Starring Basil Rathbone, Estelle Winwood, Gary Lockwood, Anne Helm, Liam Sullivan
Directed by Bert I. Gordon
(actor & director credits courtesy IMDB.com)
A young man raised by a kindly witch uses her magic gifts to try to rescue a princess held prisoner by an evil sorcerer.
Bert I. Gordon, the filmmaker who created his own special effects for numerous movies from the 1950s and onward, hasn't always gotten favorable reviews for his work, but his efforts at a fantasy film here aren't really too bad. Taking us back to a setting in the time of knights and dragons and witches and the like, he has his brave would-be knight (Lockwood), with magical help from Winwood, take on an ogre, a deadly swamp, and a rocky prison, among other perils, before a final confrontation with evil magician Rathbone and his fearsome two-headed dragon. The dragon in particular is probably the most impressive creation, breathing real fire through its nostrils. Obviously aimed at children, and hard to criticize on that level, the storybook atmosphere benefits from Paul Vogel's bright color photography and the rousing marches in Richard Markowitz's musical score. That's not to say the film doesn't have its problems with plenty of logic holes in the screenplay and some weak attempts at humor. Rathbone, although he's professional as ever, clearly wouldn't have chosen this role given access to more prestigious productions. When he heard I was watching this, film historian Troy Howarth explained that the actor took on a number of films he thought beneath him in order to pay for his wife's extravagances. Also in the cast of interest is Winwood, who took on similar roles on the TV series Bewitched and Batman later in the 1960s, as well as Maila Nurmi, the attractive horror hostess Vampira, who is hidden behind a hideous makeup.
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