Now showing on Stevegoolie Saturday Night...20 Million Miles To Earth (1957) on classic DVD 📀! #movie #movies #horror #scifi #monstermovies #creaturefeature #20MillionMilestoEarth #50s #DVD #stevegoolie #Svengoolie #METV
Tonight I watched my first non-Perry Mason William Hopper film: 20 Million Miles to Earth. On the one hand, it's a campy monster romp, with jerky animitronics and absurd plotting. But on the other, it's an incredible example of mid-century Sci-Fi and a delightful addition to the kaiju genre made by Americans for one of the first times.
Watching it, it's so easy to see how Godzilla, King of the Monsters! from just a year earlier influenced this movie. What's also fun about that is that, of course, that movie featured Raymond Burr in the American version, while 20 Million starred William Hopper. For both, these were among their penultimate roles before the premiere of Perry Mason, which would come to define both their professional careers.
I really wanted to love 20 Million Miles to Earth (1957) because of the incredible stop motion animation by Ray Harryhausen, but mostly it just makes me sad. That poor creature experiences nothing but violence and pain its entire short life because of humans. (Content warning: depictions of animal harm.) The tragedy is the point: the movie ends on a cheap rumination on the “cost” of human progress. Which, of course, only pisses me off because I reject the premise. This is a film I don’t like precisely because it’s done so well.
I’ve posted this picture before, but I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to showcase the contrast between Art Adams’ original pen-and-ink and the colored version.