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In The Loop

Monday, March 8th, 2010

companies: BBC Films,
UK Film Council and Aramid
Entertainment Fund
year: 2009
runtime: 106′
country: United Kingdom
director: Armando Iannucci
cast: Peter Capaldi, Tom Hollander,
Gina McKee, James Gandolfini,
Chris Addison, Anna Chlumsky,
Enzo Cilenti, Paul Higgins,
Mimi Kennedy, Alex Macqueen,
Johnny Pemberton, Olivia Poulet,
David Rasche, Joanna Scanlan,
James Smith, Steve Coogan
writers: Jesse Armstrong, Simon Blackwell,
Armando Iannucci, Ian Martin
and Tony Roche
cinematography: Jamie Cairney
music: Adam Ilhan
order this film from Amazon.com:
SD DVD | Blu-ray

“Twelve thousand troops . . . but that’s not enough.  That’s the amount that are going to die, and at the end of a war you need some soldiers left, really, or else it looks like you’ve lost.”

~ Lt. General George Miller

I missed this one when it (briefly) ran in theaters.  It certainly wasn’t a difficult film to miss, seeing as it played on a single screen for a week to two with nothing in the way of local advertising.  The closest I had to a theatrical experience was with regard to the trailer, which played before one of the handful of screenings of The Hurt Locker I attended.  That trailer, a manic flurry of editing backed by Rossinni’s William Tell Overture as re-interpreted by someone in the midst of a cocaine bender, killed with the audience, promising a smart, witty, imminently quotable piece of political satire the likes of which hasn’t been seen in some time.  In The Loop went on to become one of the best-reviewed films of the past year (93 and 83 percentile out of 100 at Rottetomatoes and Metacritic respectively for those who need numbers to chew on), and certainly delivers on all of the trailer’s promises.

In The Loop plays a bit like an episode of NBC’s The West Wing (not surprising given that it’s an off-shoot of the British TV series The Thick of it), only scrubbed clean of any trace of systemic respect and filtered through a ludicrously obscene lens .  There are no appearances by the President, Prime Minister, Secretary of Defense or what have you.  The focus is firmly on the underlings, the mass of supporting players who make things happen through shear determination and hefty doses of luck, good or otherwise.  And if all else fails, there are always plenty of facts to manipulate for the cause.

In fact, the entire narrative for In The Loop is about manipulation, most notably on the person-to-person level.  The plot, such as there is one, concerns the confused cooperation of the United Kingdom and the United States in the build-up to an unspecified conflict in the Middle East and the unlikely Cabinet Minister Simon Foster (Tom Hollander) propelled into the center of things by his awful media appearances.  Directing him into a host of disparate directions is Malcolm Tucker (Peter Capaldi, The Lair of the White Worm), a vulgar enforcer from Downing Street whose job it is to keep bumbling ministers straddling the constantly shifting party line.  Complicating matters on the other side of the pond are anti-war Asst. Sec’y of State Karen Clark (Mimi Kennedy) and Lt. General George Miller (James Gandolfini) and her enemy, conservative war-mongering Asst. Sec’y of State Linton Barwick (David Rasche).

Simon Foster is as close as the film comes to having a central identifiable character, a well-intentioned Minister turned political pawn (he doesn’t even have control of the blinds in his own office) who stumbles through all manner of positions on the issue of the war before being forced into resignation and, ultimately, fired.  He is frequently equated with meat, room filler for meetings and photo-ops, and is tossed about from agenda to agenda before being fed to the dogs (rather, the press) and returned to his rural constituents, forgotten by the world at large.  Through Foster we are witness to the monstrosity of the modern political machine and its ability to destroy those unlucky enough to become trapped in its quickly-moving parts.

Countering Foster’s political naivety is the seasoned Malcolm Tucker, the Downing Street attack dog tasked with keeping Foster in his place – wherever that might happen to be.  Prone to outlandish threats of physical violence (“Stay detached, or that’s what I’ll do to your retinas!”) and vein-popping fits of rage, Tucker is adept at bullying those he sees as beneath him (everyone, in other words) into whatever corner the situation calls for, but is ultimately as worried about his personal stake in events as everyone else.  Capaldi is exceptional, lending credulity to ludicrous phrases like “ass-spraying mayhem” in ways that I think few actors could.  He is responsible for what is, arguably, the film’s finest moment, when Tucker, alone in the mediation room of the United Nations building, has a moment of silent existential panic.

There’s a lot of seriousness to In The Loop, not the least of which being the subject it tackles (obviously inspired by the build-up to the Iraq War in 2003).  The country the United States and the United Kingdom are joining forces against goes unnamed throughout, re-enforcing one of the important points of the film: The governments don’t want a war against any nation in particular, they just want a war.  There’s no escaping the fact that the decision the film’s mountain of supporting characters are awkwardly racing towards is going to cost real lives (per the quote at the head of this article).

The screenplay (by director Armando Iannucci, with Jesse Armstrong, Simon Blackwell, Ian Martin and Tony Roche, the crew behind The Thick of It) blends comedy seamlessly with a manic pacing and the serious elements of the narrative.  The jokes are non-stop from the start, the sense of humor bleakly sardonic throughout.  Every other line is a jab at something or someone and I found myself, for perhaps the first time ever, watching an English-language film with subtitles enabled just to be sure I wasn’t missing anything (a big thanks to MPI Home Video for including them on their DVD).  In The Loop is, in a word, vicious, an outright condemnation of a system that sends young men to die for little more than the personal political gain of those at the top.  It’s also uproariously funny, and I haven’t laughed so much during a film in a long, long time.

