Friday, February 14, 2020

Movie review - "The Golden Voyage of Sinbad" (1973) ***

Seventies fantasy films that aren't sci fi don't have the high reputation of say the 50s and 60s ones but this is grand fun - family entertainment in the best sense. Jon Phillip Law isn't terribly charismatic as Sinbad - he could do a bland-off with Kerwin Matthews. He ads a beard and an accent but it doesn't help.

However Caroline Munro is fun as the slave girl with a shapely figure and perennial pout and Tom Baker was born to play the villain in this sort of movie (presumably he liked the fact so many of his scenes were shot in one room, conjuring spells and sending evil things off to do his bidding... but he does join in the action at the end.) Martin Shaw is Sinbad's BFF.

I wish Munro had been given more to do - after an introduction which seems to promise she'll be prominent, she drops out of the action - and less screen time had been devoted to Takis Emmanuel who is meant to be wacky cowardly comic relief but doesn't quite pull it off, at least not to me.

Strong production value, fun effects and like most of these Harryhausen movies they cleverly stack the action at the end so the last third is almost pure action. Memorable stuff too including a fight with multi-armed Kali.

No comments: