Hits and Myths of Old-School Epics

"Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey is now in theaters and receiving largely ecstatic reviews. Critics have called it "a staggering achievement," and fair enough: the film was built around an enormous IMAX shoot and a real commitment to capturing as much as possible in camera rather than leaning on CGI.

"But call me an old man for saying this: for all its scale, the world it builds can feel too polished, too glossy, more museum piece than lived-in ancient world.

"So I went back to seven old-school productions drawn from ancient myth and the sword-and-sandal tradition. They simply don’t make them like they used to, and most modern attempts are barely watchable."

A wonderful collection of classic tales of Ancient Greece on the silver screen (which includes a couple of my Harryhausen favourites), compiled by the ever-reliable Luminism channel.

Jack The Giant Killer (1962)

The Prince Of Witches, Pendragon (Torin Thatcher), and his minions have been expelled from the Duchy Of Cornwall, but he is still craving dominance over the land and so uses a giant to kidnap princess Elaine (Judi Meredith) on her birthday.

His plans are thwarted though by farmer Jack (Kerwin Mathews), who slays the giant and rescues the princess. He is promptly knighted by the king (Dayton Lummis) and charged with the task of ferrying Elaine to a Normandy nunnery where she can be hidden from Pendragon.

Unfortunately, Pendragon learns of this plan from a traitor at court and sends a cadre of witches to ambush Jack's ship in the English Channel. Elaine is spirited away to Pendragon's island fortress and Jack is thrown overboard by the ship's mutinous crew.

He's rescued from the sea by Viking fisherman Sigurd (Barry Kelley), along with the ship's cabin boy Peter (Roger Mobley), and so the three, aided by Sigurd's "imp in a bottle", the leprechaun Diaboltin (Don Beddoe), sail to Pendragon's mysterious island to rescue the princess... little realising that she has already been transformed into a witch by Pendragon's dark arts.

Jack The Giant Killer reunited stars Kerwin Mathew and Torin Thatcher from 1958's The 7th Voyage Of Sinbad with director Nathan H. Juran and producer Edward Small.

However, even though Jack The Giant Killer uses extensive stop-motion claymation for its special effects this is no Ray Harryhausen picture. The monsters, on the whole, are serviceable, but the clay sculpts lack the detail of Harryhausen's superior work.

The script, by Orville H. Hampton and Nathan H. Juran, based on the folk tale of Jack The Giant Killer, puts an interesting spin on witchcraft that I've never seen before: it is akin to a form of demonic possession that can be placed on a person, wiling or unwilling, turning them into a witch.

The film's witches come in two distinct flavours: those who resemble humans (but whose true form is revealed in mirrors) and those who resemble demons, with the latter having a broader range of magical powers.

As is often the case, it's the villains that steal the show and Torin Thatcher is brilliant as the scenery-chewing, pantomime villain Pendragon, who continually mocks the Cornish king as he schemes to usurp the rightful ruler.

Jack The Giant Killer is very much a fairy tale story from simpler times, but makes for excellent family-friendly fare full of magic, monsters and romance.

Little-Known Stop-Motion Monster Movies

Rare VHS oddities. Forgotten fantasy films. Handmade monsters hiding in places you’d never expect.

Today we’re digging into some obscure and little-seen movies that delivered surprisingly great stop-motion creatures, from demonic vultures and clay dinosaurs to cyberpunk war machines and prehistoric monsters.

Thanks to the excellent SirBootis Flicks channel for this selection.

Wrath Of The Titans (2012)

The first thing that needs to be said about Wrath Of The Titans is that, even though far from perfect, it is leagues ahead of the ill-considered Clash Of The Titans remake that spawned it.

There's even a far more respectful cameo from Bubo The Mechanical owl (from the Harryhausen original Clash Of The Titans) that I took as a discrete apology for the horrors of the first movie.

A decade after the events of Clash reluctant hero, single-parent and demigod Perseus (Sam Worthington) is called out of retirement for one last job - his father Zeus (Liam Neeson) - has been captured by an alliance of Hades (Ralph Fiennes) and Ares (Edgar Ramirez).

They have struck a deal with  Kronos (mightiest of the imprisoned Titans and father of Zeus and Hades) to hold onto their power during the twilight of the gods.

Perseus teams up with Queen Andromeda (Rosamund Pike) and the rogue Agenor (Toby Kebbel), who happens to be the son of Poseidon, and embarks on a quest to free his imprisoned father.

This involves our heroes tracking down Hephaestus (Bill Nighy) - even though Andromeda, a Grecian Queen has no idea who Hephaestus is (!) - on a mysterious island overrun by Cyclops.