Iannucci’s direction is a bit too television for my taste, and all-handheld HD camera work is starting to lose some of its effective immediacy after all the other feature films (particularly in the horror genre) and television series (The Office, et al) that have utilized the technique.  His sense of pacing is spot-on, however, and In The Loop roars forward at full-tilt from the first frames.  Exceptional casting rules the day, the long list of performers taking the swift-footed screenwriting in the appropriate stride.  Capaldi and Paul Haggins reprise their enforcer roles from the television series, while Mimi Kennedy and David Rasche make for memorable dueling Assistant Secretaries of State.  Steve Coogan (Hamlet 2) makes an important bit appearance as a constituent disgruntled about a collapsing wall, and Tom Hollander brings pathos to the dim-witted and quickly fading political star Simon Foster.

MPI Home Video released In The Loop to both DVD and Blu-ray on the 12th of January, and I highly recommend that those who, like myself, missed it in its limited theatrical run take the opportunity to catch up to it now.  Both do the job of capturing the HD-cam photography, the Blu-ray being noticeably clearer and sharper if not much else.  Extras are limited – a trailer, a tv spot, a nice collection of deleted scenes (28 minutes worth), and an extremely short (3 minutes, 17 seconds) look behind-the-scenes – but the film itself is more than enough to make the discs worthwhile and the price is certainly right (under $20 retail for the Blu-ray and considerably less for the SD DVD).  Both English SDH and Spanish subtitles are available for the feature, the former of which I found very useful in preparing for this review.

This is a wonderful piece of acid political satire with surprising depth lurking beneath all the cock jokes (and believe me, there are a lot of them).  I’ll stop short of calling it brilliant for my own petty reasons, but don’t let that dissuade you.  In The Loop comes very highly recommended.

order this film from Amazon.com:
SD DVD | Blu-ray

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Crazies, The (remake)

Monday, March 1st, 2010

companies: Overture Films, Participant
Media, Imagenation Abu Dhabi FZ,
Penn Station and Road Rebel
year: 2010
runtime: 101′
country: United States
director: Breck Eisner
cast: Timothy Olyphant, Radha Mitchell,
Joe Anderson, Danielle Panabaker,
Christie Lynn Smith, Brett Rickaby,
Preston Bailey, John Aylward,
Joe Reegan, Glenn Morshower
writers: Scott Kosar
and Ray Wright
cinematographer: Maxime Alexandre
music: Mark Isham
out in wide release

A germ warfare experiment crash-lands in the water supply for the sleepy community of Ogden Marsh in this modestly budgeted redux of George Romero’s sardonic 1973 thriller.  The new The Crazies wisely avoids rehashing the events of the original outright, though a few moments of slick horror aren’t enough to cover for the fact that the Scott Kosar and Ray Wright screenplay has precious little on its mind.

The story this go around focuses squarely on sheriff David Dutton (Timothy Olyphant, Live Free or Die Hard) and his wife Judy (Radha Mitchell, Pitch Black, Surrogates), who are expecting their first child.  The intrusion of a shotgun-toting maniac into a high school baseball game announces the arrival of Trixie, a destructive virus engineered by those maniacal masterminds working for the big-G Government.  It isn’t long before other townspeople are showing signs of infection, glassy stares and questionable behavior (some reminiscent of the M. Night Shyamalan misfire The Happening).  Just as sheriff David and deputy Russell (Joe Anderson, Amelia, The Ruins) start to put the pieces of the Trixie puzzle together the town is cast into darkness, an all-encompassing communications blackout announcing the arrival of the film’s second villain: the big-M Military.

Soon David, his wife and his faithful deputy are on the road, doing their best (and failing) to avoid the likes of crazed gun-toting hillbillies and the anonymous forces of the gas-masked Military on their way to Cedar Rapids.  They meet others along the way of course – one of Judy’s patients, her boyfriend, and the less-than-friendly new management of a rural car wash – none of whom are terribly important.  The film wastes no time in dispensing with them by means of pitchfork-armed high school staff or squads of Army-issue goons.

Breck Eisner’s The Crazies hits upon several of the high points of the 1973 film, updating the house-fire opener of that picture to good effect, but eschews the military perspective entirely (a huge part of the original, which focused on the inefficacy of government bureaucracy at the time of the Vietnam War), a perspective that could have added some prescience to this by-the-books horror programmer in the wake of hurricane Katrina and in the midst of two wars in the Middle East.  Instead we get an anonymous Military machine that, in obvious allusion to the Nazis, rounds the towns population into cattle trucks and concentration camps in preparation for mass extermination.  Yikes.  A soldier momentarily captured by David and his cohorts even enlists the Nuremberg defense after helping to gun down a teen-aged boy and his mother: “We were just following orders.”  There can be little doubt as to who is supposed to be perceived as more dangerous – the Military or the crazies – with a fuel-air bomb hanging over our protagonists’ heads.

The “military = bad” trope has been repeated in films ad-nauseum for as long as this reviewer can remember, and while it probably still works for plenty of people it’s my biggest complaint against the picture.  One thing we can be thankful for, however, is the exclusion of a scheming uniformed baddie behind it all.  Whoever is behind the quarantine operation in Ogden Marsh is left graciously unexplored, and one irksome genre pratfall avoided.

