Critical Reception
The film was released the same summer as Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, and suffered in comparison to that science fiction epic.
Reviewer Lawrence Van Gelder, writing for New York Times, called the acting "rudimentary", but found the movie enjoyable: "...this latest Sinbad adventure maintains the innocent and atavistic juvenile charm of the others in the series." Reviewer Lorna Sutton said the film was "pure escapist entertainment which doesn't require serious analysis or criticism." She found the film enjoyable, despite its flaws. "The plot is familiar, the characters are predictable and dialogue is trite. But the action and the special effects provide for a fast-paced two hours of entertainment."
Five years after its release, an anonymous reviewer for the Ottawa Citizen described the movie as a "bad umpteenth entry" in the series, and slowly paced. But Linda Gross in the Los Angeles Times was kinder, declaring it "a fantasy laced with nostalgia and corn".
Some modern reviewers find the stop-motion work lackluster compared to previous Harryhausen films. Harryhausen biographer Roy P. Webber found the ghouls highly derivative of the skeleton warriors from Jason and the Argonauts, with the heads strongly reminiscent of the Selenites from Harryhausen's 1964 effort, First Men in the Moon. He also found the Minoton and the giant wasp to be lacking in character and so ancillary to the plot as to be dismissed. Harryhausen later admitted that the picture was too rushed, which led to many characterization problems in the animation.
Other cinematic effects in the film have also been criticized. Webber, for example, notes that the traveling mattes used in the film to include various filmed elements are very poorly done, and the special effects used to show Zenobia transforming into a seagull are "so bad that it is truly laughable."
However, some aspects of the film have received enduring praise. Webber notes that the baboon animation was so good that many people were fooled into believing a real animal had been used. The battle between the Troglodyte and sabre-tooth cat is much better choreographed than the battle between the centaur and the griffin in The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, and much more dramatic (with the cat actually raking with its claws and biting with its teeth, leaving deep wounds on its opponent).
Read more about this topic: Sinbad And The Eye Of The Tiger
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