The limited edition original Ymir model is pretty cool.
Tools:
Recommend review to a friend »
Decision, decisions.
For Ray Harryhausen fans, Tuesday, October 7, will be a day of reckoning. Sony is releasing "The 7th Voyage of Sinbad" on DVD and Blu-ray, along with a Ray Harryhausen Collectible DVD Gift Set and a Ray Harryhausen Blu-ray Collection.
It's not a simple matter of DVD vs. Blu-ray, either, because the Gift Set comes with a 7" tall replica of Ymir from "20 Million Miles to Earth." The limited edition collectible is accompanied by a full-color certificate of authenticity "signed" by Harryhausen and numbered "x" out of 10,000. "The enclosed replica was based on the plaster cast design of my original Ymir sculpture, recently-refurbished under my personal supervision for this special collection," Harryhausen writes. It's a cool green statue that's substantial-looking enough for dens and offices, but a word of warning: the white compound it's made from is dense and heavy, but also brittle. If it falls, it breaks. My son had it on a bookshelf he bumped and it fell two-and-a-half feet to the floor. Result: one broken (now-glued) hand, three missing toes, and a few tears. So treat this as if it were the original plaster cast.
Another complication is that the DVD Gift Set includes three films in color and black and white--"It Came from Beneath the Sea," "Earth vs. the Flying Saucers," and "20 Million Miles to Earth"--while the Blu-ray Collection includes those three films in color and black and white plus "The 7th Voyage of Sinbad" in color and black and white. If you're a DVD collector, that's not much of a problem. Just pick up a copy of "Sinbad" when you get the Gift Set. But for Blu-ray collectors who lust after that green, fork-tailed Ymir? You're going to have to buy the Gift Set and maybe sell, trade, or give away the DVDs in order to get your very own statue.
Some fans might be hesitant, wondering when an "ultimate" Ray Harryhausen collection will be released. After all, a true Harryhausen collection also would include "Jason and the Argonauts" (1963), "The Golden Voyage of Sinbad" (1974), and "Clash of the Titans" (1981). But hey, maybe that means another collection and another statue.
Harryhausen pioneered a technique he dubbed Dynamation, which split the background and foreground so that the stop-motion could be "sandwiched." Fans, meanwhile, are split on which of Harryhausen's films offers the best special effects: "Jason and the Argonauts" (1963), "The Golden Voyage of Sinbad" (1974), or "Clash of the Titans" (1981). Not surprisingly, it has to do with what decade they grew up in. "Jason and the Argonauts," with its skeleton fight that had to have been the inspiration for the bony battles in Disney's first "Pirates of the Caribbean" movie, gets my vote. But let's not forget that Harryhausen's genre was the B-movie. They were produced on the cheap and written to be mildly entertaining vehicles for no-name actors. It was Harryhausen who helped those B-movies make the grade.
Harryhausen collaborated with "King Kong" stop-motion animator Willis O'Brien on a 1949 variation, "Mighty Joe Young," and went solo four years later with "The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms." Baby Boomers will most remember Harryhausen for a string of films that came in the '50s and early '60s--campy sci-fi flicks like "It Came from Beneath the Sea" (1955), "Earth vs. the Flying Saucers" (1956), "20 Million Miles to Earth" (1957), "The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad" (1958), "Mysterious Island" (1961), and, of course, old Jason and his Argonaut buddies.
So how does this set stack up? Well, apart from the cool-but-fragile collectible, two fairly solid B-movies are included, along with one marginal one:
"It Came from Beneath the Sea" (1955) is the weakest entry. In the Fifties, kids went to Sci-fi B-movies to see the latest atomic mutants or mythological creatures. Ray Harryhausen's creations were the stars, not whatever B-movie actors were involved--most of whose names we didn't even know. And kids had to wait way too long for anything cool to happen in this story about a giant octopus that attacks San Francisco. If you saw this in the theater, you'd be getting into mischief for the first two acts until things finally started to get interesting. "It Came from Beneath the Sea" stars Kenneth Tobey as submarine commander Pete Mathews, who, after maneuvers, discovers unidentifiable animal remains on his ship's propeller. Naturally, it turns out to be an octopus grown to gigantic proportions because of all the atomic testing, but there's so much talking and quasi-romance between Mathews and Prof. Lesley Joyce (Faith Domergue) that you can't wait for the octopus to wring somebody's neck. When the creature finally lays hold of the Golden Gate bridge, it can't come a moment too soon. DVD Town's Tyler Shainline was kinder to it than most critics in his review. Harryhausen's effects are fun to watch, but the film really drags.
"Earth vs. the Flying Saucers" (1956) moves along at a much crisper pace, beginning with a saucer sighting and integrating the "cool stuff" with the he/she talky segments that characterize all these B-movies about atomic creatures or strange sightings. It stars Hugh Marlowe as Dr. Russell A. Marvin, whose wife, Carol (Joan Taylor) assists him in his work-which is to launch "skyprobes" to test for other life in space. Well, those probes are exploding in space and Dr. Marvin is trying to figure out why. It turns out that what he thought was St. Elmo's Fire was really flashes of aliens who had come to Earth in their saucers because they misinterpreted those space probes as an act of war, and they were the ones exploding them. Hey, wouldn't we do the same, if something came into our air space? As I wrote in my review, when the aliens land and their knowledge-sucking and "translation" kick into gear, it reminds you a little of the old (and equally campy) "Lost in Space" TV series. In any event, "Earth vs. the Flying Saucers" is great fun, and as B-movies go, not that bad!
"20 Million Miles to Earth" (1957 is the real plum in this collection, though. The narrative is stronger, and we become involved with the creature from the moment its discovered as an egg until the gargantuan Ymir ravages Rome. There's some nice location footage here that you usually don't get in a B-movie, and the acting seems a cut above as well. The action begins off a fishing village in Sicily, where a rocket ship crashes less than 30 yards away from a fleet of fishermen. Here's where the camp kicks in: There's just a little bubbling around the edge of the rocket, which is already half-submerged and has a convenient, man-sized hole in its side. This is the calmest ocean you'll ever see, especially after a violent air crash. The fisherman, who are scared fishless by something that might well be full of aliens, nonetheless decide to check it out. Inside, they find one dead astronaut and two live ones--one of whom has a face that looks like it's fallen victim to an assortment of poxes and plagues. Aboard that craft was a sample from Venus that a little boy finds and sells to a zoologist, who, with his daughter, travel like gypsies to others so they can continue to study it. But the creature grows and grows and eventually escapes, leaving it to the military again to try to bring him down before he can totally destroy all of Italy. Ymir has a few King Kong moments, as when he climbs to the top of the Coliseum and swats at those who would do him harm, or when he's strapped down so scientists can study him. As I say in my review, it's another solid B-movie, perhaps one of Harryhausen's most underrated.
Average user rating (1-5):
Not yet rated.
Not yet rated.
[release]24490[/release]