The other villains of the piece, those poor souls unfortunate enough to have become infected with the Trixie bug, are utterly unremarkable in design, with Eisner choosing to take his cues from the overflowing cornucopia of blandness that is modern zombie cinema.  The crazies sprout sores, puffy veins and discolored eyes, an aesthetic far too familiar to be in the least big frightening on its own.  Crafty implementation could have solved that particular issue, but no dice.  Eisner telegraphs his scares far in advance and allows too many of the horrific setups to devolve into outright silliness, leaving The Crazies sorely lacking in real visceral thrills.  Gore is actually quite limited here, and those expecting buckets of exposed inner organs may be disheartened.  Here I find myself giving Eisner considerable credit, for depending on the horror of the situation over graphic visuals.  A pitchfork to the gut is no less terrible a prospect without the sight of intestines flailing about.

Eisner seems more adept at action than horror here, with the slow-motion tumbling of an SUV proving one of the highlights of the picture.  His handling of the dramatics is adept if not particularly brilliant, and it’s the believability of the small-town characters that ultimately lifts The Crazies above merely average.  The cast do well in their respective roles even if no one (as is the case with much of the picture) stands out.  The fictitious Ogden Marsh may be no substitute for the real Evans City of the original, but it’s Mayberry-esque main street appeal is not to be underestimated.  The intrusion of HAZMAT-suited military men upon Rockwellian America is still a vision both surreal and effective, though it is a pity more wasn’t done with it.

I feel it important to note that I did enjoy The Crazies by and large, even if I have no desire to see it again.  Neither memorable or really effective, it’s still better than most horror programmers these days.  The crowd I was with was certainly entertained (admittedly much more-so than myself), even with a baby cooing and giggling  throughout.  The best thing about the picture may be Romero’s place as its executive producer – he’ll undoubtedly see a decent payday for his troubles.  This new The Crazies may be entirely forgettable, but those on the lookout for a matinee’s worth of entertainment could certainly do worse.

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Ganjasaurus Rex

Wednesday, February 24th, 2010

companies: Prehistoric Productions
and Reel People Media
year: 1987
runtime: 88′
country: United States
director: Ursi Reynolds
cast: Paul Bassis, Dave Fresh,
Rosie Jones, Howard Phun,
Rich Abernathy, John Ivar,
Andy Barnett, Alex,
Stephen Brown, Diana Hahn
writers: Paul Bassis, Dan Gilweit,
Rosie Jones, Rick Cooper, Al Ceraulo,
Andy Barnett, Alex, Stephen Brown,
Jon Akselsen and Diana Hahn
videographer: Russel Dobson
music: Step One Studios, David Penalosa,
Rob Sadler, Andy Barnett, Mark John,
Rod Deal, Larry “Lazer” Murphy, Tree Spirit,
Tyce, Mike, Sean, Rich, Dan and Paul Bassis
special effects: marty Smitty
order the OOP Rhino Video
release from Amazon.com

Plot: A prehistoric monster terrorizes the California coast and the marijuana growers there, who have developed a new strain of cannabis the grows to be as large as a redwood tree.

Aside from an extensive selection of Sandy Frank-imported Japanese science fiction features and an Ed Wood Jr. skin flick, Rhino Video’s 1988 release of Ganjasaurus Rex is the only other VHS I clearly remember dwelling on Blockbuster’s paltry “Other” shelf.  Even to my young eyes it looked just too . . . well . . . bad . . . to be worth bothering with, so I never did.  Not, at least, until now.

The story, such as there is one, follows a handful of pot farmers looking to make it big with a new sequoia-sized strain of cannabis and the subsequent (farcical) attempts by the DEA to suppress their efforts.  Intruding upon things is the gargantuan Tyrannosaurus Herbivorous Ganjasaurus Rex, a misunderstood beast from the sea who seeks only to munch peacefully on the towering marijuana plants that dominated its prehistoric environment.  Compulsory scenes of monster mayhem ensue, with Ganjasaurus Rex sending the local California populace fleeing and the DEA rushing to an expert on the beast (one Professor Sprog) for help.

The box art for this one pretty much sums it up – cheap is the operative word.  Low-fi and low-tech, the project seems to be the confused brainchild of a few stoner musicians looking to sound off against the Reagan-era War on Drugs in the doofiest way possible, by having a pissed-off prehistoric monster rise up in reaction to Federal drug raids.  Some archival footage from a 1985 raid on a California pot grower is even used to beef up the creature’s first appearance.  The dinosaur menace (implicitly linked with Godzilla, which makes for a copyright joke at the end of things) is primarily accomplished through stop motion, at least in the argumentative sense of the term.  Mostly it looks like what it is: either a toy being jerked around in front of a blue screen or a larger head mock-up with a light bulb inside of it.  Impressive it certainly isn’t, though it is amusing from time to time.


Surprisingly enough, the writing here (credited to no fewer than ten people, including much of the cast) isn’t all that bad, and some is even funny as intended.  It’s obvious where the sympathies of the creators lie.  The DEA, local law enforcement, and anti-pot community activists (operating under the banner of “Operation C.A.M.P” . . . har har har) are presented as little more than buffoons, their dialogue full of Freudian slips (confusing “propaganda” and “press packets”, for instance).  The good-guys are peaceful and well-intentioned hippies with names like Cloud and Moss, who spend their days watching T.V., eating lentils, and being generally unproductive members of society.  The scientists are goofy, especially Professor Sprog, though we know they’re good too – they drink all-natural carrot juice while their DEA agent guest opts for Folger’s Crystals and Sweet ‘n Low.

