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Very disappointing...

Good concept, poorly executed.

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

David and Goliath is the Italian peplum version of the Biblical story, best known for featuring an aged Orson Welles as the villain of the piece, a ruthless King Saul who rants and raves in his various guest appearances. As a film, it's surprisingly low budget, a set-bound political piece that lacks the kind of basic spectacle that this genre is known for. It's no comparison to the Hollywood blockbuster version of the story, featuring Gregory Peck, and by comparison it just features minor actors spouting badly-dubbed dialogue with the occasional war sequence thrown in to try to keep viewers awake. It doesn't really work.

King Saul has lost favor with God, war is imminent. The only man Saul is afraid of is the prophet Samuel. Samuel arrives to prophesies about a man that God will anoint a man king out of the land of Benjamin to rule over Israel - that man is David. David must fulfill the prophesy but King Saul is willing put up a battle or die before he will bow down to David and give up his throne. Before David can take the throne, he must fight Goliath. In the end, King David restores Saul back to the throne. This is a pretty decent version of the biblical story. It's not a big long Epic tale but of a good length to give us a movie version (around an hour and a half long).I do not rate films of this nature by how much it matches the bible tale nor do I rate these types of films by how much I believe the story is true. I rate them by how well entertained I was by them, how well it was filmed and acted out. My rating is not for my personal beliefs, but for how well I enjoyed it.4/10

Spaghetti biblical study elevated somewhat in status by the appearance of Orson Welles playing King Saul. Ivo Payer is David, the man who would be king of the Israelites, but who must first defeat Asrod, King of the Philistines (Meniconi) who's managed to lure the hermit behemoth Goliath (Kronos) as his secret weapon. Beginning with David's journey to Jerusalem, where he quickly establishes himself as a shepherd (or radical, depending on your lean), freeing the slaves and showing compassion for the wicked, he is taken in by the Prophets and groomed as the next King. His inevitable battle to the death with Goliath is a disappointingly brief action sequence, with Goliath shown in the distance to distort the height difference which is obviously far less than desirable. The bloody battle that follows is everything a sword and sandal movie promises to be, again, albeit too brief.Welles is essentially a peripheral character although unsurprisingly, his performance towers above those around him; Massimo Serato as ally turned conspirator Abner does a reasonable job and although not as buff as a Steve Reeves or Brad Harris, Ivo Payer isn't as wooden as one might expect of films of this ilk. Meniconi too isn't bad as the evil Asrod, although why he would bet the house on a 6 foot maybe 5 inch Neanderthal who can military press an ancient stone tablet beggars belief. But then it did happen according to the Old Testament. Goliath was probably much bigger than depicted here – cinematography tricks fail to enlarge Kronos to the necessary proportions.Colourful sets, appropriate score and functional dialogue (dubbed) permits some standard of entertainment and unlike most biblical epics, "David & Goliath" is compact at about an hour and a half. If you're home alone over Easter or Christmas, don't have high expectations and could cop a low-key sermon (scantily clad dancing girls an unexpected bonus), "David & Goliath" might keep you mildly entertained.

This cheesy but entertaining sword-and-sandal movie has more in common with the muscleman spectacles being made in Italy at the time than it has with the superior Biblical epics made by Hollywood in the same era, such as "Ben Hur" and "The Ten Commandments." The dialogue is stilted, the acting stiff, and the departures from the Biblical narrative make it unsuitable as a Sunday school lesson (i.e., Jerusalem did not become part of Israel until David conquered it after Saul's death; in one scene the prophet Samuel quotes verses from the Book of Ecclesiastes, which hadn't been written yet). On the credit side, the movie has lots of pretty girls (what's a Biblical epic without scantily clad dancing girls?) and an exciting battle scene. Hilton Edwards (billed as Edward Hilton) hams it up amusingly as Samuel, and an alarmingly obese Orson Welles gives a commanding performance as Saul, showing that life can be tough for a working actor even if you're a genius. Aside from Welles, only the sexy Eleonora Rossi-Drago, as Saul's scheming daughter Merab, manages to create a three-dimensional character. Overall, the acting is so poor that circus strong man Kronos, as Goliath, actually gives one of the better performances even though all he does is grunt.