Director – Nathan Juran

A small town in Sicily. That’s the first thing on the screen, and I think I’m about to be treated to, yep, a gaggle of brutally stereotyped Italians a-laden with excessive-a accenti. Because Sicily is an island everyone who lives there is a ruddy faced fisherman with a tiny crude row boat and a hand-tied net that’s probably been handed down for effin’ generations. A big shiny toy spaceship flies by and crash lands in the ocean a few feet away. The intrepid and brave fishermen are able to save only two astronauts, one of them the commander, whom they take to the local clinic to be cared for by a chisel-faced doctor woman. The commander, Colonel Robert Calder wakes up just as much of a sweaty asshole as he was before. The other guy dies with the Colonel screaming in his face, but nobody seems to really care that much. The Colonel gets worked up about a capsule that was on the ship, but unluckily for him it has washed onto shore and the village “curious child” has opened it up and sold its gelatinous contents to a traveling zoologist and his daughter, the harsh doctor, who trades cutting remarks with the Colonel. The zoologist leaves the egg - whoops, did I give it away? He leaves it out on the kitchen table. Well then, a little creature soon emerges much to Zoologist's delight. This is where Harryhausen’s animation divides the film into two distinct cinematographic styles. The first being static background shots with overlays of the monster, and the second, reaction shots from the rest of the cast. The strange but somehow cuddly creature grows too large, and even vicious. It smashes its metal cage and escapes. Good thing a sweaty tense Colonel Constipation is nearby staring vacantly, he was just popping back from Venus where this savage creature comes from, oh, oops, sorry folks, yeah, I brought it with me! Since the creature us susceptible to electrocution, but only at very specific voltages lets throw a metal net jerry-rigged to a car battery over it. Ohhhh helicopters! Old helicopters are cool because they look so funny and unwieldy.

To tempt the monster into netting range they throw him sacks of his favorite food, raw sulfur (which they keep in the back of their army jeeps.) It works and the creature is captured and the Army decides to show it off so they have a press conference. Some reporters get to see the monster exactly when the equipment fails and it escapes into the Rome Zoo. There it busts out some pretty cool fisticuffs with the largest land mammal on earth, and finally with the big time property destruction. The American military, despite having no reason to be driving tanks around Rome in 1957, is more than willing to escalate hostilities blow for blow, even if they do look like a bunch of confused kids while doing it. Some potentially interesting metaphors are skimmed in the climactic fight scene in the Roman Coliseum. Early Harryhausen effort outdoes and overshadows its context. Implication and satisfaction. It is what it is folks, and it does a good job at being just that.

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