Bill Nighy turns in a totally bonkers performance as the weaponsmith of the gods, seemingly channelling Monty Python, but he directs the party of adventurers to the entrance to the labyrinth that leads to Tartarus, where Zeus is being held.

Yes, our heroes are going on a dungeon crawl!

Even though, ultimately, the labyrinth is a bit of a red herring (as everyone makes it through by luck and chance in the end anyway), it's still very impressive visually and certainly inspirational for those gamers who like their underworlds' mythic.

The gods of Wrath Of The Titans are treated like comic book superheroes (with some of the fight sequences reminiscent of big screen Marvel or DC outings), and there's a solid message buried in there that mankind can get on just as well without "gods", the labyrinth (as I've said) looks incredible and some of the monsters are very well realised (the Cyclops are particularly strong, even if the random four-armed, two-headed, demon-things that precede Kronos in the final battle are a bit blah).

There's a bizarre romance that's pretty much on a par with Faramir and Eowyn in Peter Jackson's Lord Of The Rings and a mild case of cheese involving Perseus' son Helius (John Bell) - but the main thing we come to a film like this for is monsters and fighting and there it delivers.

As eye-candy, Wrath Of The Titans is a treat - and it won't make your brain ache like Clash Of The Titans.

While the story may have very little basis in mythology (it's basically generic fantasy fare, but there's nothing wrong with that) this is a decent rainy afternoon movie for those who like this kind of B-movie.

Clash Of The Titans (2010)

The 1980's original of Clash Of The Titans may not have been one of the strongest of Ray Harryhausen's stop-motion sword-and-sandal epics, but at least it had charm and excitement going for it.

And the definitive depiction of Medusa!

The 2010 remake is sadly lacking in all of those areas, with the reworked storyline transforming a classic hero's journey into a collection of random happenstance with no overriding logic.

Sticking to the same basic plot - Perseus has to kill the Medusa and use her head to petrify the unstoppable kraken before it eats the princess and trashes the city - this version manages to hit a few key beats (e.g. the Pegasus, the Stygian witches and Medusa), but then throws out so much from the original that worked well (Calibos, for instance, is reduced to just another monster to be slain).

Even ignoring the blatant jibe at the original - when Perseus is told to discard Bubo the clockwork owl - Clash Of The Titans tries too hard to "be different" and ends up being drab and unengaging.

As Perseus, Sam Worthington again demonstrates the total lack of charisma he showed in Avatar and while much of the CGI is quite impressive for its time, there seems little attempt at maintaining an Ancient Greek verisimilitude (who, for instance, were the strange rock creatures riding the giant scorpions and why did one join Perseus' group for no apparent reason?).

With the filmmakers almost total disregard - bordering on contempt - for the source material, it would have only taken a bit of a nudge further and this could easily have become just another Lord Of The Rings-aping fantasy film, devoid of any Ancient Grecian trappings.

"Second To The Right, And Straight On Till Morning"

I have long dreamed of a fantastical, island-hopping roleplaying game "project", akin to the beloved Ray Harryhausen sword-and-sorcery movies of my youth filtered through something akin to old school Dungeons & Dragons.

The exact flavour remains undecided, but I already have a campaign format in mind.

I want to emulate the very first campaign that Gublin and I played back in the late '70s: a picaresque nautical yarn in the style of Sinbad The Sailor, The Odyssey, Jason & The Argonauts or even Clark Ashton Smith's The Voyage of King Euvoran, with the player-characters as the crew of an exploratory ship sailing from mysterious island to mysterious island.

I've long said my campaigning Holy Grail is to run an open-ended 'forever campaign' that captures the spirit of the first generation of roleplaying campaigns (e.g. Gary Gygax's Greyhawk, Dave Arneson's Blackmoor, and my personal favourite: Dave Hargrave's Arduin).

Maybe this is the adventure that will steer me in that direction.

Top Ten Ray Harryhausen Creations

In the week that marked the anniversary of his passing in 2013, what better time to celebrate the creations of the godfather of stop-motion: Ray Harryhausen.

SINBAD WEEK: Sinbad of The Seven Seas (1989)

As the original 1947 Sinbad The Sailor movie proved, you can make an excellent Sinbad film without Harryhausen effects as long as you have a great cast and script - Sinbad Of The Seven Seas has none of these.

I guess my spidey-sense should have been tingling by the mere sight of Lou 'Incredible Hulk' Ferrigno grinning on the cover of the DVD case.

