Friday, July 5, 2013

Photo of the Day

Queen Farida (Melonee Rodgers) tries to seduce Sinbad (Lou Ferrigno) in SINBAD OF THE SEVEN SEAS

This movie puts the 'bad' in Sinbad. Oy! Apparently plagued with production problems, the end result is so bad that I have to change my list of Worst PEPLUM Films of All Time. It was supposed to be a 4 part mini-series directed by Luigi Cozzi, who also directed Lou in the two HERCULES films the bodybuilder made in the early 1980s, and he's also the man behind the legendary STAR CRASH. Cozzi dropped out of the project which was left in limbo.

Another director stepped in, Enzo G. Castellari, and filmed some stuff for a feature film but then the entire production was shelved again. Tons of footage had been filmed but without any final product in sight. Later on, Luigi Cozzi returned to the project and re-edited everything that was filmed to that point into the final film known as SINBAD OF THE SEVEN SEAS. Cozzi filmed some additional scenes with Daria Nicolodi (wife of Dario Argento) who played a modern-day suburban mother reading a Sinbad story to her daughter (played by Cozzi's real daughter) and this narration is the cohesive structure to give all of the scenes some sort of sense. It's really messed up. Production values are somewhat better than the HERCULES films but aside from that it's a real curio.

Remarkably enough director Castellari never knew a final film was completed and only became aware of its existence when he saw it by chance in a video store.

2 comments:

orsh549 said...

This movie didn't make any sense to me whatsoever. I had the DVD of this, but now it lies in some garbage dump in southern PA. I would rank this in the top 5 of worse Peplums. Someday we'll have to compare lists. One question who do you think played Sinbad the best??

PEPLUM TV said...

Who was the best Sinbad? Hard to say there were so many

http://peplums.blogspot.com/2012/08/the-too-many-faces-of-sinbad.html