This contemporary continuation of a 1957 SF film demonstrates that sometimes it's better to leave well enough alone. 20 Million Miles to Earth
is remembered fondly not for its wooden acting or pedestrian script but for Harryhausen's wonderful stop-motion animation of the Ymir, a savage reptile-man from Venus that keeps doubling in size until humans blast it off the top of the Coliseum in Rome. Unfortunately, the Ymir isn't an especially interesting character. It's just a dumb monster whose main personality trait is a very bad temper. To spin a new story out of Harryhausen's working sketches, the creators are forced to toss in chunks of Indiana Jones
, Alien
and a slew of bad monster movies in hopes that something will stick together to serve as the basis of a plot. It doesn't work, and the result is silly mush, sprinkled with mystical-ecological gibberish. Garcia's art is competent if a bit stiff while Campos's coloring is surprisingly pretty good. (May)
