Stars: William Hopper, Joan Taylor, Frank Puglia, Thomas Brown Henry, John Zaremba

Director: Nathan Juran

Summary: When an American spaceship crashes lands on Earth, the rescue party realises that there is something on board that shouldn't be there...

The first space flight to Venus returns to Earth carrying a specimen of Venusian life called the Ymir. When the ship crashes into the sea upon its re-entry into Earth's atmosphere, the small, reptilian creature escapes, growing to an enormous size, eventually terrorizing the city of Rome. The always beautiful and impressive creature animations of the great Ray Harryhausen elevate the film above the level of ordinary 1950's monster sci-fi. The Ymir is one of the best-known creations in his long, distinguished career.

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Reviewed by: davybozal24-7
Posted on March 7, 2006 4:44 PM

Even though this movie was made a long time ago it still has the occasional scary bit in it which may make you want to hide behind the sofa . The good guys versus the big bad scary monster and it can only end one way , brilliant 50s movie making at it's best .

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Notable neither for its director nor its stars, 20 Million Miles to Earthhas been given the widescreen spit 'n' polish treatment because of its special-effects man, the legendary Ray Harryhausen. And it's his work here that makes this daft slice of hokum so watchable. When a group of Italian boat fishermen investigate a crash-landed space rocket returned from a trip to Venus, they find one surviving all-American hero and an alien in aspic: the Emere, a tiny homunculus hungry for sulphur and growing faster than a teenager on steroids. Cue man-vs-alien mayhem, screenfuls of avuncular patriarchs and the gratuitous destruction of Rome.

A by-numbers B-movie, Harryhausen's sixth feature isn't a patch on his later Technicolor masterpieces, but the unusual Italian setting ("I wanted a trip to Europe") adds an exotic quality and his effects are as solid and convincing as ever. The film only really begins to crackle when his stop-motion creation is onscreen. Like a scaly King Kong, he's as likely to engender sympathy as fear: surely anyone who's been bombed, blasted, burnt, electrocuted, shot at by trigger-happy squaddies and involved in a punch-up with a pachyderm is entitled to lose their rag a little. And fans will enjoy spotting in the Emere the flowerings of Harryhausen's later and greater creations, Sinbad's Cyclops and The Titans' Calibos and Kraken. The denouement, with the creature atop the Colosseum, is as effective as that of Kong's. It wasn't beauty who killed the beast here, however, it was bombs.

On the DVD:20 Million Miles to Earth's black and white picture is clean and crisp in this anamorphic 1.85:1 widescreen transfer, and the Dolby digital mono soundtrack is clear enough. The theatrical trailer will please fans of kitsch, as will the featurette "This Is Dynamation" produced at the same time as the first Sinbadmovie. The real corker here, though, is the generously lengthed documentary "The Harryhausen Chronicles". Narrated by Leonard Nimoy, this features a stellar cast of devotees (George Lucas among them) waxing lyrical about the influence of Harryhausen's films, and allows the man himself to ramble fascinatingly over clips of his filmic canon. The claw-slash menu marker is a nice touch, too. If you're a fan, this disc is Harryhausen heaven. --Paul Eisinger

Aspect Ratio:	1.85 Wide Screen
Main Language:	English
Region:	Region 2
Special Features:	This Is Dynamation Featurette, The Harryhausen Chronicles, Trailer
Subtitles:	Arabic, Bulgarian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Swedish, Turkish
Year:	1957
Release Date:	June 24, 2002
Runtime:	79 minutes
Certification:
Catalogue Number:	C D R 11857
Keywords:	Earth, General, Wide, Screen, Million, Fiction, Miles, Science, Twenty, Horror, Sci, Fi
Genre:	Science Fiction