And if not then, by the fact that the film opens with a contemporary framing device of an annoying  mother (Daria Nicolodi) reading her equally annoying daughter (Giada Cozzi), Edgar Allan Poe's The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade (although Poe's story bears no similarity to this sorry affair).

So far, so Princess Bride. But the narration continues, even as the scene shifts to Sinbad and his multi-racial crew, and then it continues some more and it pretty much never stops throughout the whole movie!

And if that wasn't bad enough, all the dialogue by the main characters has been rerecorded and dubbed over - quite badly and quite obviously.

Not that the actors are that good anyway, nor do they have quality material to work with and little apparent direction from Enzo Castellari, master of the spaghetti western and director of the original Inglorious Bastards.

From start to finish, Sinbad Of The Seven Seas is a dreadful script performed by dreadful actors, with the only comparison I can make being the distinctly British tradition of pantomime. And like pantomime, unless you are under six, Sinbad The Sailor is - in equal parts - likely to bore you to distraction and have you laughing out loud at its awfulness.

The only performer to come out of this with any kudos is John Steiner as villainous vizier Jaffar, clearly the only one in on the joke, who is gloriously over-the-top and arch, switching between delightful smugness and being his own worse enemy. Not only does he tell Sinbad where he has hidden the magic crystals that Sinbad must track down but then, having summoned a magical storm to batter Sinbad's ship, he runs it ashore on one of the islands where some of the crystals are hidden!

Inexplicably Sinbad is joined on his adventures by a Viking (Ennio Girolami), a Chinese soldier of fortune called Samurai (!!!) (Hal Yamanouchi), effete prince Ali (Roland Wybenga) - who is to marry the caliph of Basra's cute daughter, Alina (Alessandra Martines) - as well as a bald chef and a cowardly dwarf called Poochie (Cork Hubbert).

While chasing after the magic jewels that Jaffar has scattered - like a pointless video game - they encounter a number of ludicrous obstacles, most of which are overcome by very bad fight sequences (Sinbad has an odd habit of throwing his sword away and simply wrestling whatever he is facing).

The only scenario that shows a bit of initiative is Sinbad's seduction by Amazon Queen Farida (Melonee Rodgers) and her ultimate comeuppance.

I can't even bring myself to discuss the surreal cameo by bodybuilder Teagan Clive as Jaffar's co-conspirator, Soukra, the S&M dominatrix witch, except to say, like the rest of the film, it will leave you perplexed, bemused and possibly in need of counselling.

Unless you are in a particularly masochistic mood, really love ultra-low budget bad movies or are aged under six, Sinbad Of The Seven Seas is best steered clear of.

Cult 1980's Fantasy Worth Watching (or Rewatching)

For some reason, fantasy movies feel especially good to revisit in winter, so in this video I decided to focus on the genre, specifically the 1980s.

You won’t find obvious picks like Krull, Excalibur, or Conan the Barbarian here, not because they don’t belong, but because you already know them well. Instead, this list makes room for slightly less popular titles.

Some proper classics here, including my boy, the pioneering Hawk The Slayer and his sleazy cousin Deathstalker, as well as Beastmaster and a wonderful Ray Harryhausen epic in the shape of Clash of The Titans (his Medusa is the definitive Medusa for me!).

Plenty of old school Dungeons & Dragons inspiration to be found in this lot as well.

Eclectic and Beautiful Fantasy Movies From The 1970s

"The Golden Age of Sci-Fi/Fantasy is 14"

In an old article on his blog about a youthful passion for the Dragonlance novels, Timothy S Brannan shared the wise saying: "The Golden Age of Sci-Fi/Fantasy is 14."

And this is so true.

The things we discover at that age stay with us.

For me, this would be around 1980... the year Hawk The Slayer came out.

I've written often of my love for this most Dungeons & Dragons of all fantasy movies (and probably will continue to do so).

At the dawn of the '80s, I was already engrossed in the stop-motion worlds of Ray Harryhausen fantasy movies (his last, Clash of The Titans, would come out in 1981), and this was also the era of the original Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back (which came out in 1980).

I was reading mainly sci-fi (Hitchhikers Guide to The Galaxy, Stainless Steel Rat etc), if I recall correctly (inspired by the galaxy far, far away), but my young gaming hobby had propelled me to the works of Fritz Leiber.

His Fafhrd and The Grey Mouser stories would come to influence my Dungeons & Dragons adventures as much as Harryhausen's Sinbad at that time.

