Sinbad of the Seven Seas

It’s not just bad, it’s Sinbad. The last in a series of Italian co-productions undertaken by that legendary American factory of trashy dreams, Cannon Films, Sinbad of the Seven Seas is an unjustly forgotten gem in the category of amusingly bad movies; in fact, it is one of the most captivating contributions to said category. Lou “The Incredible Hulk” Ferrigno as Sinbad and his crew composed of a dandified Adonis, a queer Asian in make-up, a pseudo-Viking, a buffoonish dwarf and a vagabond alchemist must rescue Princess Alina from the clutches of the most theatrical villain in the history of cinema. Before that, however, he must set sail on a quest to find four magical gemstones, during which he will face many dangers including seductive mulattoes, empty suits of armour, walking rocks, zombie lepers and laser-wielding mutants. Meanwhile, Alina is locked up in some sort of chemical apparatus that is supposed to suck the good out her, in the bad guy’s lair, which is reminiscent of Doctor Manhattan’s glass fortress in Watchmen. In addition to that, we have here a heap of quite imaginatively rendered mechanical special effects, absurd twists, nonsensical dialogue, bombastic stunts, phantasmagorical scenes (e.g. Sinbad charms snakes so that he can weave them into a rope, which he uses to break out of prison) and a nonstop barrage of acting performances that oscillate between Ferrigno’s wooden Sinbad and John Steiner’s magnificently over-the-top villain. And all of this is wrapped up in a narrative that looks like a third-rate attempt at The Princess Bride, with a bit of source material from the pen of Edgar Allen Poe himself (who indeed wrote the parody story The Thousand and Second Tale of Scheherazade, though this film has very little in common with it). As was usually the case with Cannon Films, everything is the result of even crazier production conditions. After the making of Hercules with Lou Ferrigno, its director, C-movie trash master Luigi Cozzi, wrote the screenplay for Sinbad, but due to time constraints, B-movie maestro Enzo G. Castellari was ultimately hired to make the project. Castellari completely reworked the screenplay and received a commission to make a roughly six-part television mini-series. When most of the material had already been shot, Cannon Films was in dire financial straits and the project was suspended. Unbeknownst to Castellari, the producers subsequently rehired Cozzi, who was given the task of turning the rambling multi-hour fragment into a single feature film. Cozzi came up with the solution, which involved filming a passage with a mother reading her daughter a bedtime story about Sinbad, which made it possible to bridge the plot gaps and somehow tie everything together. The problem, however, was that the material that had already been filmed contained lines in different languages (as was customary in Italian productions, each member of the international ensemble spoke their own language and several dubbed versions for various territories would be made after filming had been completed), and because several years had passed since the filming, which took place in 1986, and the screenplay was nowhere to be found, it was not entirely clear what the film was actually about. Cozzi’s contributions often brought even more confusion to the whole thing, and so one day Brad Goldberg, an employee in Cannon Films’ marketing department, got a call asking if he would write a voiceover for a completed film. The next day, according to Goldberg himself, he submitted the first draft, which he had hoped to discuss with the filmmakers and subsequently fine-tune it, but instead his typescript was taken directly to the dubbing studio. Fortunately, the result of all of this is not an incoherent mess as in the case of another Cannon accounting mistake, namely Journey to the Center of the Earth, but a wonderful, crazy bit of camp that manages to amaze and amuse. (22/03/2015) (moins) (plus)