20 Million Miles to Earth
                        
Director: Nathan Juran
Year: 1957
Rating: 6.0
The Black and White version. There is a colorized version.

"It's heading for the Coliseum" are magical words. This is good fun especially when the creature grows close to Godzilla size. I was only disappointed that it left most of Rome intact. It needed another fifteen minutes of Rampage in Rome. At least the Vatican should have been wrecked. This is another Ray Harryhausen special effects production and though in some ways less imaginative than his earlier and later work as it sticks with only the one solitary creature, there is a huge amount of stop-motion set pieces. The creature gets a lot of screen time. I had expected from the title that this would be a sci-fi space film, but it all takes place in Italy.



The final shot will remind you of King Kong with its tragic rather than victorious ending. Beauty didn't kill the beast but man's need to conquer everything did. It brings to mind that it was seeing King Kong when he was a child that set Harryhausen down this road. Interestingly, it was also King Kong that inspired the other great special effects master in the business during the same period, Eiji Tsuburaya. I wonder if the two of them ever met to discuss their work. Tsuburaya did it with men in costumes and incredibly realistic miniaturization, while Harryhausen created his special effects through the painstaking effort of stop-motion and then matching it to the live action. Both styles are wonderful. Art.



The film opens with a few Sicilians out fishing when a huge spaceship comes crashing down in the sea. They row to it and are able to drag two men out who are still alive, one soon to die. The other is Col. Calder portrayed by William Hopper aka Paul Drake. He started his long run on Perry Mason in this same year. The famous gossip columnist Hedda Hopper was his mother. Marisa (Joan Taylor - Earth vs Flying Saucers), an almost doctor mends him up and you know a romance will break out between these two. Because they are the stars of the film. Calder just came back from Venus. You mean Venice as one person asks. No. Venus. Secret mission. And by the way we brought back a living creature. I hope it hasn't escaped. Ya, it would not be much of a movie if it didn't. A small boy takes a washed ashore spongy thing to a zoologist. Not the smartest one in the world. When it first pops out of its protective covering it is kind of ugly cute. A nice pet with its tail and scales. Oh, look it grew twice its size in one day. I wonder how that happened. Let's take it in a van to Rome. With his daughter the aforementioned Marisa. That does not go well.




But the creature is basically harmless. Its diet is sulfur. A mineralarian. Unless it is attacked. And of course, we attack it. They do capture it and take it to Rome all securely locked up, but if you have seen King Kong you know that won't last. And it keeps growing. And growing. A little slow on the uptake, but the final section is classic. It wrestles with an elephant. I found myself rooting for the creature. Kidnapped from Venus, brought to America, attacked, electrified, poked and prodded. And he is the villain? The coliseum scene is great as the military shoots at it with bazookas. Doing more damage to it than the Vandals did 15 hundred years earlier.