Now Sony Pictures is releasing three films from Harryhausen's black-and-white heyday - It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955), Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956), and 20 Million Miles to Earth (1957).  All three exemplify Harryhausen's attention to detail.  They also showcase the ability of producer Charles Schneer to do a lot with a little - on tiny budgets, Schneer lashed together Harryhausen's amazing animation (which he shot in isolation), B-movie actors, and stock footage.  The resulting films are charmingly dated, but they still retain the thrill and wonder of seeing something strange and frightening.

Viewers who enjoy these films in a single, long evening will notice some similarities.  They're all monster movies at heart (duh!), and they all showcase the destruction of world-famous landmarks, sacrificed in the course of repelling monstrous threats.  In It Came from beneath the Sea (ICFBTS for short), a giant octopus is roused from the deep and ends up mauling the Golden Gate Bridge; in Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, the Washington Monument and the U.S. Capitol are damaged when the military downs various alien spacecraft; and in 20 Million Miles to Earth a fast-growing misfit Venusian reptile-man scrabbles around on top of the Coliseum in Rome before being cast down to his demise. (You'll really feel for the Venusian by the end of this film - he's a misunderstood creature lost in a modern world, a descendant of Frankenstein's monster and King Kong.)

All three films star stolid men-among-men ready to do battle with whatever horrific threat arrives - and they won't let death and destruction take time away from romance.  In ICFBTS, Kenneth Tobey's submarine captain pursues Faith Domergue as a research scientist pressed into service by the government.  (They share a wonderful entendre-filled flirtation scene in which she fondles a graduated cylinder of just such a length and just such a diameter.  I have no idea if this was intentional or not but it's titillating and eyebrow-raising nonetheless.)  In Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, Hugh Marlowe and Joan Taylor

are husband-and-wife rocket scientists who find themselves leading the fight to repel an alien invasion.  Taylor returns in 20 Million Miles to Earth as a medical student touring the Italian countryside with her zoologist father.  She crosses paths with William Hopper's planet-jumping astronaut, the sole (human!) survivor of a mission to Venus.  (Aside: I've always found the title of this film slightly confusing.  How is it 20 million miles to earth if they're already on earth?  And if the closest approach of Venus to Earth is over 26 million miles, where'd the extra 6 million miles go?  Oy!)

A word about the ladies - all three of these films go out of their way to establish the female leads as capable and ambitious.  From ICFBTS: "...there's a whole new breed who feel they're just as smart and just as courageous as men - and they are.  They don't like to be overprotected and they don't like to have their initiative taken away from them..."  Pretty cool stuff for the 1950s.

All three of these new releases are two-disk packages,

the second disks being devoted to special features like interviews with the still-spry Harryhausen.  Some of these featurettes can become tedious and repetitive, but they're informative nonetheless.  All the films have also been newly colorized, using some sort of new process that included advice and input from Mr. Harryhausen.  I'm a purist when it comes to cinema, so I much prefer to watch films in their original incarnations, but my sampling of the optional colorization looked decent enough.

Fans of cult cinema will greatly enjoy these new releases - they're fantastically fun and great examples of the nearly-lost art of hands-on animation.

- Review by John C. Snider © 2008 SciFiDimensions.com

- For more info, go to the Official Website of Ray Harryhausen

- Submitted by Mahnmut

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