*For the next week or so plus, I’m going to add a random film the great Ray Harryhausen worked on. The legendary special effects MASTER passed away on May 7 at age 92 in London and yes, the film world owes him more than they can ever repay.
While it has some great creature and scenic effects, some terrifically lousy acting and ridiculous dialog plus a few plot elements nearly sink 20,000,000 Miles to Earth like the doomed spacecraft that brings the Ymir into movie monster history.
That said, there are some iconic images in this 1957 sci-fi flick that linger in the memory, all masterfully animated by Harryhausen’s steady hands. His Ymir is at first “cute” and tiny, but as it increases in height and gets poked and pushed into an uncontrollable rage by a cast of idiots who misunderstand the poor creature until the army is called in to blow it off Rome’s Colosseum, you actually feel more sympathy for it by the time the film ends. Of course, if you just hate monsters in general, you’ll be cheering along with the fist-pumping crowd when the creature gets its due. But I’ll bet you a nickel that you’ll still think that Ymir was pretty damn cool…
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Without Ray Harryhausen’s still impressive special effects, Earth vs. The Flying Saucers would probably have been just another 1950’s “B” movie lost to the ages, only popping up on one of those cheapo compilation DVD’s you see as impulse items at some big box stores. However, thanks to those awesome saucers and some fine destruction of federal property by some rather cranky aliens, the film has been a favorite as well as an inspiration for other flicks from Independence Day to Mars Attacks! and more. The somewhat clunky acting and use of WWII stock footage don’t hurt the film one bit because they’re usually only a few minutes from one of Harryhausen’s cool animated saucers blowing the heck out of something or simply flying across the sky…
Forget about today’s overblown CG effects, many of which make modern movies worse than better. Ray’s best work was all about blending fantasy into the assorted realities of the worlds he created and transporting viewers to places and making them forget about the outside world for about an hour and a half or so.
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