Quatermass 2

An Overshot
In The Dark

Quatermass 2
aka Enemy From Space
UK 1957
Directed by Val Guest
Hammer/Shout Factory Blu Ray Zone A

Warning: Spoilers covering you and burning your skin.

Quatermass 2 was the second of the British company Hammer’s adaptations of the great Nigel Kneale’s first three Quatermass serials for the BBC. It’s widely said that the film was the first movie to use the Arabic numeral to denote its sequel status, something I’ve long been suspicious of but I’m happy to regurgitate that information in the hopes that someone will properly confirm or deny (it used to be denoted as the first film to use a number denoting its sequel - period - but, some time ago, when I pointed out to people that films such as Kurosawa’s second Sanshiro Sugata also used a numeral... well... I noticed the Wikipedia article on this version has at some point changed the distinction to be the first to use the Arabic numeral 2... still not sure of the truth of that though).

Hammer originally wanted to make their, pretty entertaining, movie X - The Unknown the first Quatermass sequel but Kneale, who had nothing to do with that story, refused to license his characters to them and so they had to change the character names before they went into production on it (you can read my review of that one here). After his disappointment at the cuts and treatment of his first Quatermass serial as adapted by Hammer (he would never autograph anything to do with the first movie), Kneale was able to negotiate being properly involved with working on the script for this second one. Nevertheless, there are still a lot of cuts and lots of story points very condensed... including key characters removed. Having said that, two characters, one of the Professor’s sidekicks and, also, Inspector Lomax were carried over from the first film. Goodness knows why because the two actors for those roles were replaced... which is a shame because I would have liked to see the redoubtable Jack Warner back as Lomax.

Brian Donlevy returns as Professor Quatermass on this one, something else Kneale hated about the productions but, he does an adequate, if gruff, job in the role (still the only actor to play the character twice on film... Andrew Kier would play the role only once on film but would also return, decades later, to play him again on the radio).

This one is probably my least favourite of the Quatermass stories but, that doesn’t stop it from being an exceptionally good serial and a reasonably great movie too. In this one, Quatermass stumbles on someone near a village called Winnerden Flats, having taken ill after coming into contact with a falling meteor, what the locals at work on a top secret ‘government project’ call an ‘overshot’. Quatermass sees something alive jump from one of these and disable his colleague before said colleague is abducted and Quatermss ‘aggressively evicted’ from the place by a kind of zombie police force from the plant. Also, the plant is an exact replica of the working model that Quatermass has been using to plan the worlds first moon colony. It’s not long before he, Lomax (played in this one quite adequately by John Longden, who does bear a passing resemblance to Warner, I guess) and ace newshound Jimmy Hall (played by the famous Hancock and Carry On comedian Sidney James) team up to try and stop this threat, which involves toxic aliens infiltrating the government and building habitable atmospheres for themselves on Earth, where they can gradually take over the human population.

Rounding out the main cast are such stalwarts as Bryan Forbes, William Franklyn and, of course, the late, great Michael Ripper. Ripper would also have a bigger role in the original serial version of Quatermass And The Pit (reviewed here) the following year (he was also in X - The Unknown, of course).

And it’s good stuff and, while not as creepy as the first one, still packs a strong punch such as, when one of the government men Quatermass talks to in order to get them inside the plant is covered and burned in the toxic sludge that comprises the alien beings from a tank, his black and smouldering body making its way slowly from the top of one of the domes via a staircase, to die at Quatermass’ feet. Another hard hitting moment is when Britain’s beloved comedian Sid James is machine gunned to death at a bar by some of the human hosted alien zombies... I talk about this moment in my article, The Seven Deadly Great Violent Comedian Death Scenes (right here).

Quatermass 2 is a great movie though, despite being my least favourite (which just goes to show how incredible the others are). It’s a shame that the whole, long sequence where one of the professor’s colleagues takes a rocket into space to fight the aliens on their own craft was jettisoned in this version. Instead, it’s been replaced by William Franklyn dying in a hail of machine gun fire but just managing to launch a rocket aimed at the aliens to explode on impact. Overall though, there’s really nothing bad about the film and it’s a pretty solid sci-fi horror movie (just like all the other Quatermass productions). Perhaps it’s the one most overlooked but that doesn’t make it any less potent and fans of Kneale and his best known character should definitely enjoy both the original serial and this condensed movie version, for sure.