SINBAD OF THE SEVEN SEAS (1989)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical*

Luigi Cozzi might never have made a really good movie in his long career, but give him credit: he always seemed to be TRYING to entertain, rather than just cranking out routine potboilers.

SINBAD OF THE SEVEN SEAS is slapdash, yet not routine. There's just one mythic thread in the story that allows me to rate its mythicity as "fair," but SEVEN's main appeal for most viewers will be its over-the-top approach to the swashbuckling tropes of Arabian Nights movies, borrowing from 1940's THIEF OF BAGDAD and 1958's THE SEVENTH VOYAGE OF SINBAD, though the main influence is Cozzi's earlier movie ADVENTURES OF HERCULES, one of two films he did with actor Lou Ferrigno, who also plays Sinbad here. It's because of the borrowing from ADVENTURES that I call SEVEN a Cozzi movie. He wrote the script with two other credited writers and was supposed to direct the project as well. But due to scheduling conflicts, Enzo G. Castellari (a director better known for war movies and westerns than for fantasies) helmed SEVEN, and Cozzi was later enlisted to edit the raw footage into the surviving movie.

The trope dominating SEVEN is what I called, in my ADVENTURES review, the "jigsaw quest," wherein something important is broken into two or more segments, with the result that the protagonists must exert themselves to assembling all the pieces again. However, it's impossible to judge from the English dub of SEVEN whether the original Italian script was any better in terms of explication. Over the course of the movie, I just barely cobbled together the idea that in Sinbad's time the city of Basra is a paradise without crime or evil, *possibly* due to its possession of the five mystic Gems of Basra. The evil vizier Jaffar (John Steiner), in addition to swiping his name from the villain of the 1940 THIEF, plans to gain control of the gems and use them to conquer the world. But Jaffar can only do this-- I think-- if he can cause the Princess of Basra Alina (Alessandra Martines) to become his willing bride, since she apparently has some unspecified connection to the gems. To this end Jaffar uses his magic to brainwash the King of Basra and all the soldiers of the city, and then he sticks Alina in a brainwashing machine that looks like a huge blood-draining device. Doesn't brainwashing cancel out the "willing bride" part? Oh well, this is just Cozzi swiping wildly from the part of the 1940 THIEF in which 1940 Jaffar uses a magic rose to make a princess fall for him-- though that evildoer at least really loves the young woman he's endeavoring to seduce.

But Alina's will can't be broken by the machine because she nurtures an undying love for her distant swain, Prince Ali (whose name is oddly similar to her own). Moreover, she knows that Ali is on his way back to Basra alongside the musclebound captain of a sailing ship, Sinbad (Ferrigno) and his merry crew, which includes a dwarf, a Viking, and a Japanese samurai who quotes Confucius at one point. When these heroes arrive in Basra, Sinbad goes alone to the royal palace, where Jaffar traps him in a pit of snakes. A little later Jaffar's guards capture the other crew-members and consign them to a torture chamber.

The inevitable escape of the heroes show some cool touches of originality. Sinbad, instead of fighting the snakes, talks to them, emphathizing with their lot in life under such a cruel master, and-- they allow him to make a rope of their bodies so he can climb out of the pit! You won't see anything like that in a Syfy fantasy film. Then, when Sinbad barrels into the torture chamber to save his friends, there's a cool muscle-tussle in which a guard, every bit as beefy as Ferrigno, wraps a chain around Sinbad's chest and tries to crush him. All of the bad guards end up in a pool of piranhas (guess they weren't any of the brainwashed victims?) and the heroes retreat from Basra in their sailinig-ship.

Jaffar sends skull-headed warriors to attack the ship, and of course the warriors repulse the attack. But the fiend's other action is more problematic. In theory he should want to keep the mystic Gems of Basra close to the palace, in case he's able to break Alina's will. Instead, he decides he will send four of the five gems (I think either the original writers or the translators lost count) flying off to  dangerous areas of the world. so that Sinbad and company will get destroyed by various perils. (A surviving still shows Jaffar conferring with one of the menaces, as if he personally teleported himself to that locale to arrange things.)

The pattern here is the same as in ADVENTURES OF HERCULES: when the heroes defeat a monster, they harvest one of the gems from him/her/it. The story is rendered somewhat incoherent in that for some reason Jaffar magicks Sinbad's crew back to their ship and out to sea, so that Sinbad's last couple of endeavors are solo missions. (I assume the idea about Jaffar's intervention was a belated, flimsy justification for the crew having disappeared from a large part of the movie.) Most of the monsters-- a stone sentinel, ghost knights-- are dull, and the only one that's a little interesting is an adventure with some island-dwelling Amazons. To be sure, they're not very impressive women warriors, since they capture the crew with traps, while their queen Farida (Melonee Rodgers, seen above) mesmerizes Sinbad with her hootchie-kootchie. It might have seemed more on point to have Ali tempted by Farida, since his resistance would have mirrored that of Alina. But the script never gives Ali even one strong moment, even when a minor character claims she intends to duel Ali, though no such duel transpires.

In his solo wanderings Sinbad makes two new allies, a tough girl named Kyra (Stefania Girolami) and her dotty wizard-dad. (Stephania shares her last name with Ennio Girolami, the guy playing the Viking, and both are allegedly the children of substitute director Castellari.) The wizard helps re-unite Sinbad and his crew, now possessed of all the mystic gems, so that they can launch a frontal assault on Jaffar. The sorcerer has one last card to play, conjuring a duplicate Sinbad to match biceps with the original. But of course the good guys win and Jaffar faces the fate of-- being forced to resign his position as vizier???

I don't know how seriously to take any of the writeups on the film. One makes it sound like Castellari produced a bunch of unusable raw footage, far more than needed for a feature film, and Cozzi was called upon to edit it. Another story is that SEVEN was supposed to be a four-part telefilm, which might explain Castellari having produced a huge amount of footage, but the story as it exists doesn't seem to have enough plot content for a serial work. 

Ferrigno doesn't produce any stellar acting, but he looks like he's having a good time, just because his hero can smile and crack bad jokes instead of just grimacing at the cameras. John Steiner may or may not have provided his own dubbing but he wins the Snidely Whiplash Award for turning up the acting-amps to Warp Eleven, making old Conrad Veidt seem positively subdued. A female muscle-star of sorts, Teagan Clive, appears only for a handful of scenes in which she provides Jaffar with someone to talk to, but she doesn't do anything more, much less getting into her promised duel with Prince Ali. But though Teagan doesn't get to show off her stuff, Martines, Girolami and Rodgers provide a nice sampling of pulchritude.

Lastly, despite all the supernatural wonders of SEVEN, in terms of phenomenality it falls into the domain of the uncanny, because the whole thing is a story told by a mother (horror actor Daria Nicolodi) to her little girl. This story-within-a-story probably started out as a shout-out to the original Arabian Nights, despite an utterly false claim in the movie's prologue that SEVEN is based on a short story by Edgar Allan Poe. But just as I esteem SEVEN slightly for its sloppy but colorful swipes, I have to give props to a prologue that would perpetrate such a hoax in the name of Poe, one of the great hoax-lovers in all Western literature.