Quatermass

The Stone Ranger

Quatermass
aka Quatermass IV
aka The Quatermass Conclusion
Airdate: 24 October - 14 November 1979
Directed by Piers Haggard,
Network Region B Blu Ray
Four Episodes

Warning: The big spoiler is here.

“Huffity, puffity, Ringstone Round,
If you lose your hat it will never be found,
So pull your britches right up to your chin,
And fasten your cloak with a bright new pin,
And when you are ready, then we can begin,
Huffity, puffity, puff, puff!
Huffity, puffity, puff!”
Ringstone Round Nursery Rhyme from Quatermass


It had been 21 years since the last Quatermass serial, Quatermass And The Pit (reviewed by me here) had aired and 12 years since the last Quatermass movie, Quatermass And The Pit (reviewed by me here) had played at the cinema. So longer than all my life when, as an 11 year old, Quatermass was first shown on TV. Of course, I was a great admirer of the Quatermass movies from constant showings on television... the first and third ones always terrified me as a kid and I’m glad to say that this fourth adventure equally scared and haunted me.

Penned once again by the great Nigel Kneale, he’d tried to get ‘Quatermass IV’ produced by the BBC many years before but it fizzled out and I believe he didn’t work for them for a while after that (returning only after a few more decades for a Quatermass radio serial and another TV adaptation of the first Quatermass story). So this amazing writer defected to ITV, it seems to me... taking Quatermass with him. I don’t believe it was an accident that the producer of this show was the great Verity Lambert either.... another visionary of a sort.

This one takes place in what was then the UKs ‘near future’... and so this one is the serial that dates itself the most. A bleak Britain similar to the post-apocalyptic shambles of the Mad Max and other films... where roving gangs attack you on the street while the government breaks down and hides. It is in this environment that an ageing Quatermass, played by the acting legend who was John Mills, comes to London to take part in a TV broadcast, if he can make it to the studio before getting mugged by a roving gang. Fortunately, another guest going to the show, Joe Kapp, played by Simon MacCorkindale, rescues him but, during the broadcast about a new space project, the project is destroyed, sideswiped by an energy beam... by something which Quatermass and the others will have to find a way to defeat as soon as possible.

Has this got something to do with the pseudo-hippy (but definitely not peaceful) cult of youths called planet people? Quatermass is trying to find his granddaughter, who has run off to join them. But they go around following ley lines, chanting, smashing up scientific equipment and, as now starts to happen... and the sideswipe on the space station is a symptom of this... the youths get ‘taken’ at different times at various stone circles around the world. And also places which used to have stone circles at any rate (like Wembley Stadium... which is still standing in this fictional version of the near future). And when I say taken, they are mostly destroyed and not, as the planet people believe, taken to a new planet. Something is harvesting the youth of the human race, spilling the remains into the atmosphere (turning the sky green by episode four), extracting what it needs and then returning, every few thousand years. Quatermass believes the alien intelligence (this is just a machine) left markers on the earth to shoot the ‘collection beams’ to and ancient humans marked them as ‘bad places’ by building stone circles.

Okay, that’s a very stripped down summary but that’s the basic set up and it’s actually, despite having a lot of scenes of people just talking and exploring ideas, absolutely fascinating and, frankly, terrifying. Kneale is, as you would expect, not afraid to kill off regular characters and innocent bystanders (even Joe Kapp’s wife and two young kids get destroyed by the beam) and the whole thing moves along at a pace. John Mills is brilliant playing Quatermass and, watching the performance and the way it’s written now (on something like my fifth viewing after the original broadcast, the repeat broadcast, the VHS tape, the DVD and now the already extinct Blu Ray* from the equally extinct Network video company), I realise that he does, indeed, show that undercurrent of remorseless, ruthless zeal that was captured in some of the earlier portrayals of the character. Yes, he’s a kindly old man but he’s not above ‘using’ the lone survivor of one of the culls for study purposes and he takes each death in his stride... he is first and foremost the scientist who will stop at nothing to understand and, in this case, try to set a trap that, unfortunately for fans of the Quatermass stories, needs to be sprung from inside the trap itself.

It’s a remarkable serial, certainly not the best of the serials but neither is it the worst (and they’re all pretty darn good anyway). I remember the subtle, camera glimpses which didn’t dwell (possibly so the props wouldn’t lose their effect under scrutiny) of the half melted bodies of those that got caught in the alien beam and got ‘left behind’ (aka not totally destroyed). And there’s the flashy set piece where the surviving, half demented girl levitates from her hospital bed before promptly exploding. It’s all good stuff and, like Quatermass And The Pit, which mixed science fiction with old local legends, a definite entry into the folk horror genre... one of the best, I would say.

