Most of the time I felt rather like one of those movie dinosaurs that wrecks a city. This dubious genre has always been a great favourite of mine, despite the fact that they are all exceedingly bad films. No one ever made a good one. Weak stories, wooden acting, dreadfully unconvincing special effects—these are the primary features of these films. I love them all deeply. And it’s not hard to see why.
    At the time, the latest addition to this sorry collection was called Twenty Million Miles to Earth and concerned a creature accidentally brought back to earth by a deep space mission. The space ship crashes in the Mediterranean and the creature escapes into modern Italy. The monster is bewildered and disoriented by all it encounters, but that, of course, is an experience shared by all tourists to that remarkably confusing and excitable part of the world. The point here is that the creature is neither dangerous nor malevolent—all the trouble is caused by the panicky reaction of the humans when they encounter this ugly, giant beast and nobody overreacts and panics excessively as do Italians. It is a startling exercise in xenophobia, an escalating tragedy played out with all sympathy residing with the monster, which ends up fighting elephants in Rome and falls to its death from the wall of the Colosseum.
    And I was with it all the way, and understood exactly how frustrated it felt.