‘Sinbad and the Seven Seas’ or — The Shining Glory of John Steiner?

The story goes that back in 1986 the original director of ‘Sinbad and the Seven Seas’ (1989), Luigi Cozzi, was replaced by Cannon Films with Enzo G. Castellari. Castellari, possibly believing he was making a TV series rather than a single feature film, handed in over three hours of footage. This footage, deemed unusable, was shelved for three years until 1989 when, desperately needing cash, Cannon brought Cozzi back to the project and gave him $500,000 to salvage what he could in order to deliver a releasable product. Cozzi achieved this by lifting wholesale ‘The Princess Bride’s (1987) framing device of a young child being told the film’s story as a bed-time fairy tale thus allowing the filmmaker to stitch together whatever unrelated material he wanted with a narration-heavy voice-over filling in the gaps.

Now, going from the above you’d be forgiven for expecting the end result to resemble an incomprehensible mess, but that couldn’t be further from the truth because ‘Sinbad and the Seven Seas’ doesn’t resemble an incomprehensible mess because it explicitly IS an incomprehensible mess! But dear goodness, what a glorious disaster it is.

Plot and/or character descriptions are futile because this movie pinballs about like a rabid hamster in a tumble-dryer meaning any attempt to make sense of it could result in cerebral haemorrhaging. Not only that but even if the film was narratively coherent it would still pose a risk to the viewer’s sanity because what is here is still brain-shatteringly stupid anyway.

For example — at one point Sinbad is locked in an underground dungeon filled with snakes so, in order to escape, he starts complimenting the snakes until they allow him to knot them all together into a rope. Yet what shocked me the most was that he didn’t even have the decency to un-tie them afterwards!

Yep, this is a daft, baffling, frequently unintelligible movie… but boring it is not.

Not only that but Enzo G. Castellari certainly knew how to stage great action (at their best his films are some of the most deliriously exciting ever made) and there are some of flashes of that here. A great example is the scene when Sinbad and his crew arrive on the Isle of the Dead and the following sequence where they battle the Ghost Knights, their armour being completely empty inside, is genuinely inventive and fun.

Although the film’s biggest secret weapon is John Steiner as the evil Jaffar, who delivers a performance of such ferocious scenery-chewing immensity he’s like the Cookie Monster let loose in a biscuit factory. There’s a reason Steiner is such a beloved favourite of Italian genre fans and that’s because every time he’s in a movie he immediately cranks everything up several notches in terms of sheer energy, and here he’s going off the bloody charts and into previously unexplored acting territory.

He also gets a lair and a henchwoman that both need to be seen to be believed.

‘Sinbad and the Seven Seas’ is an objectively appalling movie, and one so obviously cobbled together it might not even qualify as a “movie” anyway. But it’s consistently fascinating, unbearably hilarious and absurdly fun. Now, could someone please let Castellari release his three-hour cut because I’d watch that in a heartbeat.