Film review: 20 Million Miles to Earth (1957)

Ray Harryhausen is a legend (so much so that he got an homage in Monsters Inc.), and I will gladly watch any movie that features his stop-motion work, but man this film made it hard.  (Good news - you can watch some of the best bits here without having to suffer the human actors).  Essentially it's a classic 50s monster movie, but there are some oddities about it.  For one thing, it's set in Italy.  Is this just so the beastie can destroy the Coliseum?  

Or was it because the actors wanted to practice their Chico Marxist cod-Italian accents?  Another is that technically the backstory to this movie is way more interesting than the story.  It begins with fishermen doing their fishing off the coast of Sicily, with young Texas-obsessed Pepe (which doesn't sound very Italian to me, but what do I know) who will be responsible for much carnage, when a giant (quite impressively rendered) rocket ship crash lands in the sea near them.  

The brave Verrico insists that they go and see if there are any people alive in there.  They find two alive (one at death's door with a weird kind of skin condition) and one dead, and rescue the live two before the ship sinks.  Cut to the US, where they are lamenting the loss of their secret mission to Venus when it is reported where it ended up and that there are survivors.  As the survivors are being looked at on the beach, young Pepe notices a large glass-and-metal sealed tube and runs off with it into a cave where he opens it, gets out what is obviously some kind of giant frog-spawn-like egg out of it, wraps that in his jacket and runs off.  Meanwhile an adult is running off in the same direction to get a doctor for the sick astronauts.  The town doctor is off delivering babies but there is an old professor from Rome and his American granddaughter who have been traveling around in a caravan (which, we are led to believe, is an object of wonder to the simple Sicilians).  Turns out she's the trainee doctor, so gets dragged off by the adult, while he is the animal expert and sucker to whom Pepe has been selling dubious specimens to finance his Texas tat habit.  He reckons the egg is worth 200 lire and gets it out of the old geezer with comparatively little fuss.  Anyway, you can probably guess how things go from there.  The egg hatches 

and grows at a fantastic rate, into the monster that we came to this movie to see.  Meanwhile the granddaughter bickers with, then falls for the captain of the spaceship, who has brought back this sample of Venusian life to study how it manages to avoid falling victim to the disease that has disfigured his comrade and killed the rest of his crew (how he emerged unscathed is unexplained).  Apparently they witnessed many examples of these creatures on Venus, and they live on sulfur (imagine what their farts smell like) but none grew like this one.  Obviously it's like when Superman comes to Earth and is suddenly a superhero.  Yeah, that's the ticket.  Anyway, carnage ensues.  Somehow it manages to drag, even while being only an hour and 20 minutes.  Save yourself time and just look up all the animated bits on YouTube.  But be warned - apparently Harryhausen had no fondness for elephants, because they're always battling with his monsters and losing.