Pretty Good

Disturbing yet enthralling

In other words,this film is a surreal ride.

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

I saw this film first when I was 11 years old and seeing it 59 years later hasn't diminished me enthusiasm. This is some of Ray Harryhausen's best work and first with classical characters as opposed to futuristic science fiction.Playing Sinbad is Kerwin Matthews who seemed to like doing these films, he was so often cast in them. He's getting ready to marry Princess Kathryn Crosby and that's something for even a sea captain to marry into the royal family.But when they're blown off course and come to an island where magician Torin Thatcher headquarters and shares it with a cyclops, a giant flying roc bird and a fire breathing dragon Thatcher keeps to protect his lair it's trouble. Thatcher has possession also of a magic lamp with a boy genie Richard Eyer who like Pinnochio wants to be a real live boy. Watching The 7th Voyage Of Sinbad really takes me back to when I was 11 years old. You can still thrill at my age to what Harryhausen does with those monsters. An 11 year old of any age can still thrill to the dragon and cyclops duking it out while our hero escapes with his lady love.Thatcher's a villain that will give you nightmares. He's pure evil, the kind you applaud when he gets his.After almost 60 years The 7th Voyage Of Sinbad is still a great family film with whole cloth heroes and the darkest of villains.

I still remember this amazing inspirational monster film so vividly from my childhood memories watching this classic fantasy film at the Outremont theatre in Montreal, Canada (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outremont_Theatre) and the other Ray Harryhausen classics such as The Golden Voyage of Sinbad which are my two ultimate favorites. I was about 13 at the time or younger. Passing by the theatre often was my favorite past time, waiting for the movie posters to be posted in the glass case outside the theatre to announce the next classic monster flick. How I miss those innocent days of awe and wonder. It would be nice to have a great director/producer like Peter Jackson remake these classic fantasy films with the same special touch as Harryhausen gave them. I find they retool the originals like Clash of the Titans with too much script change and not enough magic substance.Robert C.

This was the first of the Ray Harryhausen fantasy epics, wonderful films packed with loads of special effects in the form of monsters and weird beasts (JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS and THE GOLDEN VOYAGE OF SINBAD combine with this, in my mind, to make a great trilogy - just don't bother with SINBAD AND THE EYE OF THE TIGER, as it doesn't have the same feel to it). To me, it seems like a pretty influential film, especially on the Italian industry who went on and inserted loads of mythological monsters into their peplum films in the early '60s.Once the plot gets started, the pacing is fast and the film is packed with loads of different special effects, some good, some not so good. Back projection is used quite extensively and in a realistic way. Once the princess is shrunk down to miniature size they use the old mixture of gigantic sets and back projection to create the illusion, and it works. The only effect to the film's detriment is, I feel, the magic lamp. The scenes of the annoying boy-genie emerging from the lamp were probably done as best they could be but I still think they look pretty awful. Kerwin Matthews is the square-jawed hero, and has the correct attributes (fitness and charisma) for a leading man in this type of film. Playing the bad, bald magician is Torin Thatcher, who does so well in the role that he was brought back as the villain in JACK THE GIANT KILLER (another great film which incidentally re-teamed him with Mattews). Kathryn Grant I found to be quite an unattractive love interest, and Richard Eyer, as the boy genie, is just plain irritating.Elsewhere, we have plenty of great locations, colourful cinematography, and a wonderful stirring score from Bernard Herrman which helps to draw out the magical and fantastic feel of the film. As is always the case with Harryhausen, his special effects are the best thing in the film, and they do not disappoint here at all. The first to pop up is a "snake woman", a very exotic looking creation. Then we have one of his cyclops monsters, which often pop up in films such as this and always provide a great menace. Also appearing are a huge green fire-breathing dragon, a two-headed giant bird and, for the piéce de resistance, a sword-wielding skeleton who fights with Sinbad. This skeleton is excellently animated and looks like a dry-run for the finale of JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS. The film is packed with action and many battle scenes. Mutinies are attempted, monsters fight with other monsters, humans battle monsters, and a whole load of the cast get crushed, burnt or slashed to death along the way. All of the action sequences are exciting to watch, even if some of the punches are thrown a little too wide for my liking. THE 7TH VOYAGE OF SINBAD is a wonderful fantasy adventure from the golden age of cinema, and a real delight for children and adults alike.

Whenever I watch one of these types of movies I'm overwhelmed by the painstaking amount of work that went into creating the 'dynamation' styled creatures, the work of special effects artists like the legendary Ray Harryhausen. You have to remember that the monsters and other fantastical creations were made of clay and repositioned a countless number of times while filming them individually frame after frame until the desired effect was achieved. Then, the film of the inanimate objects had to be blended together with the live action to produce what you see on screen. It's just an incredible amount of manual work that had to go into producing films like these in the days before blue screen and CGI.And the monsters here truly were fantastic. A Cyclops made an appearance on two separate occasions, while the second expedition back to the island of Colossa by Captain Sinbad (Kerwin Mathews) revealed a legendary Roc, an enormous two headed hawk-like bird, along with your traditional fire breathing, scaly green dragon. Perhaps the strangest creation was that of the four armed half woman/half serpent conjured up by the magician Sokhura (Torin Thatcher), an ingenious tribute to the power of one's imagination.So with all these mythical creatures on display, one might miss the parallels to one of the all time great sci-fi films made over a decade and a half later, the original "Star Wars". After Princess Parisa (Kathryn Grant) was restored to normal size after applying the magic potion, she and hero Sinbad did the old rope swing across the gorge to escape the dragon's lair, a neat prelude to Luke and Leia doing the same thing in 'A New Hope'. Sinbad's sword fight with the skeleton of course was recreated any number of times using light sabers by various characters in the Star Wars universe.If there's one thing I thought the film makers might have improved on it would have been the casting of the lamp genie. The young Richard Eyer just didn't seem to have the charisma that was needed to pull off the magic genie theatrics that the story called for. But he's not on screen all that much so I wouldn't consider him an impediment to enjoying the picture.