Here is one of my favorite films of all time. Hands down, it is the movie I most wish Hollywood and modern filmmakers understood how to make, because it is pure magic. This is the sort of wispy far away journey film that is just not made. Lucas tried with WILLOW, but it was a very very pale shadow of this film.
As the opening music and titles began, my eyes began tearing up... this was a gorgeous print, and other than an annoying popping on the soundtrack, I was in heaven. I was completely happy. A smile doesn't even describe it, to own a copy of this film in 16mm, to be showing it out here... ahhhh heaven. I ask the audience if anyone had seen it, just my sister, father, myself and Tom Joad had seen it. How was that possible? People are alive that haven't seen this film? People exist that don't know how to summon the genie from the lamp and then set him free of his curse? I couldn't imagine that humans existed that didn't know of a land beyond beyond, a world past hope and fear.. How do you not just wither away to dust? How do you imagine or see creatures in cloud formations on those summer evenings when the coolest thing is the grass beneath your sweaty neck?
I was stunned... then a feeling of glee came to me as I realized that for all those in my domain, in this party situation, they all, each and everyone were being treated to a film that they will talk about for all time, and forever it will be tied to this backyard, this square screen and this beer called Shiner Boch. And I realized that I was fulfilling my place in the great reel of life. Afterall someone... somewhere first showed me Seventh Voyage, someone did that, and I was repaying that here tenfold.
This is pure fantasy filmmaking at it's pinnacle, it quite simply does not get better than this. The melody, the rhythms, the sets... exquisitly filmed in Spain. The interiors gorgeous, caves bathed in beautifully unreal lighting, and who care from where the light comes, this is a fantasy and all the conventions, the trappings we surround ourselves in, they all melt away. This is the world where ugly hand maidens can be turned into exotic snake goddesses and back again. This is the world where giant two headed Rocs (birds that live atop the pinnacles of Colossus) pluck men away from their shrunken fiances and skewered friends to be food for fuzzy chicks atop the nest. This is the world with the most beautifully designed dragon in film, a cyclops that defies definition. This is the film you searched your whole childhood for, but perhaps never found. This is you sled of long ago laughing afternoons that you never knew to grasp for.
There are films that change everything in your life. I wanted to be an effects person so bad when I saw this film. I began reading Famous Monsters Of Filmland after I saw this movie. I asked my father how they did it, and he gave me a collection of Forry Ackerman's classic magazine to explain.. I read those old pages and devoured that world, I sipped and gulped the information down. I discovered the world for the first time, and I knew I wanted to do something, anything in it.
The cast is filled with people you won't know or recognize, they are simply the characters you will see, nothing more nothing less. They will fill those roles in your mind for all eternity and you will thank them for it. And the wizard that created this masterpiece... Ray Harryhausen. The film began as a few charcoal sketches, a stairway to nowhere with a skeleton and Sinbad upon it, a cyclops roasting a man alive, you know the images that make you go wild. Many of you have undeniably seen EVIL DEAD 3: ARMY OF DARKNESS. You know those skeletons? They were nothing, check out this film to see where it all began, and how a master animator, perhaps... nay, the greatest animator of stop motion or real world creations. What do I mean by that last part? Well, Ray creatures, they were alive, sure he didn't have a computer to blur a few inbetween frames here and there to reduce the strobing affect, but what he did have that noone I see animating in 3-D has is the absolute perfect understanding of building a character 24 frames a second. The subtle character things he would give a dinosaur or an Ymir. Or the way a cyclops would grab at something and miss. Nobody does it like him, and here he was flexing his muscles and giving the world a new understanding of eye-candy.
For my father, he saw this film when he was 13 years old and living in San Antonio, Texas. At the time his mind was most driven by the world of the wild west, his Hopalong Cassidy radio buzzing in it's mono glory. The world of 12 inch black and white televisions and a world of simple things. He went to a 'forbidden' theater on the 'wrong side' of town to see the movie. The Aztec theater, the interior like an Aztec temple, gorgeous, perfectly lurid for 13 year old whose arch enemy was a 13 year old on the other side of the iron curtain. He bought his ticket and he sat in the theater. He looked at the poster and thought, 'yeah right, those creatures will never be on screen!' He walked in, and the boy that walked in never came out, instead out came this deranged lunatic (by fifties San Antonio standards), a convert, someone that was now looking beyond the six guns and the cowboy hats... Hell, now there were beasts with one eye that stood some 50 feet high with cloven hoofs and weirdly bent legs! Screw six gun outlaws, they had just been left at the bank pulling their job, this little boy was set to sail the seven seas. Soon after he discovered Famous Monsters of Filmland, and my future was written.
This is a film that can change you for the better, a film that doesn't age, that doesn't wear out, a film that plays a thousand times then plays a thousand more. It does that, it gives us that, because it's fun, it's magic and it's not of today, yesterday or tomorrow, it's of a time and a place that never will/was be/been. That is where fantasy belongs, and this was the gateway, the signpost for more such films. Only Jason and the Argonauts and Golden Voyage of Sinbad followed without missing a beat, and no other has taken the journey. Perhaps Miramax will have the guts to go through with Peter Jackson's dream of another journey, and perhaps I'll have another film to add to this list. I truly hope so, I do...
Afterwards, slackjawed film fans drooled, as if the Virgin Mary came and talked to them like she did Francie Brady, they were converted, as have all that came before. Today was a great day in film for me, a day to celebrate. That night we came in the house and continued watching films till the cocked crowed and the sun bounced to attention. Days and nights of fun and film and friendship. Ya gotta love them days
