20 MILLION MILES TO EARTH (1957)

Sicilian fishermen find a huge rocketship floating nose down in the sea and manage to save two men from the wreckage, and a young boy named Pepe finds a cylinder with a gelatinous slug-like thing in it and hides it on the beach. One of the men dies in pain from some kind of skin rash, but Calder (William Hopper) survives. It turns out that the men on the spacecraft had just returned from a secret flight to Venus, and the icky thing in the cylinder is the egg of a Venusian life form. In the meantime, the boy has sold the cylinder to a local zoologist, and in his lab, the creature is born, a muscled reptilian thing that looks like a miniature Godzilla. It quickly outgrows the cage it's kept in, escapes, and goes on a rampage looking for sulfur, which it feeds on, before it's captured using electrified netting and penned up in the Rome zoo. A steady electrical charge keeps it calm but when the equipment fries out, it escapes (again) and goes on a rampage (again), this time battling an elephant in the streets of Rome and winding up in the ruins of the Colosseum where it meets its fate. The last line, spoken in front of the dead monster: "Why is it always so costly for man to move from the present to the future?"—a line that doesn't seem earned as a moral for this particular tale.

This film featuring the meticulous stop-motion animation work of Ray Harryhausen was shot in black & white, so while it may not be as impressive looking overall as some of his later color movies (Jason and the Argonauts, The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, etc.), this features one of his greatest creatures. Critics often refer to the monster as the Ymir because that's what it was called in early versions of the script, but that name is never used on screen. The creature manages to be both brutal and somewhat sympathetic—after all, it had no choice in being brought to earth, and its rampages seem to be mostly about getting food, not just trashing a town like Godzilla or being infatuated with a woman like King Kong. As usual with Harryhausen movies, the writing is on the weak side; the opening Sicilian scenes are promising but non-monster scenes get bogged down in an unsatisfying relationship between Hopper and the zoologist’s daughter (Joan Taylor). Still, this has enough action and good FX work to be a classic in the stop-motion monster genre. [DVD]