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Ray Harryhausen’s second spin around with Sinbad the Sailor takes the basic formula that worked so well in The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad and cranks it to eleven. This steroidal sequel lacks the naïve innocence of the original, but makes up for it in a bigger scope, more fantastical elements, more stop-motion critters, and more of everything else. It’s a worthy successor despite the general sense that the magic of these films was quickly drying up and their promised adventures falling short of the prior heights.
While the script is a collage of incidents with holes built into the material to provide wiggle room for Harryhausen to strut, The Golden Voyage of Sinbad does distinctly lack a certain something that was pervasive in some of his older films. Perhaps changing tastes had left this gee-whiz type of adventure story as archaic by 1974. Still, even with a major problem of middling awe there’s plenty to recommend and catch your imagination during the voyage.
Most notably is a moment of tender poetry, where Harryhausen seemingly wrote in (the Sinbad films are the few movies where he contributed story elements) a self-reflective moment between a creator and creation. Our villain, Koura (played by the Fourth Doctor, Tom Baker) uses black magic to create a homunculus then gives it some of his blood to breathe life into the creature. This moment, oddly tender and beguilingly quiet, is a miniature portrait of the master at work, giving pieces of himself to bring to life a cavalcade of horrors to do his bidding.
While that scene is a clear highlight, it’s not the lone moment of inspired magic and imagination. An uncredited Robert Shaw, unrecognizable under layers of makeup and vocal distortion, as the Oracle of All Knowledge in a banging, clattering scene of awe and terror as the oracle drops mysterious clues and vague prophecy to aide our heroes on their adventure. Shaw’s Oracle looks positively demonic with it’s disgusting teeth, wild beard, and many horns protruding from his scalp. He appears and disappears in firestorm and blinding lights, and this is the type of moment that Harryhausen fans are thrilled by.
Of course, the real reason we all return to Harryhausen’s films is the stop-motion creature animation. The Golden Voyage of Sinbad is overstuffed with creatures, and a few of them are some of the more memorable inventions of his career. While the one-eyed centaur is fun, and the masthead that springs to violent life is appropriately creepy, but nothing compares to sense of fantasy and wonder that the statue of Kali generates. The battle between Sinbad and his cohorts against the statue is the first sequence in any of these films to live up to the brilliance of Jason and the Argonauts’ skeleton army. This battle with Kali hammers home that when these films are working, whether in individual scenes or as an entire work, they convey a pleasing sense of the otherworldly.
