Great Actors, Costumes, Scenery; but Strays Too Much From Scripture

SAMSON AND DELILAH is 3 hours long! It has three great lead actors and a famous director, but it is greatly weakened by too much fictionalized filling-in around what the Bible says about the story.

The first two hours are pretty slow, with half of it being embellishments to try to make the Scriptural details seem logical and rational to modern viewers. This is a good idea, but they leave out half of the Bible details, while trying to make plausible the half of Scripture that they do cover. They create many non-Biblical characters who help develop the history of the Israel/Philistine conflict, but I don't think it's worth the screen time that they use up, and it definitely isn't worth leaving out Bible details to make room for the fictional characters and back story.

They hired Dennis Hopper for the film, but they had to create a fictional character for him to play, the Philistine General Tariq, and then they spend too much time developing Hopper's character and the fictional details that MIGHT have been going on with the bad guys. In the meantime, they don't cover all of the details in the short story from the actual Bible. They do a good job with the non-Biblical story, but it makes the first 2 hours of the movie kind of drag along.

The last hour of the movie almost redeems the entire movie, as this is where a lot of the overly extensive character development finally cashes in. Unfortunately, though the last hour is emotional and logically put together, it is not really Scripturally accurate. We end up seeing what the filmmakers wrote, not necessarily what God wrote in the Bible.

Early in the film, one blunder was not covering all of the angel telling Samson's parents about their unlikely son to be born to them. They show the wife being told, but then cut out the husband, Manoah, praying for the angel to return for more information, and them eating together when the angel disappears into the smoke. This would have been a fairly inexpensive scene, and it would have helped out the percentage of actual Bible content, but it did not make it into the movie. I guess their special effects budget may have been too low for the disappearance into the smoke, but it would have been easy to do all the rest of that Bible passage. They already had all of the actors on the set for it, but did not get it into the movie.

They took many verses from the Samson Bible story, but shifted the chronology and smaller details around. It is not too badly done, but would have been so much stronger if they had stuck to Biblical accuracy.

They show Samson fighting the lion, but doing it to save Delilah. Samson fights Philistines with a jawbone, but only a few dozen, not 1,000 as the Bible says he did. They show Samson setting the fields afire, but not with foxes tied together at the tails. They allude to Samson carrying the city gate away, but don't show it onscreen.

They named the movie SAMSON AND DELILAH, but they actually end up with little onscreen time showing the two together, which surprised me.

SAMSON AND DELILAH might be too mature for children, as it shows Samson hooking up with a harlot, and in bed with Delilah. There is no nudity, but their bodies are humping and bumping together, and small kids might ask what the characters are doing. If a child is too young for the birds and the bees, then you should definitely skip this movie.

If you are really into Bible movies, then you may enjoy this one. But I don't recommend using it to try to witness to people who aren't already confirmed believers. It is too slow for anybody with only a casual interest in the subject matter.

This is part of a line of made-for-TV Bible movies from the 1990's, from LUBE Productions, an Italian company making films for English speaking audiences. SAMSON AND DELILAH is one of the weaker films in the series, though it is still not too bad, if you are really curious to see it. The best ones in the series are ESTHER, SOLOMON and JEREMIAH. Those three have been out for years on DVD, and are a better bargain if purchased together in THE BIBLE SERIES BOX SET. It has only been in 2005 that the rest of the series became available on DVD, though they have been available on VHS all along. The production values are very good in all the films, though they are sometimes weak in the area of supernatural events onscreen, probably due to the expense of special effects.

I would recommend the DVDs of JEREMIAH, ESTHER, SOLOMON, JACOB or JOSEPH ahead of SAMSON AND DELILAH, if Bible accuracy is what you are looking for. But fans of Dennis Hopper and Elizabeth Hurley will enjoy SAMSON AND DELILAH because these two actors do a good job and get a decent amount of screen time.

Good but doesn't follow scripture very closely

Although worth watching, it is the worst of the Bible series pertaining to following scripture. The biggest problem is that they leave out key event and/or totally get them out of order. All in all it 'is' entertaining a pretty clean considering the story.

Inaccurate

I am a big fan of the Bible Series, Moses, Jacob and David are great movies, a little inaccurate at times but nothing mayor, however Samson and Delilah it's very inaccurate, for instance it completely forgot the part in which Samson offers honey to his parents (to show disobedience) or when Samson asks permission to his parents to marry a Philistian woman. This movie in relation to all others doesn't contain a message but rather its an attempt to make a biblical story a commercial one.