I was always a player - rather than a Dungeon Master - in my early years, so was interested in character ideas, rather than grander plots and world-building (not that I didn't appreciate them at that time, but they just weren't as useful from a gaming perspective).

I had yet to stumble upon the stack of New Teen Titans in a second-hand book store in Tunbridge Wells and become a fully-fledged comic book collector, but I still dabbled in that medium.

2000AD was my publication of choice at that age.

And, of course, all these things still hold sway over me and continue to influence my gaming and broader hobby interests.

I don't think I realised, until just now, quite how important the art we discover at that particular age is in shaping the sort of person we grow into in our adult life and our hobbies, passions, and interests.

Biblical Epics

Every now and again in my non-stop viewing calendar I like to take a moment to return to the big screen epics of my youth, the grandiose Bible stories that were a staple of vintage cinema.

In those benighted, pre-VHS days, when there were only three TV channels available in the UK, I would get my large-scale fantasy fix from 1950's movies like The Ten Commandments (which I'm watching at the moment), Ben-Hur, The Robe, Quo Vadis etc which were played, it seemed, pretty much on rotation at the weekends.

I have an embarrassing childhood memory of a very young me (possibly five or six) standing in the garden with a large stick - doubling as a staff - pretending to be Moses at the top of my lungs!

Never once did I think these were anything more than pseudohistorical, sword-and-sandal, fantasy stories but there was something there that piqued my young imagination.

In parallel with my unwavering love of Ray Harryhausen films and coupled with Kirk Douglas in The Vikings and, of course, Spartacus, these movies were already shaping my "swords-and-???" tastes even before I was introduced to the works of JRR Tolkien and then Dungeons & Dragons. 

Dungeons & Dragons provided me with a way to quantify ("stat up") the things I was seeing in these movies and hearing at school during our compulsory "religious education" (which meant trying to force Christianity onto us, rather than teaching us about all the religions of the world).

At prep school, I recall excitedly going through the hymn book we were given, hunting for potential magic items: "Bring me my bow of burning gold, bring me my arrows of desire!"

In recent times, harkening back to this mini-obsession of my tween and pre-tween years, I even sought out (I think from Noble Knight Games in the  States eventually, when it didn't cost an arm and a leg to ship something across The Atlantic), the Green Ronin d20 supplement Testament, for running games in the Old Testament era.

No, it doesn't have stats for God (unlike the Fantasy Wargaming book, by the late Bruce Galloway, published in the early 1980s, which has stats for both God and the Virgin Mary) but it does go into a lot of historical detail about life and beliefs in that ancient era.

The most recent "Biblical Epic" of the peplum variety that I've seen was 2018's Samson, a pretty decent retelling of one of the few Bible stories that ever held my interest.

Although they seem to be few and far between these days, I always keep half-an-eye out for any competent "Biblical Epics" that skirt the edges of my geeky radar.

The Giant Gila Monster & The Killer Shrews (1959)

When a couple of courting teenagers disappear from a small, isolated Texas town, their parents - and the local sheriff (Fred Graham) - fear they have eloped.

But this is just the start of a wave of disappearances, many connected to road traffic accidents on the lonely roads that traverse the unexplored woodland that surrounds the town.

The father of the missing boy, wicked mine owner Mr Wheeler (Bob Thompson), puts pressure on the sheriff to blame the disappearances on Chase Winstead (Don Sullivan), ace hot-rod mechanic and crooner, de facto "leader" of the local youth and clearly the smartest teenager in the county.

The sheriff isn't having any of it, because he relies on Chase to keep the other youngsters on the straight and narrow and he knows he's a good kid who cares for his widowed mother (Gay McLendon) and disabled younger sister, Missy (Janice Stone).

Eventually, the town drunk Old Man Harris (Shug Fisher) spots an enormous gila monster - the size of a bus - when it derails a passenger train, and the sheriff finally has something to work with.

The titular Giant Gila Monster

Meanwhile, Chase and his friends have organised a "platter party" (dance night) at a local hall, hosted by celebrity DJ, Horatio Alger 'Steamroller' Smith (Ken Knox), who owes Chase a favour.

Not only is Chase revealed to the audience as having just cut a record, but he also gets to sing a song - which he'd previously sung to his sister - but, thankfully, that's the moment the gila monster decides to attack the barn dance.

The sheriff drives the beast away with his rifle, but it's up to Chase to deliver the well-foreshadowed coup de grâce on the oversized reptile.

The Giant Gila Monster: Special Edition was the first Blu-Ray release from new film  restoration, preservation and distribution company, Film Masters.

