Critic Reviews

Horror film director Hessler and special effects man Ray Harryhausen combine brilliantly to trace Sinbad's mystical voyage. The effects aren't simply fascinating for their own sake - they genuinely convey a sense of the magical and otherworldly.

This sequel to the terrific The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, is great fun--with a minimum of plot and a maximum of wonderful Ray Harryhausen special effects.

Miniatures in The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, created by Ray Harryhausen, may appear at first glance to be worlds away from the CGI creatures in The Phantom Menace and Jurassic Park. But it was Harryhausen's work that taught such filmmakers as George Lucas and Steven Spielberg to dream of creating ever-more-perfect fantasy worlds. [22 Feb 2008, p.C2]

Gordon Hessler directed this 1974 British feature, whose main raison d'etre is some first-rate “Dynamation” special effects from Ray Harryhausen, including a ship's figurehead that springs to life and Sinbad crossing swords with a six-armed statue.

Golden Voyage is really just an excuse to show off Harryhausen's commodious bag of tricks.

This Sinbad misses the verve, the exuberant high spirits, of the best of Fairbanks and Flynn, but it's wonderfully good-natured all the same. [16 May 1974, p.109]

Children who revel in clean-cut heroes, villains given to spells and incantations and the kind of special effects that breathe life into mandrake root, ships' figure-heads, centaurs, griffins and statues of Kali (always a deity beloved of evil forces) will probably find it a happy concoction for passing a rainy afternoon.

An Arabian Nightish saga told with some briskness and opulence for the childish eye, yet ultimately falling short of implied promise as an adventure spree.

In the grand pantheon of Sinbad movies, those pleasurable Arabesques of silly beasts, big swords and scantily clad maidens, this lower league Ray Harryhausen stop-motion thriller squeezes between the better Eye Of The Tiger and the worse Seventh Voyage.