This is a simple enough film. Rocket returning from Venus crashes near Sicily and a foetal thing grows to become a giant lizardy humanoid type thing. The acting is ordinary and the script predictable.

What makes it better than average for a 1950s monster movie is the Ray Harryhausen animated Venusian, called a Ymir here. Photographed in atmospheric black and white, its progress from small caged creature to being loose and dangerous on the streets of Rome and fighting an elephant is engrossing. You can't help rooting for the Ymir, attacked along the way by dogs and soldiers. The Ymir becomes a character like Frankenstein's creation or the Creature from the Black Lagoon. Excellent work by Harryhausen, and far more interesting than the CGI dinosaurs from Spielberg's over praised (and underwhelming) Jurassic Park trilogy.

Don't get me wrong, it's an enjoyable flick, but it typecasts humans *perfectly*, for the asshats they usually are.

This is the King Kong epic, only with a reptilian "ape" kidnapped from Venus, not some obscure tropical isle. And of course, "humanity" wins by murdering the creature when it proves to be inconvenient.

I'm hoping the purpose of the flick was to be a sort of expose', rather than rooting for the "good guys" to kill the "bad" creature, and if so, this hits the mark dead-on.

The unfortunate creature, Ymir, is taken from his native Venus as an egg, where he later hatches into a cute little lizard-critter. But of course, the "scientists" react by grabbing, capturing, and caging the little critter, to be experimented on, without even wondering what it needs as far as food, water, etc. And the nerve to call it "so ugly"... like it'd think the pink squishy things imprisoning it were paragons of beauty?? Okay, Joan Taylor is seriously hot, but still...

So, when Ymir can *finally* escape, all he does is grunt at his captors and wanders off, never so much as touches them. Only when provoked does he react in anger; they even *say so*! He wants to eat, gets attacked by a dog, and only then gives the dog a beat-down. He gets repeatedly attacked, and only when pitchforked in the back does he attack his attacker. He's electrocuted and recaptured, experimented on some more, and only through human incompetence is able to escape again. But from there, he's met with guns, flamethrowers(!), tanks, all sorts of weaponry. Finally, in his last-ditch effort to escape by just blindly climbing to nowhere in particular, he's howitzered and finally murdered. Yes, murdered.

Yay, "humanity".

So then, finally, can the gorgeous almost-doctor and square-jawed military-dood go have a nice quiet meal in a dark cafe. Gives ya the warm-fuzzies just allllll over.

Again, I'm really hoping that was the intent of the movie, to show humans in the light they've earned throughout history. Maybe it'd be a wake-up call to some. We can only hope.

Put em' back where you found him! That's the only solution to this issue, bringing a creature from Venus down to earth in order to study how they can survive on Venus's atmosphere. Of course, if some Earthling was pulled off this planet by a Martian or any other planet for the same reason (or any reason), they wouldn't like it either. This all starts in the coast off of Sicily where a space craft suddenly plunges into the sea as fisherman watch. Two of them and one of their younger sons head to the craft to help rescue any possible survivors, not even sure if they are going to be earthlings. Fortunately, their gamble pays off, but the little boy finds a remnant from the ship which he turns over to a local scientist and his daughter (Joan Taylor) for examination. This object contains a monstrous looking creature from Venus which starts off as arms length but quickly grows thanks to the earth's atmosphere, soon traipsing all over Italy and ending up in Rome where it takes a tour of the grounds where Nero once fiddled and Caligula once tortured Christians. By this time, he's the size of Godzilla and not at all happy that the military (mostly American) won't leave him alone.

Superb in every aspect (with a few goofs that only today's audiences would pick up on thanks to advanced special effects that just aren't as fun as what Ray Harryhausen does here), this roars by in under 90 minutes and is filled with so many great sequences that to mention just a few would be a detriment to those who have not seen it before. Still, to see this sad creature being tracked, almost electrocuted and placed in solitary confinement, and finally, breaking out of the zoo and battling an elephant, you can't help but be touched by it. When the creature does finally find some seclusion, it's in the middle of Rome's famous Colosseum where even there he can't find peace. William Hopper's surviving astronaut seems compassionate to the poor creature but, knowing it's too late to take them back to their home planet, is resolved to the fact that he's going to either have to kill it or watch the earth be destroyed by it. His acknowledgment that through every advancement mankind makes, the costs are greater, is one of the great theories of our times, and one which should wake today's audiences up to how we further destroy ourselves and potentially our own planet and species, through messing in science where we should just leave it alone.