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.

The Quatermass Xperiment

Bernard Offerings

The Quatermass Xperiment
1955 UK
Directed by Val Guest
Shock Blu Ray Zone B (Australian)

The Quatermass Experiment, the original TV show on which the Hammer adaptation The Quatermass Xperiment (with no ‘E’) was based, was quite a phenomenon in the UK. I remember my dad telling me when I were a lad that the power went out in some areas of the United Kingdom on the last episode’s broadcast because of the amount of people rolling in from the pub and turning their television sets on to catch the latest installment. My parents also used to talk about a really big plant they had, well before my time, which the family had called Victor, named after the Victor Caroon character in this first Quatermass adventure.

I also remember that, when I saw this at around the age of six or seven years old, staying up for a late night TV showing, it was this film rather than the various Universal and Hammer Dracula and Frankenstein movies (which I could handle with no problem), which actually gave me nightmares and kept me up at night. Although the genius storyteller Nigel Kneale’s original script was completely condensed and rewritten for the Hammer adaptation, there was still the compelling concept which haunted the mind after the film had finished, at least when you’re a kid, and so it’s little wonder that this and the third movie, Quatermass And The Pit (reviewed by me here), broke me out in a cold sweat during the middle of the night, as a child.

I’ve since seen the remaining, surviving two episodes of the original serial when they were screened a few years ago at the BFI and, of course, on the subsequent DVD release of those surviving episodes... plus the sequel serials. The original, from what I could tell, was quite a different beast in that the whole idea of Quatermass “talking down” a creature that had the consciousness of his previous, absorbed colleagues was kind of lost in the film version. And, of course, in the way the lead protagonist was played... Nigel Kneale’s own hatred for this production and, in particular, of Brian Donlevy’s “out of character”, bullying version of the good Professor is fairly well documented.

This doesn’t, in any way, make it a bad movie, however. Far from it in fact. It’s one of the great triumphs of 1950s British sci-fi/horror and, if it hadn’t had been, then none of the sequels would have been made. If you’re wondering, by the way, why the movie version has such a funny spelling to it, it’s because the distributors were playing on the fact that after the introduction of the X certificate (replacing the H certificate) in 1951, this was one of the very first homegrown products to bear the rating (many say the first but I believe there’s a lot of argument still about that and I really would like to see some better, or at least credibly clear cut, research and eveidence on that issue).

The film itself, as the original serial did, starts off as one of that particular genre of great detective fiction variants... the “locked room mystery”... although I don’t remember ever seeing it credited as such, to be honest. Nevertheless, it is one and the initial basic and compelling mystery... how did two of three astronauts in a spacecraft disappear from a locked spaceship with the suits still left behind and linked to the ship... is itself a lead in to the escape of an alien/human hybrid creature when the film goes into police/procedural manhunt territory for the second part of the story... as the surviving but silent astronaut, Victor Caroon, begins to absorb and consume various plants and people until he turns into a deadly tentacle monster capable of destroying the Earth.

And of course, if you’re going to go on a manhunt, who better to have with you than Dixon of Dock Green himself. Yes, Jack Warner plays Inspector Lomax who, along with Quatermass’ help, runs the creature down to some scaffolding at Alexandra Palace where a live television performance is being transmitted... much to the dismay of a young Gordon Jackson as the show’s producer.

This film got its reputation, and its popularity, because it’s well acted... everyone is deadly serious and you can easily suspend your disbelief when you see reactions and deductions made by such a hard working bunch of characters... and also because the direction is superb. Val Guest does some incredibly atmospheric stuff here including a shot where he carries on a conversation between two people by just listening in on them off screen as his camera focuses through a window in the next room and we catch Victor suddenly sitting up to full consciousness while his wife sleeps. The tension created by the fact that we know something is going to happen and the bickering of the conversation really works and it’s such things like this, which serve to highlight what might otherwise be considered minimal horror, that really make The Quatermass Xperiment worth watching.

There’s a wonderful sequence where Quatermass and co are finally watching the film developed during the spaceflight of the rocket that was sent up before crashing back to earth at the start of the movie, and tension is ratcheted up because every now and again the camera cuts out deliberately to save film on the journey... so that is used as a device to create tension between glimpses of “what happened”, which is vague anyway (to say the least) and also to create pace for the playback, of course... all the boring bits are cut out and we just get the highlights.

In terms of composition it’s also a very attractive package. The black and white 4 by 3 aspect ratio is very well accommodated by director Guest, who does some interesting things including using the actors heights to suggest diagonals. In one particular case, when tests are being done on Victor, he uses the seated subject framed by three other people of verying heights to make a V shape which is then disrupted by the camera following two of the characters. When just those two characters come back onto shot with Victor, we get an inverted V shape as a kind of visual answer to the shot a minute or so before... very nice.

There’s also a brilliant moment where Quatermass is investigating inside the crashed rocket and he turns the handle of a hatch and the Dutch angle that the director has been shooting from rights itself  to rotate to a normal angle in time with the motion. Guest also uses some “point of view” shots from the monster’s perspective at one point... probably not an innovation at the time but I’m guessing it wasn’t a common choice either... at least in terms of British made monster movies of the time.

This is all good stuff and the minimal but excellent scoring by someone who would become one of Hammer’s leading composers, James Bernard, fits the film perfectly... possibly sounding a little over the top to modern ears but never really breaking the mood. In one specific scene the composer really scores (if you’ll pardon the pun) by pitching the music in a shrill wail which drowns out while continuing and emphasising the screams of Victor’s wife in the car as Victor reveals his hand has turned into a giant, lethal, cactus like thingamajig. This is powerful stuff and tends to jump right into the subconscious... I confess this is about the tenth time I’ve watched the movie in my life and I only noticed he was doing it this time around.

What more can be said? The Quatermass serials and, to a lesser extent on a national level, the big screen adaptations of them, were a huge influence on British viewing habits and it’s probable that without the original version of The Quatermass Experiment, the climate which produced such long running shows as Doctor Who would never have been there... so it’s an important work, far beyond the mere fact that it’s as entertaining and effective as hell as a great piece of 1950s sci-fi/horror hybrid. Shows like the aforementioned Doctor Who still, to this day, slip in references to the Quatermass legacy and American director John Carpenter also acknowledges this influence from time to time.

Bernard Quatermass is one of Britain’s greatest science fiction characters and this Hammer adaptation called The Quatermass Xperiment, originally known in the US as The Creeping Unknown at the time of it’s release over there in 1956, is the movie version that brought him to the attention of the outside world. The original sequel was stopped by Kneale as a genuine sequel and character names changed before the rights to Kneale’s second serial in the series, imaginatively titled Quatermass 2, was put into production. The film originally intended as a sequel went ahead anyway with Dean Jagger in the role of.... ahem... Doctor Adam Royston and my review of that production, X - The Unknown, can be found here.

If you’re a fan of science fiction or horror and you’ve never seen any of the Quatermass films or serials, then you should probably be ashamed of yourself but you should definitely make amends and seek this stuff out as quickly as possible. There’s a reason why films like this have become classics and it’s all up there on the screen. Scary stuff when you’re just a kid... creepy enough when you’re a little older.