palace guards (even pulling the old "hero steps aside so two bad guys can bump skulls and knock each other out" maneuver) and rejoins the revolution, who storm the palace angry mob style, complete with pitchforks and torches. Samara escapes back to Moon Man Mountain, but discovers what it's like to let down the stone people from the green cheese planetoid. For revealing their plans to Herc, the Moonies kill Samara by, well, waddling stiffly toward her, forming a circle around her, and listening to her scream for a little while. So their powers don't actually consist of anything beyond the ability to instill people with the heart-stopping terror of what they could potentially do were they built to do something other than waddle around like giant stone penguins... As Hugemeat Hardloin and pals pad the running time by trying to find the Moonies' lair and wandering around a wasteland soundstage full of fake rocks and trees with the wind machine turned to 11, Redolphis the king Moonie (whose big rubber head is just transparent enough that you can see the actor inside's mouth moving behind Red's teeth when he speaks his lines), with the help of a big, magical, pulsating cabbage, goes about reviving Selena. As the moon lurches closer and closer to our planet, the movie erupts with stock footage of volcanoes, tidal waves, hurricanes and landslides. But, using his godly strength, an unnecessarily long shot of his oiled up pecs, and a conveniently placed load-bearing stone column, Greasy McLargeHuge easily defeats the nigh-immobile stone space titans. As for Big Bad Reddy Daddy, our hero soundly trounces him by pushing him down like he was some old woman at the supermarket. In fact, Redolphis 's only defense is about as effective as the king of the Moonies idly screams like, well, an old woman being pushed over at the supermarket. Today’s lesson: if invading aliens from the moon try to destroy the world, just give 'em a little shove and you're good to go.

One overturned statue and a series of unexplained fires later, Princess Phyllis is reunited with her cousin/husband-to-be Darix, Agar joins Slabchunk Benchpress for a ride along the beach on a white stallion, and we get the blissful cinematic equivalent of a visit to Dr. Kevorkian's office: THE END. There's a big difference between fun cheesy crap and agonizing cheesy crap. Flash Gordon falls under the first category and Hercules Against the Moon Men falls screaming into the latter like a shooting star of bad movieness. It's kinda like the Nazis or Brittney Spears: good for a laugh once in a while, but generally nothing good came of them and they just caused a lot of people immeasurable suffering. On the optimistic side of things, the movie's initials are HAMM and I greatly enjoy ham. It's my favorite part of the pig! And that extra 'M'? Why that stands for "Mmmmmmmmmm", as in, "Mmmmmmmm, I sure do love ham!" Life is all about finding that silver lining folks...