The creature feature hits stores Stateside in September 2023 as the headliner in a Blu-Ray double-bill with The Killer Shrews. 

Both films are from 1959, stalwarts of the drive-in era of no-budget shlock productions, cranked out for a very specific demographic.

Despite the often laughably poor acting and occasionally ropy script from director Ray Kellogg and co-writer Jay Simms, there is a convincing, 1950's sense of community pervading this 74-minute B-movie.

And it's this verisimilitude that comes closest to saving the picture because, in all honesty, until the closing moments, when townsfolk get to finally see their mysterious nemesis, The Giant Gila Monster is a whole heap of nothing.

Sure, things happen and Chase and the sheriff get to run around a bit but because they are so clueless as to what is really going on there's no real sense of jeopardy.

Random musical interludes from Chase, as well as nuggets of backstory coldly calculated to tug at your heartstrings, make the movie a quiet strange viewing experience, as more time is spent developing the potential victims than actually justifying what is happening with the giant monster.

The suggestion from the opening spiel is that it has grown large due to its lack of contact with any real threats in its isolated habitat, so why has the giant gila monster chosen now to start eating humans?

As far as I could tell no reason was given, although I like to think it was somehow tied to Wheeler's dodgy mining practices.

While the audience has sight of the monster from the get-go - a real life lizard dropped into miniature model sets - there is no actual interaction with it until the final act, and it's only then that we can truly get an idea of its supposed gigantic size and the threat it poses to the community.

Much of the action takes place at night, but thanks to this new restoration from 35mm archival materials (and Blu-Ray presentation), the contrast is crisp enough that while we still know it's meant to be night time we can actually see what's going on.

This new release of The Giant Gila Monster: Special Edition is definitely a film that connoisseurs of vintage "so bad it's good" monster movies need to add to their collection.

However, it's not really one for the casual viewer as you need to cut the film an awful lot of slack to really enjoy it.

As well as a trailer and commentary track, the Blu-Ray disc of The Giant Gila Monster includes an audio, archival, interview with the late Don Sullivan aka Chase Winstead.

"I'm in hot pursuit of them Killer Shrews"

Ironically the 'bonus feature' in the two-disc set, The Killer Shrews, is actually the superior film (which, of course, isn't saying much).

Captain Thorne Sherman (James Best) and his engineer, 'Rook' Griswold (Judge Henry Dupree), just manage to outrun a hurricane in their boat and make it to the isolated island where they have to drop off supplies.

There they discover a small scientific community, led by Swedish geneticist Dr Marlowe Craigis (Baruch Lumet) and his daughter, zoologist Ann Craigis (Ingrid Goude), preparing for a siege rather than just bad weather.

The handful of scientists and their assistants are living in fear of the results of an experiment run wild: giant shrews (actually dogs in ratty costumes) devouring all the wildlife. But now they've run out of other animals to eat and are turning on the small human population.

With the double threat of both a major weather event and mutant animals, The Killer Shrews is what old school Doctor Who fans would term a classic "base under siege" scenario.

There is genuine claustrophobic tension here as the sea captain tries to organise the defence of the island's adobe stockade against the mutant monsters.

Another masterpiece from the team of writer Jay Simms and director Ray Kellogg, Killer Shrews is a more focussed and coherent horror yarn than The Giant Gila Monster. 

While the shrews themselves are very obviously a combination of glove puppets (for close-ups) and 'disguised' canines (for long shots) there is an undeniable charm about this ultra-low budget approach to creating a swarm of killer monsters.

Even the justification for making the creatures even deadlier, by turning their bite's poisonous, is a clever little idea than works within the logic of the story. 

Coming in at barely over an hour's running time, there's a rugged, pulpy quality to The Killer Shrews, served up with some quality acting from the permanently drunk bad guy Jerry Farrell (Gunsmoke star Ken Curtis) and our square-jawed lead played by the future Sheriff Rosco P Coltrane of Dukes of Hazzard fame.

This disc includes a film commentary track, original radio spots for both movies, and an informative quarter-of-an-hour documentary on the career of Ray Kellogg.

He was a contemporary of Ray Harryhausen who took effects in a different (cheaper) direction as well as working on many big budget movies, including directing John Wayne's The Green Berets, and acting as second unit director on Cleopatra and Adam West's Batman: The Movie.

Also packaged with the films is a 24-page booklet featuring essays on the Texas radio pioneer and films' producer, Gordon McLendon (who appears in The Killer Shrews as absent-minded scientist Dr Radford Baines), and a critical dissection of Killer Shrews by professor and film scholar Jason A Ney.