I saw two Sinbad films again this Christmas, the Seventh Voyage from 1958 and the Golden Voyage from 1973.
Seeing them so close together I realised that of the two the earlier 1958 film was much much better in my opinion.
The Seventh Voyage was a really excellent movie, entertaining and exciting with a great storyline and fantastic effects. The necromancer villain was very convincing and the Island cyclops and the green dragon really great monsters. I just loved the whole thing. It had that classic zap and zing found later in Jason and the Argonauts.
Fifteen years later the Golden Voyage of Sinbad seemed to have lost so so much. The story was weak, the villain despite being Tom Baker was lukewarm and the monsters and effects somehow half-hearted. I admit that the fencing Shiva was good but the continual use of the miniature flying Ymir creature throughout the film was just lazy. It just felt to me as if the wind had dropped from Sinbad's sagging sails.
I now need to see Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger from 1977 to see if the rot had set in for good. Is it better than the Golden Voyage would you say?
What do you think readers? Am I being overly harsh?
Never saw the 73 Sinbad, but was OBSESSED with Seventh Voyage. Saw it on TV countless times, and had the 8mm home digest film versions, which I ran over and over and over... Harryhausen's stone-cold masterpiece, IMHO.
ReplyDeleteSeventh is so much better Zigg. Wow, you had the 8mm film! Have you still got it and the box?
DeleteThe original 8mm digests (there were two or three of them if I recall) by Columbia Pictures are long gone. But I stumbled on a couple of "outlaw" 8mm digests of Sinbad awhile back on ebay, by a notorious company named Atlas Films, who would basically steal other company's films, duplicate and resell them under different titles! I love Atlas Films, they are so sleazy as to be almost underground. Anyways, I had two bootleg "Sinbad" reels, one of which I gave away as a present, the other which I still have laying around, I think. They had titles like "Evil Magician" and "Magic Camp" and as the buyer, you never knew exactly what you were getting. I remember a friend of mine bought several Atlas Horror titles in the 1960s, with titles like "Thing in the Ice" and "Monster in the Cave" and they turned out to be scenes from Universal's Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman! Unauthorized, of course! The boxes were generic - just the title rubber-stamped on the bottom - so it was always a mystery what actual film you got. But it was always worth it, because Atlas' catalog was so bizarre and eclectic. And because they were dupes of other people's films, the visual quality was always sub-par. But still worth it for the collector of the unusual!
ReplyDeleteFantastically informative Zigg. There's a book in that lot somewhere! I'd buy it for one! I love early home film formats like Super 8 and VHS. Atlas sound fascinating!
Delete