There is some seriousness afoot when DEA agents descend on Moss and his girlfriend’s pad, confiscating their gargantuan potted pets (named Zelda and Wilma) at gunpoint.  Any comment on the use of extreme force is quickly lost in the farce, with the DEA agents, their supporters, and a gaggle of press representatives finding themselves quite taken with the smoking remnants of Moss’ pet trees.  The display also attracts one Ganjasaurus Rex, who goes on a brief rampage behind still photos of local buildings before settling down and taking a few tokes off the still smoldering pot-pyre.

Performances are expectedly mixed but, as was the case with the writing, not as bad as one might anticipate.  Much of the on-screen talent were local musicians, and at least they have something in the way of personality on their side.  The less said about the more technical aspects of the production the better.  The videography is mostly flat and static, and the live audio recording is ample for understanding dialogue but not much else.  One big positive is the music, which is quite good throughout.  I’d frankly be more interested in owning a copy of the soundtrack than the film itself.

I can’t bring myself to be too hard on this one, though I honestly don’t have that much to say about it either.  For a no-budget shot-on-video monster comedy it could certainly have been worse, even if some of it did leave me feeling rather sleepy-eyed.  Long OOP, Ganjasaurus Rex currently goes for anywhere between $50 and $1000 at online retailers, which seems excessive at both ends.  If you can find it cheap it may well be worth a watch, though those who skip on it certainly aren’t missing out on much.  Does ambivalence count as a recommendation?


order the OOP Rhino Video
release from Amazon.com

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Wolfman, The

Sunday, February 14th, 2010

company: Universal Pictures
year: 2010
runtime: 102′
country: United States
director: Joe Johnston
cast: Benecio Del Toro, Anthony Hopkins,
Hugo Weaving, Emily Blunt,
Art Malick, Roger Frost,
Geraldine Chaplin, Jordan Michael Coulson
writers: Andrew Kevin Walker
and David Self (based on the original
screenplay by Curt Siodmak)
cinematography: Shelly Johnston
music: Danny Elfman
special effects: Rick Baker
and a few hundred others
out in theaters in wide release

Plot: A man is bitten by a werewolf and becomes a wolf man.

Warning: Spoilers lie ahead.  Proceed at your own peril!

“It had to be this way,” the dying Lawrence Talbot whispers in the closing reel of Universal’s The Wolfman, the needless big-budget reboot of the ’40s franchise, and perhaps he’s right.  Slick and soulless and propelled by little more than a mountain of time-lapsed lunar photography, Joe Johnston’s Valentine to the Lon Chaney Jr. classic ranks as nothing short of $150 million in wasted opportunity.

The Wolfman roots itself firmly in the territory of classic Gothic horror tales, with the dusty ghost of a once-great English manor serving as the primary location.  Visiting the manor after the untimely mutilation of his younger brother, Shakespearean actor Lawrence (Benecio Del Toro) ignores his sinister father’s (Anthony Hopkins) simple warning about the full moon and promptly finds himself in the middle of the resident lycanthrope’s gypsy buffet, receiving a nasty shoulder wound while chasing a blur of fur and muscle through a slurry of dismembered limbs and entrails.  Lawrence survives of course, and when the next full moon rises he enacts his own bloody massacre.  No sooner has he awakened than the police mob of Inspector Abberline (Hugo Weaving) arrives, convinced of his lunacy but not of his monstrous alter-ego.

A brief stint in a London asylum goes as well as one might expect, and is punctuated with a visit by Lawrence’s father, there to remove a particularly nasty skeleton from the family’s closet.  In no time at all our cursed anti-hero is howling through the streets of London and lunging across its rooftops, dodging bullets and slicing through all who stand in his way.  The conclusion sees Lawrence’s return to the family home, to confront his father (it seems claws and fangs run in the family) and meet his inevitable end.

The biggest thrill of The Wolfman was seeing Curt Siodmak receive a solo credit for his original screenplay, small consolation indeed for a film more troubled than its cursed protagonist.  The great cast does their best to breathe life into the foul writing of Andrew Kevin Walker (Sleepy Hollow) and David Self (1999’s The Haunting, Road to Perdition), so lacking in dramatics that it precludes them from being characters at all.  Del Toro’s Wolfman is sadly forgettable, a failing of a script that shuffles him about like a pawn – a massacre here, a father-son brawl there, and a bit of cliche romantic monster pathos to tidy up the ending.  It’s not nearly enough to cover up the fact that this Wolfman’s heart was ripped out well before the cameras began to roll.

Hopkins does what Hopkins does best, lending weight and credibility to his role as the woefully underwritten villain of the piece, whose malediction is obvious from the moment he first appears on screen.  Hugo Weaving plays the part of the obligatory law man, one of the more memorable caricatures of the picture and the vessel through which the inevitable franchise’s sequel baiting is delivered.  Emily Blunt is pretty but perfunctory, and the audience knows even without the silly gypsy gibberish (delivered by a fine Geraldine Chaplin) that it will be her hand and not Abberline’s that delivers the Wolfman’s death blow.

