Released this week is a limited
edition box set with both DVD and blu-ray formats are three Ray Harryhausen Sinbad
films together with lots of extras. The trio are undeniably popcorn classics
with pioneering effects for the time they were made. I certainly remember
seeing the second and third of these back in the day when we had a local
cinema. The 7th Voyage of
Sinbad is the earliest and least familiar though it’s been on TV many
times. By today’s standards this 1958 movie is rather creaky though its not the
legendary special effects that have dated half as much as the acting and plot.
Nonetheless it has the sort of thrills and spills that would have entertained
audiences in a time when most comparable films tried things like superimposing
ordinary sized lizards over the picture to make them look huge. Trouble was
they just sort of sat there. By contrast Ray Harryhausen’s stop motion
animation- known as Dynamation- makes the creatures much more entwined with the
action and it is this aspect that ultimately makes the movie watchable.
