Writers: Andrew Birkin, AJ Carothers
Composer: John Cameron
Starring: Roddy McDowall, Kabir Bedi, Frank Finlay, Marina Vlady, Pavla Ustinov, Daniel Emilfork, Ian Holm, Terence Stamp, Peter Ustinov, Marina Sirtis
More info: IMDb
Tagline: Ride the Magic Carpet into an Arabian Nights wonder-world, re-created in the splendor of magik-motion!
Plot: A resourceful thief helps a handsome Prince fight an evil wizard, and win the hand of a beautiful Princess.
My rating: 4/10
Will I watch it again? No.
This is oh so dreadfully boring. The effects are what you'd expect for late 70s TV and they don't hold up. It's not their fault, I know, but it's hard to watch. The cast puts in a good effort but the pacing kills it. It's an exercise in patience at an hour and forty-two minutes in length. It feels more than twice that. The film music nerd that I am, Cameron's score was hard on my ears. The main theme is so generic that it sounds like it was written by a novice. To make matters worse, it's repeated ad nauseam whenever there's a need for a heroic action cue. I couldn't even recommend this to fans of McDowell and Ustinov (both of which I'm a big fan of and the only reason I watched this). Oddly, co-writer Birkin went on to write some great stuff like THE NAME OF THE ROSE (1986), THE MESSENGER: THE STORY OF JOAN OF ARC (1999) and PERFUME: THE STORY OF A MURDERER (2006).
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