It also has a very eerie score which never saw the light of day on a commercial release, mores the pity, by Nic Rowley and Mark Wilkinson... a simple synthesiser score but one that really gets under the skin with its strange, haunting qualities. Also, if you want to see pop star Toyah as a planet person, machine gunned down by her own leader, then this is the show for you.

And of course there’s that great ending, the beam comes to the simulated bait of millions of youths (Quatermass and his team of geriatric scientists have come up with a synthesised signature of youth) and Quatermass is reunited with his granddaughter for a few seconds, but has a heart attack... so she helps him thump the button which explodes a nuclear bomb as the beam starts its work, taking them both with it. Not killing whatever alien intelligence has been harvesting the planet of the youth of society (who are drawn to the long buried marker points) but giving it a warning sting... the best he could hope for. So, yeah, that’s the end of Professor Bernard Quatermass, sacrificing himself for humanity (some might say it’s a play for redemption) in a nuclear bomb blast.

But not the end of the character completely...  a radio show bridging the first three serials and this one (starring Andrew Kier, from the movie version o the third serial) was later produced and also there was a live reboot of The Quatermass Experiment (Quatermass is the only TV incarnation of the character which wasn’t broadcast live, as it happens).

And that’s me done. I didn’t watch the cut down and added to international movie release version of this, this time around... The Quatermass Conclusion... but the bridging scenes shot at the same time do give that version a different flavour and, it’s worth watching at least once (but three and a bit hours of serial will always win out over an hour and a half truncation with this viewer, for sure).  Quatermass is a truly great serial and it’s just a shame Kneale didn’t write any further TV adventures of this character in his lifetime. But I’ll always, regularly revisit the ones we got because, well they’re just brilliant and their influence echoes down through the history of science fiction and horror to this day.

*Don’t worry, there’s a new Blu Ray edition of this from another company (with identical content, I think) coming out two weeks after the publication of this post.

A Black Veil For Lisa

Veil Bait

A Black Veil For Lisa
aka La morte non ha sesso
Italy 1968 Directed by Massimo Dallamano
88 Films Blu Ray Zone B
plus alternately sourced Italian Version.

Warning: Big story spoilers.

Well now... I have really mixed feelings as I sit down to write this review of my first (two) watches of A Black Veil For Lisa because, although it’s an absolute masterpiece of giallo cinema, it’s also not been presented in a correct version for the international market and I’m very, very angry at finding out the 88 Films super duper limited edition Blu Ray I bought a couple of years ago only has the truncated, rescored, heavily compromised US version of the film on it (and so does the US Olive films release, apparently). So I watched this, admittedly superb transfer of the US print in ignorance and absolutely loved it, followed by Rachael Nisbet’s absolutely great 20 minute talk on the film as an extra (the one stand out thing, it turns out, on the UK Blu Ray which alone is worth the price of admission) but then got completely destroyed when, on reading the booklet, it became clear this was a totally inferior release. Luckily for me, I had an unwatched DVD-R of the Italian DVD release which contains the full length Italian version (donated to me by somebody at some point) but... even that doesn’t tell the whole story because there are no English subtitles on the Italian DVD.

With me so far? So you can watch the Italian version with the English language track but, inevitably, in footage not fond in the US version, the dialogue switches to untranslated Italian. Also, the English track has the heavily ‘rescored by the US people’ music on it, so in order to get a true flavour of the Italian version, I had to keep toggling between the two audio sources so I could hear just how different each film sounded tonally. Not an ideal set up but at least now I feel confident enough to write this review armed with a little more knowledge. And I’ll try to review it side by side simultaneously, to point out the differences and issues I have with it.

The basic plot is very simple. We have the brilliant John Mills playing Inspector Bulov, head of the narcotics division in Hamburg. He brings to this film the most amazing performance I’ve seen in a giallo and, also, most of the acting by anyone in this film is pretty good. It’s not terrible and stilted like many a giallo (and the acting is not what you watch a giallo for anyway... even actors like David Hammings are usually scuppered by the performances of their co-stars) and it all feels pretty naturalistic. But this is not a typical giallo in other ways too... I’ll get to that in a minute. Anyway, Bulov is married to Lisa, played by Luciana Paluzzi (who most people outside of her own country will recognise from her role as the femme fatale in Thunderball, reviewed here). He thinks she’s unfaithful and, while on the trail of the giallo killer of the movie, Max, played by the jovial Robert Hoffmann, he is constantly worried about her sleeping around, as well as her unproven links to the Italian underworld. At one point half way through, the film takes a serious U-turn and derails the narrative by having Bulov, once he’s caught the killer, hire him to kill his wife instead of bringing him in. And then more shenanigans are afoot until the film reaches it’s... well, I’d like to say inevitable conclusion but, again, both versions of the film have different and contradictory endings too. In the US version, Lisa is found to have been playing Bulov all along and, after he and Max both perish, she is left alone with her gang boss boyfriend. Crime is unpunished (which is not what I’d expect from an American release at this time). In the Italian version, just after this scene, the cops arrive and arrest both Lisa and her partners-in-crime lover and justice is served (not something I would have expected to see in an Italian release of the time).

