Tonight's film was a replay of the Sci-Fi cult classic "20 Million MIles To Earth"(1957) starring William Hopper and Joan Taylor. We've seen it before, I'm guessing about two years ago. I probably reviewed it, I just checked and I see that I've been reviewing movies since 2016! Wow, I thought I only started a couple years ago, but even if I did review it I can always do it again. If I can watch it twice I can write about it twice, even though.....er, um....it may not merit the effort.
The movie starts off promisingly enough. The filmmakers had the budget to go on location in Italy, where a small group of fishermen are casting their nets off the Sicilian coast. Suddenly there is a flash in the sky and the roar of rocket engines. Holy smokes! - a spacecraft is about to crash into the Mediterranean! What in the wide world of sports is goin' on? Ray Harryhausen is in the house, that's what. He's the legendary special effects wizard who developed the use of stop-motion modeling to a high art, in pictures like "The 7th Voyage of Sinbad", "It Came From Beneath The Sea" and my favorite, "Earth vs. The Flying Saucers". His spaceship here is a missile-shaped rocket rather than a saucer, but it's gigantic and streamlined, looking very futuristic, which adds to the disconnect when it lands not far from where the men are fishing, in old wooden boats from a culture unchanged for centuries.
Having witnessed the crash, most of the men are frightened and want to row away. They do seem to know what a space ship is, but they can't believe there are any survivors. Their leader, though, convinces them to turn back toward the rocket. He is a brave man, heroic and selfless. He and his fellow fishermen enter the ruined craft and are able to pull two astronauts from the wreckage. A third is dead.
The fishermen row the injured crewmen back to shore and call a doctor. The astronauts are taken to a hospital. One - the Captain - recovers, the other has a strange rash on his face and before long passes away. The recovered astronaut turns out to be the captain of the mission, which was classified Top Secret. He gets in touch with his commander post haste to report what has happened, and before you can say Jack Robinson, the top Air Force General in Europe is on the scene to contain the story. You see, the spaceship was on it's return from the planet Venus (my God man are you serious?). It's mission was never made public, but now, besides the fact of the crash and the two dead astronauts, there is another very important reason the Air Force must prevent the story from getting out.
There was a container on board, an air tight metal cylinder that held......er......a specimen. The General has got to find out what happened to that cylinder. The Captain suggests that in the crash it might've dislodged and sunk to the bottom of the Mediterranean. Divers are brought in to search, but no soap.
Finally, a small boy comes forward. He is Pepe, a helper on the fishing boat crew that rescued the astronauts. Pepe has heard about the reward offered for information about the cylider, and in one of the movie's more colorful moments he offers to tell where it is if the General will guarantee him the money. Pepe is a little entrepreneur. He wants to buy a horse to go along with his cowboy hat (he loves Western movies). The General promises Pepe the money. "Now tell us where the cylinder is, son".
It seems that Pepe found the cylinder washed up on shore, shortly after the fishing boat landed with the astronauts. He ran off behind some rocks to open it, and found a Gelatinous Slimy Thing inside, about the size of a loaf of garlic bread. Not knowing what it was, but wanting some money for a plastic Colt 45. cowboy gun, he'd taken the Thing to a nearby friend of his, a local zoologist living in a trailer who is in the habit of paying Pepe for small sea treasures. According to Pepe, the zoologist gave him 50 lira for the Thing, and has it inside his trailer back in the woods. So the General and his team haul ass, but when they get there, the zoologist is gone.
You see, in the time that has passed, a Monster has birthed itself from the Slimy Gelatinous Mass, blowing the zoologist's mind. It is a 'Ymir" from the planet Venus (though we never hear it called that), and it resembles a cross between Godzilla, Hercules and King Kong. The astronauts had brought it back so that scientists could study it's respiratory system, to see how it survived the poisonous Venusian atmosphere. This was important for the future colonization of Venus by mankind. But what has happened, now that the Ymir is out of the cylinder and breathing Earth's air, is that he's growing by leaps and bounds. This is freaking the zoologist out big time, so he's grabbed up his granddaughter (who is studying to be a doctor), and they've taken the Ymir in a cage to Rome, where they can show it to a renowned biologist at the world famous zoo. Surely he'll know what to do with the creature, who at birth was only ten inches tall but just hours later has grown to the height of a man.
Now look.......if it grew that much already, whataya think is gonna happen on the way to Rome?
Of course! - it's gonna get even bigger, and stronger, and finally it's gonna bust out of it's cage!
I mean, c'mon....you're a zoologist, can't you put two and two together? (sheesh.....)
I'm sorry, I know I shouldn't be giving the guy a hard time. He's already got his hands full with the Monster now escaped and the military pissed at him. No doubt he feels bad about the situation. Well, forget it - let's not place blame but concentrate on capturing this Thing instead, okay? And that's what the filmmakers do for the final 45 minutes of the movie, which turns into a Creature On The Rampage flick. I was a little disappointed by this turn of events because I thought they started off with several good ideas that could've been explored, such as the secrecy of the Venus mission, and the plague-like fungus that was encountered there. They could have developed the zoologist's examination of little Ymir as well. Had they spent more time on these ideas, they might've had a classic on their hands, but I suppose they spent most of the budget on Harryhausen's creature, in all of it's various sizes, so they figured they'd use it and get their money's worth. And in that way - as a pure Creature Feature - the movie is a great success. Considering it was made over 60 years ago now, the Ymir holds up incredibly well (and I'd still rather see it than a CGI monster). It's just that, in my opinion, they could've had a more interesting film, ala the all-time classics "Them!" or "Tarantula", if they'd developed the science fiction aspects of the story a little more. They really didn't need to have 45 minutes of the Ymir screaming bloody murder and tearing Rome apart.
However, I liked the movie and am gonna give it Two Solid Thumbs Up, for the stop-motion work and also a great sequence at Garden of the Gods in Chatsworth, substituting for Sicily, where the Army is going after Ymir with tanks and flamethrowers. I mean, you can't beat that, right? It's worth the price of admission alone. /////
It's now Sunday evening. We had good singin' in church today and I went to Santa Susana for a hike afterward. On my way back I stopped at Trader Joe's, not only to stock up on supplies but also to honor the man himself, "Trader" Joe Coulombe, who passed away yesterday at the age of 89. I can remember my first visit to a T.J.s store, waaay back in 1979 when I started working at MGM. There was a little market across the street called Pronto where the guys would go to buy sandwiches for lunch.....and beers, chips and all kinds of other stuff. They suggested I try it; I did and it became a favorite lunch stop. Pronto markets were Joe Coulombe's first version of Trader Joe's, before he went statewide (later nationwide) and changed the name. The store in Culver City was one of the last surviving Prontos, so that was my first encounter with this new type of supermarket, envisioned by Mr. Coulombe and enjoyed now by thousands or maybe millions of satisfied customers. R.I.P. Joe, and thanks for all the good stuff. :)
That's all for the moment, but don't change that dial because I'll be right back at the Usual Time, now just a few hours away.
Tons of love! xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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