It’s Sunday, mein mouth-breathing mavens of the monsterous! Time for a visit to the HorrorHouse™! Today’s selection, for the pedantic 200 of you out there, isn’t strictly a horror film but a sub-genre, a member in a cross-section in your Horror ∩ Science-Fiction Venn diagram: the monster movie. And what an example of the monster movie it is! Featuring the always-breathtaking work of animation legend, Ray Harryhausen, 1957’s 20 Million Miles to Earth!
Suspension-of-disbelief helmets strapped on tight? The movie, one of the extremely few horror or science-fiction films based in Italy (“it’s sempre New York or Tokyo!”), tells of an alien egg brought back to Earth by the first explorers to Venus. This egg hatches and gives birth to a little monster that in no time at all—spoiler!—becomes a big monster and wrecks havoc in Rome. Aww… did I give something away?
Obviously important to cinema history (MovieSnob never sleeps) is Harryhausen’s beautiful stop-motion work, the classic scenes at the Colosseum especially be to noted. One thing TIL that Harryhausen shot in Rome because he wanted to vacation there! Hey, films have been shot for more self-serving reasons.
YouTube Link to the movie…
Google-free links…
- https://yewtu.be/watch?v=6Fm0LLsB9FM
- https://yt.artemislena.eu/watch?v=6Fm0LLsB9FM
- https://iv.melmac.space/watch?v=6Fm0LLsB9FM
So, sorry for the slight deviation in programming…no, no I’m not and you all like deviations anyway! See you next week, my knuckledragging nightcrawlers, here at Mongoose’s Drive-In HorrorHouse™! And remember…Parma spelled backwards is AMRAP!
20 Million miles is a really good movie, or at least I thought so as a child, I am reluctant to see it again in case that turns out not to be the case now.
“Really good movie” is so subjective! Let’s put it this way: if you like any of the Scheer-Harryhausen collaborations as an adult, you’ll still love 20 Million. It’s not 2001: A Space Odyssey but it’s got one of the best stop-motion monsters, dare I say, ever!
