Sinbad And The Eye Of The Tiger!

Sinbad and the The Eye of the Tiger is a diverting adventure tale with lots of delightful fantasy elements blended into it. It's hurt from the get-go by its lead Patrick Wayne. Sadly Wayne is simply not up to the role and while perfectly handsome enough lacks the acting chops to hang with pros like Patrick Troughton and Margaret Whiting. Fortunately for Wayne he has relative novices alongside him such as pretty Taryn Power and a lovely up and coming Jane Seymour. Both are absolutely lovely to look at, but their acting in this vehicle at least is pretty indifferent.

On the Harryhausen special effects front, this is a movie with strengths and weaknesses, but mostly lost opportunities. The Minoton which dominates a lot of screen time marches all the way to the top fo the world with the villains but then gets crushed moments before a potentially awesome battle with the Troglodyte who ends up fighting a Sabretooth tiger instead. Why not have both. Harryhausen has said this movie was a bit of a rush job, in response to good ticket sales on The Golden Voyage several years before and frankly it shows.

The show even fails to my mind to make full use of such awe-inspiring sights as Petra which is only glimpsed in the early parts of the movie. Apparently none of the main actors went to the location and that really damages the sense of wonder which could have been achieved there.

The story itself seems a patch job, too similar in many respects to the earlier Golden Voyage. This is the only one of the three Sinbad movies I got to see in the theater and I remember being diverted by it at the time. But having seen the others, the deficiencies in this entry are sadly all too apparent.

But the ladies were beauteous! Behold!

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