Clash of the Titans
January 2003 Reviewed by: Rad Bennett Format: DVD	(all ratings out of 5): Overall Enjoyment Picture Quality Packaged Extras Sound Quality

Before digital effects, there were optical effects, models, and stop-motion animation. The seer of this sort of movie magic was Ray Harryhausen. He made stop-motion animation into an art. He teamed with producer Charles H. Schneer, and the two together produced movies that still thrill audiences, films like The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad and Jason and the Argonauts. Clash of the Titans was their last collaboration and departed from the others in several significant ways. One was the casting. Previous Harryhausen-Schneer films had cast lesser-known actors to great effect, but Clash used big names, one of the biggest of all, the ailing Sir Laurence Olivier, as no less than Zeus, chief god. Some may argue that the instantly recognizable faces were distracting, but I find it fun to see them cast in roles so like their usual onscreen personalities, such as Ursula Andress playing Venus, the Goddess of Love.

The story, as one might have guessed by now, involves ancient mythology and is a fancifully fleshed out story of Perseus, Andromeda, and their trials and tribulations. The action shifts from that on earth to the manipulations on Mount Olympus, where the gods control human actions by inflicting pleasure or pain on little clay statues. If something happens to a statue, it happens to the person it represents -- rather like voodoo in the clouds. The story is more episodic than usual for this sort of movie, and there is the other departure: this is a long movie. Most of the others came in around an hour and a half; this one goes on for another half-hour.

The movie is more memorable for its moments than for itself as a whole. Harryhausen created some of his most memorable stop-motion creatures for this film. There’s the ultimate bad guy, the Kraken, last of the Titans, who reminds one of the Creature from the Black Lagoon grown to 30 stories high with a bad attitude. Then there’s Pegasus, the winged horse, and Medusa, who Harryhausen makes part snake, part woman, and all dangerous and scary. The human actors might not linger in memory but no one is going to forget the Harryhausen marvels.

The Warner widescreen transfer is good, but does not seem to be a newly minted digital master. It has some grain, and is not quite as sharp as we have come to expect with the DVD format. The colors, on the other hand, are vibrant and true. Music was always a big part of a Harryhausen-Schneer movie. Bernard Herrmann scored several, and Miklos Rosza wrote the score for The Golden Voyage of Sinbad. Leonard Rosenthal was the composer for this movie, and his soaring score is a real masterpiece. It is well reproduced on the DVD soundtrack. There are some extras, interviews with Harryhausen, and a "Map of Myths and Monsters." Click on the image of one and you can hear Harryhausen talking about its creation. In a possible bit of overkill, but making the disc imminently useful just about everywhere, there are subtitles in eight different languages!

Almost all of the Harryhausen-Schneer movies are now available on DVD. The rest are on Columbia/TriStar, and almost concurrently with the release of Clash, CTS put out two more from its vaults: Earth Vs. The Flying Saucers (**1/2) and Mysterious Island (***). The former is memorable for the scenes of Washington, DC being destroyed as beams from a sonar gun cause flying saucers to go out of control. As they crash, one slices through the Washington Monument while another crashes into the Capitol. The black-and-white transfer is a bit grainy and dark, but otherwise it's clean and quite viewable.

Mysterious Island has one of the most gripping opening sequences in movies, as a group of Union soldiers escapes a Confederate prison by using a hot-air balloon. With the stormy weather going full blast, Herrmann’s swirling music score, and Harryhausen’s excellent special effects, the scene builds tension and excitement. Unfortunately, the transfer of this color film has lots of grain and seems coarse and not terribly refined. I suspect that both of these movies were done from the masters prepared for the laserdisc releases. These fantasy adventures, which depend so much on how they look for their appeal, are really not set forth properly on these DVDs. Columbia/TriStar’s earlier transfers of Jason and the Argonauts and The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad were much better.

Harryhausen’s work shines through, however. I was struck by how much warmer and immediate his work was compared to the more perfect, yet colder, digital effects of this century. Harryhausen’s images stick with me. Let’s hope someone like Criterion has another go at these two films, producing better transfers. In fact, though Clash of the Titans is an acceptable DVD, all three could stand redoing. What say, fans?

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