Reviewed by

Christopher Armstead

I was thinking that the proprietors of my favorite movie studio, The Asylum, had just turned the corner. The last few movies I’d seen, ‘Mega Fault’, ‘6-Guns’, ‘100 Feet’ ‘Sherlock Holmes’ and ‘Mega Piranha’… Oh the joy that is ‘Mega Piranha’… were a sampling of flicks that ranged from not very good to pretty damn good with not a single one of them being death inducing. The days of ‘Alien vs. Hunter’ and ‘Supercroc’ are gone! Or so I thought. Then along comes this movie, ‘The 7 Adventures of Sinbad’ which is turrrible. Just turrrible. It’s not ‘Alien vs. Hunter’ terrible, but it is ‘King of the Lost World’ terrible… which, you know, is terrible.

While this movie might be awful it is nonetheless topical. Observe as a team of what we can only imagine to be Somalian Pirates descend upon an oil tanker filled with hundreds of thousands of tons of crude. A sea monster grabs this tanker and drops it down to the bottom sea and if this tanker erupts the world will never be the same. Somalian pirates… totally relevant. A big company pumping oil into the oceans? While the filmmakers had no idea that British Petroleum would be doing just that when they made this movie, this is exactly what BP is doing as it tries to kill us all.

Before the sea monster snatched this tanker we get to meet big time industrialist Adrian Sinbad (Patrick Muldoon) on his way to negotiate with these pirates when his helicopter goes down in the middle of the sea. Next time we see Adrian he is waking up on an island. You may be curious how Adrian, or the other people in the copter or on the tanker, found their way from the middle of the sea to an island but please don’t ask because an answer will not be forthcoming. This is the general theme of this film by the way.

Adrian isn’t on this island long when he is attacked by a Giant Crab that bogarts his briefcase where he had ten million in ransom money. Why this Giant Crab stole my man’s loot is beyond me but somewhere a Giant Crab is having a helluva party. Soon

after that Adrian and a few survivors meet the ultra lean and mean native named Loa (Sarah Desage) who shows Adrian some hieroglyphics, which were obviously made by three year-olds with dull crayons, about how he has something to do with the end of man unless he accomplishes a certain number of tasks. I believe this is where the seven adventures come in to play.

Back home Adrian’s company is being taken over by the evil Simon Magnusson (Bo Svenson), not that any of this matters since the world is coming to an end via earthquake and sea tornadoes due to the tanker that’s at the bottom of the sea. Now I’m not sure I got all of this but it seems the sea monsters and stuff are all upset and are going destroy the planet because of the oil that will be released from the tanker that’s at the bottom of the sea but dang, they’re the one’s that put it there. That’s kind of a dick move. That’s like me getting pissed off at you for having a black eye after I punched you in the face.

So Adrian and his Victoria’s Secret Model sidekick have to find a way to raise this tanker before the earth is destroyed. I think.

Not everything was terrible in the movie. Like when our crew got dropped off in the nest of the flying raptors and the one guy, for whatever reason, felt the burning desire to look deep inside the nest despite his friends telling him not to. That was funny when he got eaten. Or the other guy who did the same thing descending into a cave despite everybody telling him not to do it, and he got eaten by the goofy cyclops. Then there were the naked lady demons who zombified you when you looked into their eyes. Guess what, it wouldn’t have worked on me because it would’ve been a while before my eyes made it up to their eyes. I’m just saying.

Sure the special effects are sub par and the acting is suspect with Patrick Muldoon making Patrick Wayne look like the second coming of Sir Lawrence of Olivier but we don’t mind any of that. If I could’ve gotten a story that just made a little bit of sense, had a little clarity, and played fair on occasion I would’ve been more than happy with my bad movie. Sinbad had to fight Satan in a cavern (worst Satan ever) and gave the super model instructions to blow it up if there was trouble. She blows it up with him inside closing off the cavern, she thinks he’s dead, he shows up thirty seconds later. What happened? He would say "I escaped." Fool, I can see that. HOW did you escape is what we want know. There’s almost no explanation for anything that happens in this movie. Folks appear on islands after drowning, folks appear on boat decks after spending nights in shark infested waters, folks suffocate to death only to appear in the next scene riding speed boats, people get turned into silver goo though I don’t how that worked either. I really liked how the super model native girl started the movie with a thee-word vocabulary but after a little practice ended the movie sounding like a visiting Cambridge Professor and was piloting billion dollar sea crafts. Need a co-pilot for an experimental vehicle to save the world? Always opt for the super model raised by wolves who couldn’t speak English two days ago. Success is guaranteed.

I admire the ambition, I really do, but maybe if our filmmakers could’ve scaled back the bad CGI just a tiny bit and inserted a little more clarity this movie might’ve been a little easier to sit through. Still wondering what the hell that crab is doing with that loot though.