Okay, aside from King Kong, there are at least a dozen other horror films, in the quarter century between that classic and this film, that this narrative outline could wrap about 90% of itself about. And its antecedents are even more manifest, from the following year’s It! The Terror From Beyond Space to the Alien film franchise twenty-plus years later.

And the acting is no great shakes, although William Hopper (veteran of The Deadly Mantis), as Colonel Robert Calder, is serviceable as an American military hack. And, although she has no real business being in this film, save as a love interest in a thankfully unrealized story arc, Joan Taylor (from Harryhausen’s Earth Vs. The Flying Saucers), as Marisa Leonardo, an ‘almost doctor,’ is babe-a-licious enough to ogle. Anyone else is utterly archetypal, at best, even the cute little Italian kid (Bart Braverman as Pepe), obsessed with Texas cowboys, who looses havoc by opening the container.

The film is buoyed by Harryhausen’s effects and the surprisingly good cinematography of Irving Lippman and Carlo Ventimiglia. The DVD of the film comes in both the 1.33:1 and 1.85:1 aspect ratios, and has only a few features, including some Harryhausen film trailers, the short This Is Dynamation featurette, which details Harryhausen’s process, and an hour long The Harryhausen Chronicles, which appears on all the films in the Harryhausen boxed DVD set called the Legendary Science Fiction Collection, of which this film is a part.

A new two-disk 50th anniversary edition of the film is soon to be released, and it is rumored to have Harryhausen commenting on it, but the film survives well enough without comment. The new DVD version will also have a colorized version of the film, supervised by Harryhausen, who originally wanted the film in color, but was denied for budget limitations. Some other features will be an interview with Harryhausen conducted by juvenile filmmaker Tim Burton, an interview with Joan Taylor, a featurette on the film’s music and colorization process, and a sneak peek of an upcoming comic book version of the film.

Despite its filmic limitations, the creature is sympathetic, and not the typical monster on the rampage. Harryhausen somehow imbues all of his creations with genuine emotions, something that not a single high tech digital cartoon character, such as Shrek, has ever matched. This is truly AMAZING, and all the capitalization of the letters in that term is deserved.