THE FABULOUS WORLD OF JULES VERNE

Prisoner: Lubor Tokos

THE FABULOUS WORLD OF JULES VERNE (aka The Deadly Invention/Vynalez zkazy/1958). Director: Karel Zeman.

In the late 18th century Simon Hart (Lubor Tokos), an assistant to Professor Roch (Arnost Navratil), is kidnapped along with his employer by Count Artigas (Miroslav Horub) and his piratical associate, Captain Spade (Frantisek Cerny). The count has appropriated a submarine with which he rams ships and robs them of their bounty One of the survivors is a young lady named Jana (Jana Zatloukalova). Everyone is taken to the count's headquarters inside an extinct volcano, where the professor is forced to work on an explosive with which Artigas hopes to eventually rule the world. Simon and Jana try to figure out a way to escape ...

Octopus attack

The Fabulous World of Jules Verne, filmed in "misti-mation," is a real oddity. The images of the film can be quite arresting, as it presents a combination of live action, cartoon animation, crude stop--motion, cut outs, drawings and other techniques, but despite this it still comes off a bit backwards in the FX department (especially as compared to such items as Harryhausen's The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, which was made the year before and was state of the art). It would have been more impressive had it been a silent movie, which in many ways it resembles. Although it cites another Verne novel as its source, this is clearly most inspired by 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and is vastly inferior to the 1954 Disney version despite that picture's flaws. Fabulous World does boast some striking art direction and photography (there is a wonderful shot of masses of birds surrounding a small balloon in mid-air), has an interesting score by Zdenek Lista, and a sequence when the sub rams a ship is rather well-handled. However, this Czech film has been vastly over-praised and will ultimately have many discerning viewers reaching for their fast-forward buttons.

Verdict: Clever in some ways, but not very exciting. **1/4.