Filmic Friday 215: 20 Million Miles to Earth

There was another Harryhausen movie at the library last Thursday! It was a fantastic 1957 movie called 20 Million Miles to Earth and it was awesome. I love stop-motion, I love sci-fi, I love Harryhausen, and I love the library, so it was a perfect storm of greatness!

Looooook at this DVD cover!!!

Now, this one has amazing special effects, great rear projection, and fairly decent acting. Set in Italy (near Rome, actually), the movie starts with an enormous spaceship falling into the sea, startling a group of fishermen. The fishermen manage to save two of the astronauts (Americans, naturally), and get them to safety. The local doctor is busy delivering babies, so they turn to the daughter of a traveling zoologist. She's the first American accent we hear. She's studying to be a doctor and is understandably annoyed when people just think she's a nurse. She basically exists to get yelled at for no reason and to serve as monster-bait (which they forget about preeeeeeetty quickly...).

Meanwhile, there's this Texas-obsessed child on the fishermen's boat. Pepe, the kid, finds a big old tube in the water near the wreck and sells the weird jellied egg thingie inside to the zoologist. You may be able to guess, but the egg contains our alien creature. The creature, called the Ymir, is from Venus. I don't know that they ever actually call they Ymir by its name, but there's a lot of exposition on what its insides are like and what it eats. When it hatches, it's tiny, but it grows rapidly for... reasons?

Look how tiny!
It has no heart or lungs - just a complicated series of fibrous tubes...
The Ymir is the Internet...

Also, the Ymir doesn't kill any non-humans in this movie. It's 1957. It's pretty weird that they wouldn't kill a dog or something. I'm not complaining, and there is a fantastic and morbid fakeout involving a lamb, but the Ymir only kills humans, and only once or twice is that a direct action. Most people in this movie are killed by an instantly-vanishing disease subplot, accident, or from falling debris while they fight the Ymir.

A romance is arbitrarily struck up by the rescued American astronaut and the Doctor lady, but that's not what's interesting. No. What's interesting is how many jokes I managed to make over the course of the movie regarding Italy's involvement as an Axis power. First, I just made jokes about the character of the Commissar (yes, I mumble-sang the song...), but pretty quickly, I realized that there were some weird connections to make.

I couldn't resist poking fun about how soldiers & Italian historic sites don't really mix well, and it was immediately followed with the soldiers destroying a bunch of ancient Roman artifacts. Imagine. Then, there was a scene involving the Ymir being sedated (via antique TASER) and studied by a Japanese scientist. In Italy. Yeah. That rarely ends well for Americans (and it didn't).

Of course the Ymir escapes and wreaks havoc... 

Finally, though, and I couldn't find a shot to show you, but we have Italian policemen hunting the Ymir with German Shepherds. It's hilarious. I was absolutely quivering in my chair, cackling at all the possibly-accidental Axis references. I mean, there was nothing funny about the war, but... come on 20 Million Miles To Earth, give Italy a break!

Now that I've gotten you to the Ymir's escape, we get to talk about the real MVP of this film:

The Elephant.
Elephant is MVP.
Also: loooooook at the great stop-motion man running past the fight!!!

The Ymir was being held near the Zoo in Rome, which means that when he escaped, he was surrounded with animals that wanted nothing to do with him. Except for one elephant. The Elephant took one look at the Ymir and thought "Nope. Not in my depressing, greenery-less death-zoo. I don't like you one bit" and mauled him. It just completely destroyed the Ymir for a good ten minutes. It was incredible animation, it was intense, and it was awesome. The Elephant is the best.

But of course, all good things must come to an end, and the Elephant took one beating too many and had to take a nap for a bit. We knew he was not dead, because Harryhausen had figured out how to get his creations to breathe at this point, and we could see its sides heaving as it rested. I like to imagine that the elephant laid there for a while and then ran off into the Italian countryside, becoming something akin to the Big Cats of England...

After the Elephant fell, the military got involved, and we all know what that means :)

Explosion time!!! :D

It is glorious.

Basically, the military chased the Ymir to the Colosseum and cornered it, firing rockets and mortars and bullets and... and destroyed parts of an irreplaceable historic site... and got their own soldiers crushed underneath tons of marble...

The military kinda sucks, tbh...

But in the end, the Ymir is defeated and...

That's it. That's the end.

This seems to be how most sci-fi monster movies ended at one time. No aftermath, no wrap-up, no ending narrative, just a lingering shot on the dead creature and title card time. Boom. The End. No more.

I love how optimistic and ignorant about space movies were in the 50s. Not only did they really, really believe America would send a spaceship to Venus, but they believed that we'd be able to suit up enough to withstand the poisonous, superheated atmosphere. They believed a saurian-hominid could be a life-form. They believed that life form would do better in an oxygen-rich environment. They were awesome. We were awesome. This was a great movie, and I strongly recommend it to people who love monsters, Harryhausen, stop-motion, space-travel, and old movies :)

Now Go Enjoy Something!
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