SINBAD: THE FIFTH VOYAGE is a cheap retelling of the famous sailor that comes across as a tribute to the effects-filled Ray Harryhausen movies of old. Indeed, the various foes that Sinbad and his crew end up fighting seem to have been animated via good old-fashioned stop motion, just like in the old days, with the addition of some CGI to smooth the edges. It certainly makes for a lot of fun and brings back some of the glory days of the likes of THE 7TH VOYAGE OF SINBAD and JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS.

Unfortunately, the rest of the film is very bad and little above the level of a homemade amateur flick like SAMURAI COP 2: DEADLY VENGEANCE. The whole thing plays out on a green screen with some terrible CGI effects and even worse acting. I didn't mind the lead actor Shahin Sean Soliman, who also wrote and directed, as he's unusually for this type of film an actor of genuinely Persian decent, but the rest is pretty much a waste of time.

I thought this was going to be some great adult/teen adventure film. It is not. It is a kid's film designed for those who are below the PG-13 rating.

Sinbad (Shahin Sean Solimon) has to rescue the love of his life, the princess (Sadie Alexandru) from the White Deev (Said Faraj) who wants her soul. He and his small party must go to a large black sand desert island that is a combination of Mysterious Island, Greek Mythology, and maybe that Dante thing. The CG panning of the island shows magnificent scenery while everything was done on a very flat stage set...I could help think about "Lost in Space."

Half the film consists of flashbacks so we would know how Sinbad got himself a princess. The other half has bad CG/stop-mo animals and horrible kid's type of ham acting. The fighting choreography was a laugh. Could be a future MST project.

Actor/director Shahin (Sean) Solimon is the first Persian-American actor to play Sinbad The Sailor in an American made film, which would be this movie, which now has director's cut and expanded stop-motion VFX and new scenes.

This looks like old claymation mixed with modern desktop special effects, as well as narration by Patrick Stewart, which had to have cost something, you'd think.

How did they get to the fifth voyage of Sinbad? They're counting The 7th Voyage of Sinbad as step one (which would make this the eleventh voyage, right?) and The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger and even Enzo G. Castellari and Luigi Cozzi's Lou Ferrigno-starring Sinbad of the Seven Seas as previous chapters.

Becca didn't grow up watching these movies, so she's not going to like a Sinbad movie as much as me, even if it features the hero battling monsters, vampires and Satan himself.

Do you know how many streaming movies I've watched lately? Becca asked me to shut it off and I told her it only had two minutes left. She angrily grabbed the remote and said, "It says it has more than ten minutes left!" I replied, "Watch. The credits are going to be about ten minutes long or more to pad this all out."

So yeah. This is obviously Solimon's pet project, so who am I to deny him the opportunity to learn how to use After Effects and try to make something that shoots for Harryhausen and ends up somewhere around the clay creatures in Night Train to Terror?