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Author: Ryan Harvey

The Greatest Harryhausen: The Golden Voyage of Sinbad

The Greatest Harryhausen: The Golden Voyage of Sinbad

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golden-voyage-posterThe Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1974)
Directed by Gordon Hessler. Starring John Philip Law, Tom Baker, Caroline Munro, Douglas Wilmer, Martin Shaw, Kurt Christian, Grégoire Aslan, Takis Emmanuel.

“Every voyage has its own flavor.”

Recently on this blog, I wrote about one of the more ignored of Ray Harryhausen’s films, The 3 Worlds of Gulliver. This inspired me to review two other films of his that don’t get enough attention—the underwhelming H. G. Wells adaptation The First Men in the Moon (1964), and the wonderful but financially unsuccessful The Valley of Gwangi (1969)—on my own blog. Now I think I owe the legendary effects animator and fantasy film producer some time with one of his most popular films.

The Golden Voyage of Sinbad is not only one of Harryhausen’s most financially successful movies, but is also, in my Harryhausen-loving fan-obsessed opinion, the greatest piece the special effects maven ever worked on. I think that it’s not only Harryhausen’s best movie, but also one of the finest heroic fantasy films ever made.

Morningside Productions, Harryhausen’s and his producing partner Charles H. Schneer’s company, had experienced a financial disappointment with 1969’s “cowboys ropin’ a dinosaur” adventure The Valley of Gwangi, and the gap between it and The Golden Voyage of Sinbad was the longest yet between their movies. The two men decided to turn the clock back and re-visit the figure who had brought them to prominence in the first place: Sinbad the sailor. The major success of 1958’s The 7th Voyage of Sinbad had allowed them to take the path of colorful fantasy and period science fiction, and the character was one who could have a variety adventures. Harryhausen had done some sketches in 1964 for a new Sinbad story, and now had the opportunity to realize the project. Both those early sketches reached the final film almost unchanged. …

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The Incredible Adventures of Algernon Blackwood

The Incredible Adventures of Algernon Blackwood

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algernon-blackwood-oldIncredible Adventures
Algernon Blackwood (Macmillan & Co., 1914)

Of all the practitioners of the classic “weird tale,” which flourished in the early twentieth century before morphing into the more easily discerned genres of fantasy and horror, none entrances me more than Algernon Blackwood. Looking at the stable of the foundational authors of horror—luminaries like Poe, James, le Fanu, Machen, Lovecraft—it is Blackwood who has the strongest effect on me. Of all his lofty company, he is the one who seems to achieve the most numinous “weird” of all.

Blackwood is often referred to as a “ghost story” writer; indeed, one current in-print volume is titled The Best Ghost Stories of Algernon Blackwood. But true ghosts rarely appear in his fiction. Blackwood liked to dance around the edge of easy classification, and as his work advanced through the 1900s and into the teens, it got even harder to pinpoint. Blackwood’s interest in spiritualism, his love of nature, and his pantheism started to overtake his more standard forays in supernatural terror. His writing turned more toward transcendentalism and away from plot. The most important precursor to this development is his 1911 novel The Centaur, which critic S. T. Joshi describes as Blackwood’s “spiritual autobiography.”

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The “Other” Harryhausen: The 3 Worlds of Gulliver

The “Other” Harryhausen: The 3 Worlds of Gulliver

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3_worlds_of_gulliver_posterThe 3 Worlds of Gulliver (1960)
Directed by Jack Sher. Starring Kerwin Mathews, June Thorburn, Grégoire Aslan, Basil Sydney, Jo Morrow, Sherri Alberoni, Peter Bull.

First there was the Dynamation spectacle of The 7th Voyage of Sinbad. Then there was Mysterious Island. Then the miracle of Jason and the Argonauts, and… wait, I seem to have skipped one. Oh yes, The 3 Worlds of Gulliver, made right after Sinbad. Now how did that one slip away?

Among the “Core Ten” Harryhausen films, the ten color fantasy and period science-fiction pictures he made between 1958 and his retirement in 1981 (all but one produced with Charles H. Schneer), The 3 Worlds of Gulliver gets the least amount of love now. For most of the 1980s, it was probably the unfortunate The Valley of Gwangi that suffered the most neglect, but that was because of its unavailability on video. (The weird name wasn’t helping it either; it certainly wasn’t the filmmakers’ first choice for the title.) Today, The 3 Worlds of Gulliver has turned into something of “the other movie” in the list of Harryhausen classics, even though it came out in 1960 fresh after the smash global success of The 7th Voyage Sinbad and featured that movie’s star, Kerwin Mathews, and its composer, Bernard Herrmann. In fact, Herrmann’s score is well-loved and appreciated among music fans through multiple re-recordings, but those same music lovers often haven’t watched the movie that inspired the music.

