20 Million Miles To Earth is visual effects wizard Ray Harryhausen’s 1957 black and white interplanetary King Kong remake, as well as a tribute to his stop motion photography mentor Willis O’Brien. No, it’s not a direct analogy, but there are so many scene for scene knockoffs from Kong that one must believe that only Harryhausen could have gotten away with so much theft (read that as ‘homage’) from his mentor without facing a lawsuit. Yes, technically, the film was directed by noted B-film maven Nathan Juran (The Seventh Voyage Of Sinbad), but it’s a very standard film, wholly carried into the memory by Harryhausen’s skills.

That stated, it’s also a very enjoyable film. How can I type that, as I have built a reputation upon my damning of clichés? Simple — it has to do with a lack of pretension. Harryhausen and Juran aim for only one thing — total entertainment for the film’s 83 minute running time. And they succeed with good special effects, easy to see through emotional manipulations, and an intriguing lead character, the thing from Venus. Most reviews call the creature an Ymir, but never is that phrase uttered a single time in the film. It was likely used in a promotional packet and stuck with the film. Always, in the internal world of the film, the creature is called ‘the creature,’ or some variant.

The screenplay for the film was written by Charlotte Knight, Bob Williams, and Christopher Knopf, and adapted from Knight’s original story. Okay, to call her story ‘original’ is stretching the term. Here is a précis of the film: rocket ship goes to Venus, the crew of seventeen is killed, save for two survivors. The rocket crashes into the Mediterranean, off of Sicily, then sinks.

Two local fisherman and a small boy rescue the two astronauts, and we get a brief glimpse of a dead ‘man’ that looks suspiciously like the gray aliens from recent UFO folklore. Later, a container with the tiny unhatched creature washes on shore, and the boy turns it and its jelly-like egg over to the local zoologist, for 200 lira, to buy himself a cowboy hat. The creature grows, escapes, is mercilessly attacked by scared little men, as well as a dog and an elephant. It goes berserk, and climbs to the top of the Roman Coliseum, where it is shot down and dies.