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

2000 AD reunites Aaron Kwok and Andrew Lin from the ferociously pyrotechnic Black Sheep Affair (1998) for a slick but muddled Hong Kong/Singapore co-production conspiracy thriller about computer espionage. Kwok and Lin make fine adversaries, and have one excellent martial arts battle on a vertigo-inducing rooftop. Otherwise the action involves powerfully staged Heat-style gun play rather than martial arts, one set-piece car chase/shoot-out being strongly influenced by the Riviera pursuit in Ronin (1997). Beginning as a serious thriller, Kwok's nerdish computer games designer transforms into an invulnerable action hero, and any sense of plausibility is sacrificed for regulation mayhem. Cluttered with more characters than it knows what to do with, 2000 AD combines aspects of The Net (1995) and Entrapment (1999) into a largely nonsensical plot. Lin's villain is given vital information which later he is completely ignorant of. We never find out exactly what he is planning, or who he is really working for, and in one mystifying sequence he crashes the Singapore stock exchange, yet the event has absolutely no effect on anything. Though the cast is engaging and the direction polished the finale is an anti-climax, symptomatic of a highly entertaining movie which promises more than it delivers.

On the DVD: The 1.77:1 anamorphically enhanced transfer is clean and generally free from grain; the Dolby Digital 5.1 audio is as powerful as any heard on a Hong Kong movie, although listen though headphones and a fair degree of background hiss is clearly audible in the quiet scenes. The film can be viewed with the original Cantonese dialogue and English subtitles, or dubbed into English. Either way, a surprisingly large amount of the original dialogue is in English. There is a 19-minute "making of" documentary, though this is bland made-for-television promotional fare. Much better is the 14-minute interview with director Gordon Chan and a 17-minute interview with Andrew Lin who reveals how once shooting had begun his originally heroic part was re-written to make him the villain, thus explaining why the plot makes so little sense. Best of all is the commentary by Chan and Hong Kong film expert Bey Logan, which is packed with information about the movie, Hong Kong cinema and filmmaking in general. By itself it makes the DVD a worthwhile purchase. --Gary S Dalkin