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Thoughts Concerning Scurvy (De Scorbuto)

Thoughts Concerning Scurvy (De Scorbuto)

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I come from a medical family. Of the five members of my immediate nuclear family, I’m the only one who lacks a background or job in medicine or health care. As a writer and historian growing up in a family that now consists of a pathologist, a nurse and lactation expert, a medical student on the cusp of graduation, and an occupational therapist, it was probably inevitable that I developed an interest in disease both in history and fiction. I would never get near the profession of medicine (the general public ought to thank me for this—I’d make a horrible doctor), but the dramatic role of disease in writing has always entranced me.

Among writers, bubonic plague is the leading favorite pestilence. It’s hard to resist the power of an illness that wiped out a third of Europe during the late Middle Ages and has a death toll exceeding two hundred million. The very title “The Black Death” instantly conjures up Hieronymous Bosch grotesques in most people’s minds. It’s a disease with an outstanding pedigree for fantasy and historical writers.

However, I’d like to shine an operating room light on another disease that I think is one of the most useful for a writer. At a cursory glance, it seems like it shouldn’t have any dramatic potential at all: not only is it easily preventable, it’s also easily cured. It isn’t even communicable. But a second glance reveals that this disease is a superb tool for fiction.

The disease is scurvy.

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My Favorite Robert E. Howard story: “Pigeons from Hell”

My Favorite Robert E. Howard story: “Pigeons from Hell”

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pigeon-from-hellWhen other genre-lovers find out I’m a fan of Robert E. Howard, they often ask me what my favorite of his stories is. They probably expect I’ll name one of the Conan yarns, or perhaps a Solomon Kane or Kull story. (Kull is, indeed, my favorite Howard character.) If they already know something of my background in history, they may think I’ll name one of the Crusader stories that appeared in Magic Carpet Magazine.

But instead I say, without hesitation, “Pigeons from Hell.” And, after an inevitable moment of surprise, they always answer back: “Oh, that’s a great story! I had almost forgotten about that one!”

The irony of my love for “Pigeons from Hell” isn’t lost on me: I praise Howard for his foundational contribution to sword-and-sorcery and historical action tales, and yet my personal favorite story he wrote is a contemporary America-set horror story. But “Pigeons from Hell” is quintessentially Robert E. Howard from first word to last; Howard was an author who knew how to transform naturalism into the “weird tale,” and who also took great inspiration from the folklore of his small world of rural central Texas.

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Hercules vs. the Giant Robots

Hercules vs. the Giant Robots

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herculesposter1983Hercules (1983)Last week I reviewed a silly Conan pastiche novel. Today, I offer a sequel of sorts: a review of a very silly Hercules movie. The 1983 Hercules, sporting former mean, green, grunting machine Lou “Hulk” Ferrigno and the best special effects the Italian film industry can sort of buy, is one of the grandly awful pieces of entertaining oddness ever to come from a Roman studio. And Rome has given us some odd stuff. Aside from sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system, and public health, of course.

I encountered this Hercules when I was eleven years old. I adored Greek mythology since I was in second grade and was well-read in the topic, for which I can thank Clash of the Titans for the initial push. One Friday night, a friend and I watched Hercules when it premiered on cable. It sounded like a sure-winner for kids still not old enough to go out on weekend nights: Greek mythology, monsters, and that guy who played the Hulk. (Plus girls in skimpy outfits, but at eleven we weren’t willing to admit that was already a motivation.)

I’m not certain what I expected from Hercules back then, but it certainly wasn’t what I ended up getting. I had this strange illusion, which only an eleven-year-old can sustain, that a mystical law forced filmmakers to adhere to their source material as closely as they could. When I saw this oddball Hercules film on television, my young boy’s illusions died forever. Which is safer for my sanity, although I still feel the pains from the 1998 Roland Emmerich Godzilla and Jan de Bont’s 1999 demolishing of The Haunting [of Hill House]. The 1983 Hercules has only the most tenuous connection to Greek mythology, and appears like a mishmash of tiny bits and pieces of Hellenic legendary in a goopy stew of trendy science-fiction clichés from the SF-explosion of the late-‘70s. Welcome to Battlestar Hercules. Or perhaps Krull is the most appropriate comparison.