It’s obvious from the ugly CGI title card that the over-produced effects are to be the star of the show, with Rick Baker’s capable (and faithful) Wolfman make-up designs taking center stage.  While the frequent violent outbursts make for a bit of much-needed fun in this otherwise dull seat-filler, highlighted with torn limbs, gnawed fingers, and a decapitation or two, none of it is anything we haven’t seen before.  More importantly, it’s nothing we’re going to remember.  Some extensive CGI is as obvious as ever, particularly in Lawrence’s night time prowl through the London skyline.  The animated stand-in for Del Toro’s flesh-and-blood creature suffers from the same lack of weight and presence that dooms so many of its ilk.  The transformations, heavily inspired by Baker’s earlier work on the vastly superior An American Werewolf in London, are quite good at least, though they have little impact given the muck that surrounds them.

The less said about Joe Johnston’s (Jumanji, Hidalgo, Jurassic Park III) pedestrian direction the better.  Suffice it to say that it wastes Rick Heinrichs’ reasonable Gothic production design almost entirely.  Pacing is a problem throughout, The Wolfman’s sparse narrative not so much flowing as stuttering from point to point.  Perhaps the worst thing about this thoroughly mediocre outing is the lack of thrills or suspense – the sporadic splashing of blood and gore does not a scary film make.  Cinematography by Shelly Johnson (The House Bunny, Jurassic Park III) is as uninspired as the rest and composer Danny Elfman seems at a loss entirely, crafting a meandering score that’s fitting for the production in its lack of excitement.

The best thing about this unnecessary retread is its trailer, which covers all the same narrative ground in considerably less time and at no expense to the viewer.  Go to Youtube, check it out, and ponder what could have been – you’ll be happier and your wallet slightly fatter for the trouble.  Skip it.

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20 Million Miles to Earth

Thursday, February 11th, 2010

company: Columbia and
Morningside Productions
year: 1957
runtime: 82′
country: United States
director: Nathan Juran
cast: William Hopper, Joan Taylor,
Frank Puglia, John Zaremba,
Thomas Browne Henry, Tito Vudo,
Jan Arvan, Arthur Space
writers: Robert Creighton Williams,
Christopher Knopf and Charlotte Knight
cinematography: Irving Lippman
and Carlo Ventimiglia
music: Mischa Bakaleinikoff
special effects: Ray Harryhausen
disc company: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment
release date: December 4, 2007
retail price: $28.95 / $107.95
disc details: Region Free / dual layer BD50
video: 1080p / 1.85:1 / b/w + colorized
audio: Dolby TrueHD 5.1 surround (English)
and Dolby Digital 2.0 mono (Spanish)
subtitles: English, English SDH, Chinese,
Korean, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Thai
(Spanish, Portuguese for supplements)
special features: feature commentary with
Ray Harryhausen, Remembering 20 Million Miles
to Earth featurette, Tim Burton Sits Down with
Ray Harryhausen featurette, David Schecter on
Music’s Unsung Hero featurette, Interview with Joan
Taylor, image galleries, trailers (Close Encounters
of the Third Kind), The Colorization Process, BD-Live
order this disc from Amazon.com
single disc | 4-disc Ray Harryhausen Collection

Plot: A spaceship crashes in the sea off Sicily, unleashing an ever-growing specimen of Venusian life.  The creature is captured and taken to Rome, where it goes on a rampage culminating in a military battle at the famed Colosseum.

Ray Harryhausen’s third film project under the Columbia banner is another landmark in his feature film career, being his faithful producer Charles H. Schneer’s first solo effects effort (produced through his newly formed Morningside Productions) and the first for which Harryhausen himself was to be the source inspiration.  It was also the first teaming of the Harryhausen / Schneer duo with art director turned director Nathan Juran, who would direct a number of Schneer’s non-fantasy projects (Hellcats of the Navy, Good Day for a Hanging) as well as two future Harryhausen efforts (The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, First Men in the Moon) and even the Harryhausen / Schneer knock-off Jack the Giant Killer.

20 Million Miles to Earth, Harryhausen’s final feature in black and white, is a minor classic of the genre, only bogged down by the unevenness of the scripting.  The tale begins with a Quatermass-style event – the crash-landing of an exploratory spaceship, most of whose crew has already succumbed to a strange disease contracted during their investigation of Venus.  The only survivor is Colonel Robert Calder (William Hopper), who makes it his mission to track down a very special part of their cargo: a specimen of Venusian life that may hold the key to surviving exposure to the planet’s lethal atmosphere (the cause of the mysterious disease, which never spreads beyond the dead crewmen).

Unfortunately for Calder, the creature has already been found by a young Sicilian boy, who wastes no time in selling it to a traveling zoologist from Rome (the show-stealing Frank Puglia) for a cowboy hat.  By the time Calder catches up to the zoologist and his soon-to-be-doctor granddaughter Marisa (Joan Taylor, Earth vs. The Flying Saucers) the beast, exponentially growing due to the composition of our atmosphere, has already escaped into the countryside.  After an unfortunate encounter between the monster and a farmer, it is captured and taken to Rome, where it continues to grow . . . and grow . . . and grow . . .  until an inevitable laboratory accident allows it to escape once more, this time into the heart of a modern city.



There’s a lot of King Kong and Mighty Joe Young in 20 Million Miles to Earth, with the ostensibly peaceful Venusian Ymir finding itself out of place and increasingly terrorized in an unfamiliar landscape.  Special note is made of the creature’s atypically non-combative disposition, and that it only becomes dangerous when provoked.  This, of course, leads the human cast to provoke it, and endlessly, prodding it with sticks, beating it with shovels, stabbing it with pitchforks, shooting it, and eventually sedating it with electrocution (!).  Any statement about the belligerence of the fearful and greedy mankind, who only want the Ymir so that they can find a way to plunder Venus of its resources, is lost in the shuffle, and by the time the maddened creature awakens in Rome the story has devolved into typical monster-on-the-loose mode.  The rampage of the Ymir in Rome, including a battle with an elephant and a military confrontation around, in, and atop the Colosseum, makes for wonderful action but is emotionally hollow, and a final contemplative line (“Why is it always, always so costly for Man to move from the present to the future?”) feels every bit as tacked on as it is.

