At the beginning of 2 Fast 2 Furious, cop-cum-drag-racer Brian O'Connor (Paul Walker) has relocated to Florida in mild disgrace after letting the Vin Diesel character escape at the end of The Fast and the Furious. When his comedy boss from the first film shows up again, he has a chance to clean his record if he'll undertake one last undercover job, as a driver for flamboyant Miami crime kingpin Carter Verone (Cole Hauser). As his partner, he ropes in boyhood friend Roman Pearce (Tyrese), an ex-con who officially hates him for becoming a cop but is soon revving up the old male-bonding licks as they start burning rubber in a succession of high-octane chase and crash sequences that show off muscle cars in cockatoo colours.

Though Diesel is gone from the franchise, 2 Fast 2 Furious doesn't miss him--the human beings are mostly there to decorate the machines, with pretty girls and boys wearing chassis-accentuating outfits and spouting a hip-hop translation of what seems like an action-movie script from 1938. The baddie is nasty (especially when using the old rat-in-a-hot-bucket torture), the people are decorative, the music is as loud as the engine roar, the cars are like big clunky toys and director John Singleton can stage dangerous driving as expertly as anyone. It won't get anyone's brain in gear, but it delivers its adrenalin rushes as required.--Kim Newman

Notable neither for its director nor its stars, 20 Million Miles to Earth has been given the widescreen spit 'n' polish treatment because of its special-effects man, the legendary Ray Harryhausen. And it's his work here that makes this daft slice of hokum so watchable. When a group of Italian boat fishermen investigate a crash-landed space rocket returned from a trip to Venus, they find one surviving all-American hero and an alien in aspic: the Emere, a tiny homunculus hungry for sulphur and growing faster than a teenager on steroids. Cue man-vs-alien mayhem, screenfuls of avuncular patriarchs and the gratuitous destruction of Rome.

A by-numbers B-movie, Harryhausen's sixth feature isn't a patch on his later Technicolor masterpieces, but the unusual Italian setting ("I wanted a trip to Europe") adds an exotic quality and his effects are as solid and convincing as ever. The film only really begins to crackle when his stop-motion creation is onscreen. Like a scaly King Kong, he's as likely to engender sympathy as fear: surely anyone who's been bombed, blasted, burnt, electrocuted, shot at by trigger-happy squaddies and involved in a punch-up with a pachyderm is entitled to lose their rag a little. And fans will enjoy spotting in the Emere the flowerings of Harryhausen's later and greater creations, Sinbad's Cyclops and The Titans' Calibos and Kraken. The denouement, with the creature atop the Colosseum, is as effective as that of Kong's. It wasn't beauty who killed the beast here, however, it was bombs.

On the DVD: 20 Million Miles to Earth's black and white picture is clean and crisp in this anamorphic 1.85:1 widescreen transfer, and the Dolby digital mono soundtrack is clear enough. The theatrical trailer will please fans of kitsch, as will the featurette "This Is Dynamation" produced at the same time as the first Sinbad movie. The real corker here, though, is the generously lengthed documentary "The Harryhausen Chronicles". Narrated by Leonard Nimoy, this features a stellar cast of devotees (George Lucas among them) waxing lyrical about the influence of Harryhausen's films, and allows the man himself to ramble fascinatingly over clips of his filmic canon. The claw-slash menu marker is a nice touch, too. If you're a fan, this disc is Harryhausen heaven. --Paul Eisinger