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Pastiches ‘R’ Us: Conan the Free Lance

Pastiches ‘R’ Us: Conan the Free Lance

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conan-free-lanceConan the Free Lance

Steve Perry (Tor, 1990)

Let’s see … I’ve reviewed a Conan pastiche novel each from Leonard Carpenter and John Maddox Roberts. So next up, Steve Perry.

If there’s one word I would used to describe Steve Perry’s Conan novels, it’s goofy. Perry has a reputation among Conan fandom for overkill and general silliness. He apparently loves high fantasy. Perhaps he loves it too much. His Conan books burst at the seams with fantastic monsters, strange races, and weird magic … and not in an ideal way. Although Perry has an enormous imagination, it gets away from him and creates a world that has almost no resemblance to Robert E. Howard’s Hyborian Age. It’s not so much that these elements are silly, but that they seem so when placed in Howard’s setting. They would work fine in the Star Wars universe — and Perry has written some good Star Wars novels to prove it; I’ll admit I enjoyed his Shadows of the Empire, even if LucasFilm tried shoving it down my throat first. But in the grittier, more-historically centered Hyborian Age, where magic is rare and sinister, Perry’s style feels like someone trying to write a Forbidden Realms novel who accidentally wandered into Robert E. Howard-land.

Conan the Free Lance (yes, two words, not one, according to the actual title page — Conan isn’t picking up occasional assignments for the New Yorker) won’t change anyone’s mind about Perry’s style. The story occurs in an overt wonderland akin to high fantasy. Its villain and the instigator of our plot, Dimma the Mist Mage, lives in fortress on a bed of sargasso weeds in a Karpash Mountains lake. He needs a talisman to restore his body to its solid form, and so he sends his shapeshifting servants the selkies to fetch it from the Tree Folk. Conan, while on his way to Shadizar, rescues Cheen, a medicine woman of the Tree Folk, from the draconian hunting beasts of the reptilian-descended Pili. (Okay, we already have far too many demi-human races running around.) Conan helps the Tree Folk repulse the selkie attack, but the selkie leader Kleg escapes with the talisman—the ‘Seed’ which the Tree Folk need to make their tree homes grow. He also kidnaps Cheen’s young brother, Hok. Conan joins the Tree Folk in the quest to save Hok and recapture the Seed.

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More Disturbing Library Trends

More Disturbing Library Trends

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It seems that the deterioration of the American public library is worse than I had at first feared. At least if I am to use the Beverly Hills Public Library as an example. (Beverly Hills isn’t exactly the best example of any trend in North America, being a bizarre entity that I think J. G. Ballard invented for one of his novels, but in terms of civic decline I think I’m on safe ground using it.)

I recently posted about my discovery that a coffee shop—with fudge included, for some reason known only to “Kelly”—had mysteriously arisen inside the BHPL. I tried to satisfy myself with the knowledge that the library would at least strive to keep the coffee and fudge behind the glass doors of Kelly’s Staining Bean Juice and Contaminating Sugar Sludge, away from the precious volumes of books and helping to keep at bay the armies of paper-munching insects that might like to snack on old copies of Gormenghast.

However, on my last visit to the library, I made some disturbing discoveries. I hadn’t received the full story about the Kelly’s invasion.

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iBrain and from Homer to Twitter

iBrain and from Homer to Twitter

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ibrain_cover_finalLast month I read a psychology book exploring the implications of the digital information age. In iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Human Mind, authors Gary Small and Gigi Vorgan walk the reader through the possibility that the influx of digital communication technology and social networking tools has not only changed the way we behave, but it is also causing our brains to evolve differently. Small and Vorgan discuss the gap between “digital natives” (Generation X on up) and “digital immigrants” (everybody else) and cite psychiatric studies showing behavioral changes that have occurred from a flood of multi-tasking with digital technology and the different parts of the brain that are activated by this technology.

Thankfully, iBrain isn’t an anti-technology screed—you can find plenty of those, and they won’t do one bit of good in halting technology’s march. But the book does fail to follow through on the grand promise of the first half where it shows the tremendous psychological changes that have swept through our society and right into the neurons in our gray-matter. Ultimately, iBrain devolves into a tepid “self-help” book that can only advise that maybe digital natives should turn off the computer and read a book or go outside occasionally so they can also learn social skills. Oh, and if you’re a digital immigrant, maybe you should take some computer classes or ask younger people for help.

Well I could have told you that, and I don’t have an M.D. in psychiatry like Gary Small. It’s a shame that a great premise in book like iBrain has to collapse into humdrum advice that anybody could come up with.

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