Harryhausen week, Day 5: 20 Million Miles to Earth

This is a "b" movie with a capital B. The premise is simple: animated monster specimen from Venus crashes in a human exploration rocket, grows to phenomenal size and eventually wrecks havoc on one of Earth's major cities. I watched the original black and white version, so I can't comment on the colorized one.

The opening of this movie is practically unwatchable. We get stuck having to sit through about 20 minutes of people faking Italian accents and... well, it finally gets somewhat interesting when we see the monster, which slowly grows in size throughout the film, 'til it's about 25 feet tall. There's no stages to its growth, though, it's just the same model, shot from different distances. It gets to chomp on an Italian farmer, crush a bunch of people with stones and wrestles an elephant.

Please excuse the brevity of this article, but when a film just doesn't bring anything to the table except one measly monster, what do you want me to say? I guess I've been spoiled by the buxom beauties of "1 million BC" and the infectious charisma of the "Sinbad" films.

Probably the least interesting Harryhausen film I've seen. Tomorrow take a look at "Clash of the Titans", which looks a lot better.