The Comic Critic Reviews "One Million Years B.C."

I was tempted to do a review of One Million B.C. (1940) with Victor Mature and Carole Landis as it introduced Victor Mature as a hunky leading man. Carole Landis wasn’t hard on the eyes, either. What was hard on the eyes was its horrific special effects. Thankfully, the director did what he could to hide the rubber suits behind lots of studio shrubbery. With the help of Ray Harryhausen, the historically inaccurate dinosaurs featured in the 1966 remake of One Million Years B.C. were far better. (Please note the slight name change.) There still were real critters blown up large on the screen as in the earlier movie, but Harryhausen claimed he did this so that the audience would think the creatures were real. I don’t think anybody bought that explanation, but they did buy tickets. This is no historical drama. This is a caveman movie. A flick that’s guaranteed to show a lot of skin under skinned skin. It was the highly unrecognized wardrobe efforts of Carl Toms that produced one of the most recognizable images from One Million Years B.C. , Raquel Welch in a fur bikini, that would go on to be a pop-culture icon.

The Comic Critic Reviews "The Golden Voyage of Sinbad"

When I was growing up, a “Sinbad” movie meant that I was in for a visual treat. Ray Harryhausen, the master of stop-motion model animation, was involved in the creation of three Sinbad movies: The 7^th Voyage of Sinbad (1958), The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973), and Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977). Harryhausen experimented with different films and continually improved his technique to produce the most vivid display of moving creatures ever seen on the big screen. In The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, his magic brings inanimate objects to life as our hero sets out on a noble quest. While he has courageous friends to help him, his adversary is an evil man who will stop at nothing to achieve his own goal. And crossing their paths along this journey is an array of mythical beasts with which they must contend. There’s plenty of swashbuckling and thrills on this grand adventure. While I love all of Ray Harryhausen’s Sinbads, I selected The Golden Voyage of Sinbad to review for a few reasons. It was the first Sinbad movie I got to see in the theater. I was eleven, and it left a very strong impression on me. Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger was released only a few years later and did extremely well at the box office. However, the approach to that story has a bit more camp. By then, a little more camp was fine in my book. But the stronger storytelling in The Golden Voyage of Sinbad is why I chose it to immortalize in a cartoon review. My hope is that you will become intrigued with how Ray Harryhausen works his magic in the others. And don’t stop there; there are lots of Sinbad movies that both predate and follow the Harryhausen flicks.