So that’s the story and truly astonishing acting performances covered but, like I said, who watches a giallo for story and acting. It’s all about stylish shot designs and music for many... and this film has style in abundance. Dallamano does some wonderful stuff with the camera. The US version opens briefly on the funeral of Bulov before flashing back but not so in the Italian one which is more linear. Both then start off with a beautiful shot where the camera pans down in a street to the grid like windows of a pub front, moving right and tracking the many windows until it comes to a specific set of gridded windows, with a man’s head positioned visually in one small square window before it then zooms in on him. 

Then a curious thing happens in the US cut which I assumed, on my first watch through, was an interesting stylistic choice from Dallamano but, it turns out... not. We get a brief shot of Max watching his victim from across the street and then the shot cuts back to the end of the last shot where the camera closes in on the victim in the window... so a nice little visual echo/stutter, or so I thought. Not so though... when I saw the Italian cut, the view across the street were a few more shots and lasted longer and, when it cuts back to the victim, it’s not a repeat shot as in the US version at all. As it turns out, that was just a ham fisted, totally intrusive way of cutting out a few seconds of completely innocent footage by the Americans. One nice thing it does with Max’s character in the Italian one is, just before he kills someone, it focuses on a stylish close up of his upper face bathed in red with the whites of his eyes jumping out visually from the surrounding red, accompanied by a little musical stinger. Alas, this beautiful stylistic flourish is totally absent from the killings in the US print. 

By the way, Max is dressed as a typical giallo killer in these shots (bearing in mind this was just after Bava had made some gialli... The Girl Who Knew Too Much and Blood And Black Lace... but before they exploded in popularity in the wake of Dario Argento’s directorial debut, The Bird With The Crystal Plumage two year later), wearing the typical hat, black coat, black gloves and carrying a flick knife. In many ways the film is more a polizei in nature (like other films in Dallamano’s canon) but it soon shows it’s true giallo nature in scenes like these and the idea of Bulov hiring the killer for his own purposes. Bulov, as brought to life by future Professor Quatermass John Mills, is not the blundering, ridiculous policeman you find in most gialli, that’s for sure. And the identity of the killer is known almost from the start (as in The Killer Must Kill Again) so that’s atypical too.

Dallamano really likes vertical lines and uses them wherever possible. Max’s demise even comes in a forest punctuated by loads of upright, vertical tree trunks he can hind behind. In some rooms in this movie, though, it’s almost like he’s added vertical patterning on the decor in sections where you wouldn’t expect to find them, just so he can split the actors up into little compartments in the frame. While this is fairly common in a lot of these kinds of films... it almost looks a little too unnatural here, as the office of Bulov’s boss looks like it’s somewhat bizarrely vertically pitched, if you know what I mean. Some nice use of reflections in mirrors in some sequences too.

He also makes good use of space. For instance, he has a shot where Mills’ head is seen up close in profile on the left of a shot while his wife runs off and up stairs in the rest of the deep room behind him. Some wonderful camera movement too, in places. Such as when a camera tracks left down a street to follow a car which turns right into another street as the camera pauses to watch it turn yet another corner, before carrying on left to the other part of the original street to catch a police car careening in and then following it back right to end up in the camera’s original placement. Such great stuff.

And then there’s the score and the protracted, sinister whisperings of ‘Liiiiiiisaaaaa’ on it. Okay, so when I switched back to the Italian language, the score is totally different and, I’m sad to say, seems somewhat less appropriate than the American patch up job (I have the Italian score on order on CD so I’ll be able to listen to it properly at some point soon). Also, the Italian version has a few places where it kind of sounds like it’s plagiarising the James Bond theme... so I can see why the Americans wanted to replace it. However, quite often on the American score (which also sometimes replaces silence on the Italian one... fairly badly), it lapses into something like what Nelson Riddle would have composed for the 1960s Batman TV show so, yeah, also not quite appropriate to the action for sure. So you take you choice... Bond or Batman I guess.

Either way, the scores do nothing to detract from the brilliance of the film in total and I would have to say that, if you can somehow find the magical Holy Grail of a correct Italian print with English subtitles on it (which is now my mission), then I would recommend A Black Veil For Lisa to pretty much all fans of the Italian giallo. It’s a superb film marred heavily by imperfect releases by, I’m guessing, companies that won’t spend the money to do the subtitling. Companies which I am now very angry at but, at least the 88 Films version has the brilliant Rachael Nesbit interview... and that’s definitely a big weighing in factor to purchase, on releases like this.