The rest of the dramatics are relatively inert, with much of the human story eaten-up in pursuit of the Ymir – a needless romantic subplot between Hopper and Taylor leads nowhere at all.  The dialogue of the Sicilian fishermen who open the story is stunningly bad and downright demeaning at times, the characters themselves never amounting to anything more than hairy-backed simple-minded caricatures.  The professional cast does well with the material provided, with Hopper delivering his second solid monster-film performance of the year (the other from the awful The Deadly Mantis, also directed by Juran).  Taylor does her best with an underwritten role, which comes complete with a archetypal hate-him then love-him romantic arc and a fleeting moment of sympathy for the monster.  The monster itself is, effectively, the lead of the story, let down in the end by the unimaginative writing.

Direction from Nathan Juran is taught and effective, and his compositions (particularly in the mid-film barn confrontation) harken to his past-career as an art director.  This is certainly the best photographed of Harryhausen’s early effects pictures, and it’s good to see Juran working with above-par material (his other genre work at the time involved outright groaners like The Deadly Mantis and laughably ludicrous programmers like Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman and The Brain From Planet Arous).  Mischa Bakaleinikoff delivers some interesting original monster themes, though Columbia’s array of stock music cues are wearing more than a little thin by this point.  Harryhausen and Schneer would team with legendary composer Bernard Herrmann for their next two outings, leaving Columbia’s stock library in the dust for good.



While the storytelling may be problematic, Harryhausen’s effects methods had did nothing but improve with 20 Million Miles to Earth.  The film features some of his finest moments as an animator, the birth of the Ymir and the later shadowy confrontation in the barn.  One memorable moment has the Ymir cornered before the door of a cage, pushing against its door as John Zaremba (Earth vs. The Flying Saucers) tries to close him in – the illusion is seamless.  After wrangling with distinctly inhuman antagonists for two films (a giant octopus and a fleet of flying saucers respectively), the humanoid Ymir offered Harryhausen an opportunity to impart his creation with genuine emotion.  The creature is entirely sympathetic, afraid and lost in an unknown world with man’s military might steadily closing in around him.  The final moments atop the Colosseum, with the Ymir struggling for a last few moments of life, are evocative of King Kong. Even with lackluster drama dragging it down, 20 Million Miles to Earth still stands tall as one of Harryhausen’s shining accomplishments.

20 Million Miles to Earth is the most fondly remembered of Harryhausen’s black and white work at Columbia, and was the first of his films to see Blu-ray release through Sony.  The 50th Anniversary Edition premiered in December of 2007, and was later collected with It Came From Beneath the Sea, Earth vs. The Flying Saucers, and The 7th Voyage of Sinbad into the Blu-ray-exclusive Ray Harryhausen Collection (a collector’s set of the 2-disc SD DVDs is available, but excludes The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, released individually in 2008).

As with It Came From Beneath the Sea and Earth vs. The Flying Saucers, Sony has included a colorized variant of 20 Million Miles to Earth as part of its special edition release.  While it has its effective moments (see the shot of the dying man in the hospital bed), the job is problematic overall.  The Ymir fares pretty poorly throughout, the colorization making the differences in contrast between foreground and background elements of the effects scenes all the more apparent.  Blips in the computerized colorization procedure are frequent (as they are on all of the colorized editions of Harryhausen’s films).  Colors often bleed outwards from where they’re intended to be (see the boy’s lower right cheek in the capture below, or Kenneth Tobey’s forehead and hairline in the night-time romantic shot from It Came From Beneath the Sea), and fade-ins are often outright ugly.  A prime example occurs at the very beginning of the picture, where the colors of the COLUMBIA logo pop in before the letters are there to support them.

Both variants of the film receive a fine 1080p, 1.85:1 transfer.  While a few moments are a tad iffy (a handful of the opening spaceship shots in particular), the transfers are fine overall.  Detail is strong throughout, and while grain is less prominent than in It Came From Beneath the Sea and Earth vs. The Flying Saucers (a result of using different film stock) it’s still present and welcomed.  Damage is light and the source elements for the picture look to be in great condition for their age.  Primary audio is presented in another splendid Dolby TrueHD 5.1 track that sounds very good to these ears, though the original monophonic mix is sadly absent.  A Dolby Digital 2.0 monophonic Spanish dub is included.  The feature is supported with a wide array of subtitles (see the details at the top of this article), with supplements receiving translations in Spanish and Portuguese.

The BD-Live enabled disc features a nice assortment of supplements, the main attractions of which will be the fine commentary track from Harryhausen and effects men Dennis Muren and Phil Tippet and the nice Remembering . . . featurette.  Other featurettes are repeated on the Blu-ray releases of It Came From Beneath the Sea and Earth vs. The Flying Saucers – the interview with Joan Taylor as well as the Tim Burton Sits Down With Ray Harryhausen and David Schecter On Film Music’s Unsung Hero featurettes.  The image galleries are fantastic, allowing one to see the Ymir’s many pre-film forms, though the included trailers – a Blu-ray ad and a spot for the Close Encounters of the Third Kind Ultimate Edition – are a disappointment.  There’s lots of talk about the colorized version of the film in the supplements, and that bothersome The Colorization Process advertisement, repeated on Earth vs. The Flying Saucers, makes its debut here.  All supplements appear to be 480p SD with the exception of the paltry previews.

