SINBAD WEEK: Sinbad and The Caliph of Baghdad (1973)

Today's Sinbad movie is an obscure Italian peplum yarn, totally devoid of magic and monsters I'm sorry to say.

Tucked away in the recesses of Amazon's Prime Video vault, 1973's Sinbad and the Caliph of Baghdad has the titular sailor (Robert Malcolm) returning to Baghdad after years of exile, only to find his foster mother has died and all their family property seized by the state.

Falling in with two of the most annoying "comedy relief" characters in cinematic history - Firùz (Luigi Bonos) and Bamàn (Leo Valeriano) - all three are shanghaied to crew a ship that is supposed to deliver the gorgeous Princess Sherazade (Sonia Wilson) to Baghdad for an arranged marriage to the insane caliph (also Robert Malcolm, so you can see where this is going).

Sonia Wilson as Sherazade 

Sinbad, of course, falls madly in love with the princess, but she realises their romance is doomed and dobs him in.

Our hirsute hero and the two comedy stooges are cast adrift in a row boat and end up marooned on a lifeless island, populated only by other shipwrecks.

However, they manage to salvage a hot air balloon, and a cargo of explosives, and head back to the ship they were thrown off of.

By the time they arrive, and take it over with their cache of bombs, Sherazade has already left.

Sinbad and his "pals" head back to the city with the wealth they looted from the ship, and start living the high life, and it's at this point that a couple of muckity-mucks from the palace spot Sinbad and suddenly realise that, without his beard, he is the spitting image of the caliph that they have been thinking of overthrowing.

The mad caliph has been making sport of murdering dancers from his harem, is instigating plans to publicly impale criminals (à la Vlad The Impaler and Cannibal Holocaust), and is generally blowing the palace's budget as he goes full Caligula.

So naturally, factions in the court are seeking to depose him.

Besides being strangely obsessed with male grooming, Sinbad and the Caliph of Baghdad has a pretty mundane plot - bolstered only by the all-too infrequent appearances of the lovely Sherazade in a variety of skimpy outfits.

Matters aren't helped by the fact that the actors have been dubbed with voices that have near-impenetrably thick accents, making much of the dialogue incomprehensible.

That said, I don't think there are any deep sub-plots or complex, Machiavellian political machinations in play here.

Although there's a sort of mystery involving a torn scroll as well as a booby-trapped treasure chest (protected by a concealed watery pit trap), there's nothing really here that could inspire gamers looking to add some Arabian Nights magic to their campaigns.

The introduction of the hot air balloon is an interesting gimmick, I guess, so it's a bit unfortunate that on at least one occasion you can see clearly see the rope above the balloon holding it up (presumably from a giant crane).

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.