“What I have to say, you’ll find incredible… but true.”

Drake’s rating: I do hope Pepe’s voice changed when he hit puberty

Drake’s review: On the off chance that any of you out there ever take a trip to Venus, do me a favor and don’t bring back any souvenirs. Especially the living kind that will inevitably grow to mammoth proportions and wreak havoc upon the local populace. Because that’s exactly what the crew of the XY-21 does, and let’s just say that it doesn’t go well.

The trouble really starts when the XY-21, on a return flight from its voyage as the first spaceship to travel to the second planet in our solar system, comes crashing down into the Mediterranean instead of landing safely at Cape Canaveral. That crash draws the interest of some local fisherman, and the brave Italians navigate their way through a hole in the hull of the ship to rescue a pair of astronauts before the XY-21 sinks to the bottom of the sea.

And that might have ended any problems right there had it not been for the fact that the astronauts were bringing back a live sample of the local Venusian wildlife, which is found by Pepe (Bart Braverman, Alligator), the shrill-voiced son of one of the fisherman. With dollar signs in his eyes, the boy takes the sample, a gelatinous egg, out of the jar and sells it to a local doctor. And then Pepe buys a cowboy hat, which is a pretty good investment if you ask me.

Once the egg hatches the good doctor finds that he’s dealing with a creature never before encountered on Earth, and rushes it off to Rome for further research. But the creature, which resembles a cross between an ape and a lizard, goes through an adolescent growth spurt that transforms it from the size of a 1970s G.I. Joe action figure into that of a large child virtually overnight. Escaping from the doctor, the creature makes its way into the Italian countryside, terrorizing sheep and scattering chickens as it looks for some sulfur to chow down on, since that’s evidently the Venusian equivalent of the breakfast of champions.

But when Colonel Robert Calder (William Hopper, best known as future Perry Mason sidekick Paul Drake*), the commander of the XY-21, wakes up in the hospital, he alerts his superiors to the fact that there’s a Venusian potentially running around without any kind of adult supervision. Which is kind of like what happens around the Mutant Offices when Justin takes a rare day off. And just like those days, everything goes wrong very quickly, there’s a lot of screaming and random destruction and eventually electrified nets are brought in to bring the situation to a halt.

But unlike cantankerous Mutant Reviewers, the Venusian creature doesn’t let a little thing like electricity keep him down for long, and it escapes from captivity to take in the sights of Rome, wrestle an elephant and climb a coliseum or two. The Venusian is really just your average tourist.

20 Million Miles to Earth was unsurprisingly the brainchild of Ray Harryhausen, who was both co-writer and (uncredited) co-director, as well as of course being the man behind the extensive stop-motion special effects used to animate the Venusian creature. Famously a fan of the great Willis O’Brien’s work on The Lost World and King Kong, Harryhausen was later mentored by O’Brien and carved out his own career as a master of motion picture special effects. He was instrumental in bringing strange creatures to cinematic life in the years before computer animation, painstakingly building model figures and them moving them a fraction of an inch and shooting them a single frame of film at a time.

By 1957 Harryhausen was a seasoned special effects professional and it shows. The creature from Venus takes center stage here as it terrorizes Italy, with a highlight being its encounter with an elephant from the local zoo, a wrestling match that Harryhausen would call back to as early as the following year’s The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, which saw a cyclops and a dragon square off.

But the creature is definitely the star of the show here, and 20 Million Miles from Earth doesn’t have much going on past its various rampages. The plot is basically a truncated revisitation of King Kong, with a stodgier lead and a love interest who surprisingly never catches the creature’s reptilian eye. The creature’s whiny growl is a bit of an aural irritation as well, matched only by the incessant whine of Pepe during the first reel.

Honestly, I’m more of a fan of Harryhausen’s colorful work on the Sinbad features and Clash of the Titans, as I think his animation style fits in better with those fantastical worlds than a more modern setting does. But 20 Million Miles from Earth is still a great look at the work of an effects master who is just hitting his stride. If you can survive the separate squawlings of Pepe and the creature, it’s a creature feature worth watching.

Now if you’ll excuse me, Justin took the afternoon off so I have some running rampant to do.

*No relation.

Intermission!

• It’s just another quiet morning for the fisherman from an Italian coastal village…
• Until that spaceship comes crashing down into the water, of course.
• A hole in the hull, and conveniently enough it’s just above the waterline.
• They found two astronauts! Does that mean they get to keep them?
• Meanwhile, at the Pentagon, serious men are looking serious.
• OK, Pepe, just maybe tone it down just a tad. You’re making my tinnitus worse.
• Aw, the creature’s pretty cute!
• Then it grows, and it’s less cute.
• Calder tells everyone that the creature’s not really dangerous unless provoked. Then everyone in the film spends the remaining runtime provoking it.
• Flamethowers? I’m glad Justin’s never thought of that…
• It turns out Earth’s oxygen levels are causing it to grow. Sure, I’ll buy that.
• Bad time for an electrical malfunction.
• It’s elephant vs. Venusian in a fight to the finish!