Bland scripting can only bog a picture down so much with a Ymir about, and 20 Million Miles to Earth is still loads of fun.  This high definition package bests previous editions in the feature presentation department by a long shot, and Harryhausen’s effects still look stunning some 52 years after the fact.  I find myself highly recommending the Ray Harryhausen Collection again, though I’ve linked in to the individual Blu-ray list at the top of this article – I can’t imagine fans being truly disappointed with either.  20 Million Miles to Earth comes recommended.


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Earth vs. The Flying Saucers

Tuesday, February 9th, 2010

company: Columbia and
Clover Productions
year: 1956
runtime: 83′
country: United States
director: Fred F. Sears
cast: Hugh Marlowe, Joan Taylor,
Donald Curtis, Morris Ankrum,
John Zaremba, Thomas Browne Henry,
Grandon Rhodes, Larry J. Blake
writers: Bernad Gordan, Curt Siodmak
and George Worthing Yates
cinematography: Fred Jackman Jr.
music: Mischa Bakaleinikoff
visual effects: Ray Harryhausen
disc company: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment
release date: October 7th, 2008
retail price: $107.95
(Blu-ray only available as part of The
Ray Harryhausen Collection 4-film set)
disc details: region free / dual layer BD50
video: 1080p / 1.85:1 / b/w + colorized
audio: Dolby TrueHD 5.1 surround (English)
Dolby Digital 2.0 mono (French)
subtitles: English, English SDH, Spanish,
Portuguese, French, Hindi, Arabic, Japanese
(Portuguese, French, Spanish, Japanese
for supplemental content)
special features: audio commentary with
Ray Harryhausen, Remembering Earth vs. The
Flying Saucers featurette, The Hollywood Blacklist
and Bernard Gordon featurette, Original screenplay
credits, Interview with Joan Taylor, photo galleries,
Colorization demo, Sneak peak of Flying Saucers
vs. The Earth comic book, trailers (It Came From
Beneath the Sea, 20 Million Miles to Earth,
The 7th Voyage of Sinbad)
order this film from Amazon.com:
2-disc SD DVD | 4-disc Blu-ray Collection

Plot: Earth is attacked by a fleet of flying saucers from a disintegrated solar system.

The second collaborative effort between producer Charles H. Schneer, still under contract to Sam Katzman and here working under his Clover Productions banner, and visual effects artist Ray Harryhausen is another formulaic science fiction programmer elevated to near-classic status by its labor-intensive effects production.  The picture was another big success for Columbia and Sam Katzman, who released it on a double bill with the even cheaper The Werewolf (a memorably grim horror noir from director Fred F. Sears).  Earth vs. The Flying Saucers would be Schneer’s final film as a Katzman underling, and 1957 would see the release of his first two independently produced efforts – Hellcats of the Navy starring Arthur Franz and Ronald Reagan and the genre classic 20 Million Miles to Earth.

Earth vs. The Flying Saucers is well-paced if utterly derivative, and follows newlyweds Dr. Russell Marvin (Hugh Marlowe, the Judas of The Day the Earth Stood Still) and secretary Carol (Joan Taylor, 20 Million Miles to Earth).  Both are employed in the Air Force’s top-secret Operation Sky-hook satellite program, which has encountered an odd problem.  None of the satellites are staying in orbit as they should, all having mysteriously crashed back to Earth shortly after their launch.  A few strange encounters and a full-on ray gun attack later, the culprits in the odd disappearances are revealed: a civilization from a dead solar system has set its sights on the planet Earth, which they hope to conquer through the shear obviousness of their technological superiority alone.  Dr. Marvin and his fellow Earthlings are understandably displeased with the invader’s imperialist intentions, and rush to perfect a new anti-saucer weapon before time runs out.

The screenplay by Curt Siodmak, George Worthing Yates and blacklisted writer Bernard Gordon (Hellcats of the Navy, Day of the Triffids, Krakatoa: East of Java – the authors name, originally listed as Raymond T. Marcus, has been restored in the opening credits of Sony’s latest release of this film) is a mish-mash of original and judiciously absorbed ideas from previous efforts strung together with a little drama and a lot of military hearings and scientific exposition.  The notion of intellectually superior and physically frail extraterrestrials invading the less-advanced Earth dates back to Wells’ 1898 novel The War of the Worlds, while several moments throughout – a General (Morris Ankrum, of course) commenting on the electronic screens protecting the invaders, an examination of some of their optical equipment – are culled from George Pal’s big-budget 1953 adaptation of the same.

A misunderstanding that leads to the death of the alien’s first Earth delegate harkens to Wise’s 1951 classic The Day the Earth Stood Still, as does a mid-picture show of force by the invaders, who cut all manner of Earthly communication in preparation for their final attack.  Then there are the interiors of the saucers themselves, the extraterrestrials’ pontifications of the vast speeds at which they travel, and even the closing lines (“. . . such a nice world.  I’m glad it’s still here.”), all of which are rather reminiscent of Universal’s color spectacle This Island Earth from the previous year.  Derivative as it may be, the film has proven to be quite inspirational as well.  Toho’s Monster Zero follows the same basic plot elements right down to the truck-mounted anti-saucer rays, and Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks! makes too many direct homages to it for me to even begin to list them here.



