The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958)

"What evil sorcery is this?"

I've seen this splendid Ray Harryhausen film (and is it not instructive how we all see this as his film, director and obscure cast notwithstanding) several times before. Of course I have. But my DVD went missing years ago and only now do I get to blog it.

It's a splendid tour-de-force of stop motion brilliance, of course; very much a Technicolor King Kong. I mean this literally; the stars of the film are not Kerwin Mathews and Kathryn Grant but the horned Cyclops, the Roc, the dragon and the skeleton- and the final fight between the Cyclops and the dragon is very King Kong indeed.

Of course, Rocs aside, the story owes far more to The Odyssey than to Arabian Nights. And the acting, aside from Torin Thatcher’s splendid scenery chewing as the sneaky magician Sokurah, is pure plywood. Indeed, there is a major plot hole- why do the Caliph and Sultan not suspect the clearly dodgy wizard of being the man who shrunk the princess? Why, after declaring war on Baghdad for no obvious reason, does the Sultan allow his daughter to remain there? Actually, how come a Caliph and Sultan both exist, as equals? Were there sultans before the Ottomans, anyway?

Ultimately, we don’t care about any of this. The stop motion is awesome, therefore the film is awesome. It’s one of those films, and Ray Harryhausen was the greatest ever in his field.