Earth vs. The Flying Saucers bypasses the standard romantic arc that dominated so many of its predecessors, beginning with a married couple who have gotten that troublesome love-finding out of the way before the film has even begun.  Hugh Marlowe and Joan Taylor make a believable couple and solid enough foundation for the rest of the picture to rest upon, though precious little screen time is given to their relationship.  Most of the running time is devoted to military meetings (disbelieving Generals and all) and that 50s genre perspective of the scientific process, complete with the obligatory cost-cutting stock footage montages and a newsreel-style narration (perhaps It Came From Beneath the Sea’s William Woodson again, though the IMDB lists his credit as “unconfirmed”).  Fred F. Sears does what he always did best, making the most of the meager finances and drama that was handed to him, and fills the screen with his trademark mis-en-scene, with actors stacked deep into shots and almost menacing shadows cast on the walls of mundane locations.  I’ve always been a fan of Sears’ work, visually if not substantively, but his position as one of Katzman’s most prolific work-horse would shuffle him off the mortal coil just a year later – dead of cerebral hemorrhage at the age of 44.

The film certainly did nothing to hurt Harryhausen’s budding film career, and his carefully animated flying saucers would easily usurp those from The Day the Earth Stood Still and This Island Earth to become the most iconic of the decade.  The aliens themselves, stuffed in clunky rounded suits made of “solidified electricity”, may be anemic, but the saucers in which they fly are alive brimming with menace – he can’t seem to resist giving even these inanimate machines a distinct personality.  The animation is a fine example of the classic Harryhausen style, the saucers delicately weaving back and forth, each motion counterbalanced against another to give the illusion of suspended weight.  It all works amazingly well, and count me as one of those who is amazed, even today, at the actual size of the saucer models.  Imperfections are more obvious now some 20 years since I first saw the picture, imperfect matte lines or jitteriness of elements within the frame, but many of the tricks, like the model of the capitol dome inserted above a photo plate of the rest of the building, are seamless.

I continue to find immense satisfaction in Sony’s Blu-ray Ray Harryhausen Collection, which has given me a much-needed excuse to catch up on four of the films I was raised on.  Like the previously reviewed It Came From Beneath the Sea, Sony has opted to make their Blu-ray of Earth vs. The Flyings Saucers available only as a part of their 4-disc Blu-ray collection.  As with that film, a 2-disc special edition SD DVD with the same supplemental content is individually available and has been linked to at the top of this article.



Like the other two black and white features in the Ray Harryhausen Collection, a Harryhausen-endorsed colorized version of Earth vs. The Flying Saucers has been included along with the original black and white.  While technology has obviously improved since digital colorization was introduced in the 80s, the end product still looks very much like what it is.  Some hues still look bad, and reds are rendered particularly poorly here (an American flag looks dull and pastel, while a briefly glimpsed stop sign is nearly pink).  Skin tones continue to be an issue, with one character (the military man standing next to Morris Ankrum as they gaze out of the control tower at an approaching saucer) is cast in a ghastly yellow.  In spite of the Harryhausen endorsement and the preponderance for discussion of the topic in the commentary, the black and white original is clearly the way to see the film.

Transfer-wise, this is another strong effort.  The 1080p 1.85:1 image presents with tremendous detail and beautiful contrast (see the image of Morris Ankrum’s troubled face), with a healthy layer of grain present throughout.  Damage in the original footage of this popular attraction is limited to speckling here and there, with stock shots varying from pristine to battered – just as they were when the film was released.  Harryhausen’s extensive effects work looks fantastic, only improving with the increased scrutiny the HD transfer allows for.  Audio is presented in another excellent Dolby TrueHD 5.1 surround track, and the recording sounds like it could have been made yesterday (from Columbia’s canned effects library, of course).  A Dolby Digital 2.0 monophonic French dub is available as well.  Subtitling options are extensive on this region-free disc, with additional French, Spanish, Portuguese and Japanese translations available for the supplements.

As with It Came From Beneath the Sea, supplements here are stacked.  The package begins with another fun commentary from Harryhausen, this time joined by fellow effects artists Jeffrey Okun and Ken Ralston.  Aside from the frequent “oohs” and “aahs” over how wonderful the colorization job looks, this is a great track – well worth a listen.  Next up are a series of featurettes totaling around 70 minutes, including a retrospective of the film, a piece dedicated to blacklisted writer Bernard Gordon, and an interview with co-star Joan Taylor, who seems positively delighted that she’ll be remembered for her performances in two of Harryhausen and Schneer’s effects pictures.  The original opening credits for the film, complete with the Raymond T. Marcus credit, are included here for posterity.  We get another Harryhausen inspired comic preview, this time for Flying Saucers vs. The Earth, as well as a collection of trailers and image galleries.  The trailer for this film is, again, strangely omitted, though it is available on other discs in the set.  A little bothersome is The Colorization Process, which plays a bit too much like a late-night infomercial for Legend Film’s services and is entirely skippable.

While probably the weakest of the four films available in the Ray Harryhausen Collection, Earth vs. The Flying Saucers was none-the-less influential and remains a fun, if dated, science fiction programmer.  Harryhausen’s meticulous one-man effects production makes the upgrade to HD a no-brainer, just one more reason to pick up the full collection.  Earth vs. The Flying Saucers comes recommended.


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