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.

Quatermass And The Pit (TV Serial Version)

Hob’s Your Uncle

Quatermass And The Pit
UK 1958/59
Directed by Rudolph Cartier
BBC Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Spoilers here if you really don’t know the story by now.

Note: If you’re looking for my review of the Hammer Films remake of Quatermass And The Pit, it’s right here... http://nuts4r2.blogspot.com/2012/02/quatermass-and-pit.html

Well, what can you say about Quatermass And The Pit that hasn’t been said already? Not much I suspect but I can at least give you my impression of my recent rewatch of the original TV serial, as it’s just been ‘restored’ on Blu Ray by the BBC. Although, to be honest, since it was recorded off a screen televising the live performance, there’s not an awful lot that could have been done to clean up the visual quality, I suspect. It’s nice to revisit it here though.

Quatermass And The Pit is the third of four Quatermass TV serials written by Nigel Kneale and the last of the three performed as a live broadcast by the BBC (the fourth TV serial didn’t surface until 20 years later on rival TV station ITV). Now I never saw the serials as a kid but always loved the Hammer remake movies, especially the first and third ones. I didn’t catch up to the original serials until the VHS and DVD days. Only the first two live broadcast episodes of the original version of The Quatermass Experiment still exist but both Quatermass II and Quatermass And The Pit have survived and this Blu Ray is a welcome addition to any science fiction film and TV watcher’s home... although I would have preferred the BBC would have ‘cut to the chase’ and Blu Rayed up their former Quatermaas Collection DVD box set, rather than release this as a stand alone and then, presumably, expecting us to double dip on it a few years down the line.

This is going to be a fairly short review because I’ve probably covered most of the story beats in my previous review of the movie remake (right here) but I will say that I can never really make up my mind if I prefer the original serialised version of Quatermass And The Pit or the Hammer adaptation of it. I think it’s a case of... I like whichever one I’m watching at the time but of all the Quatermass serials which made the transition into the movies, this one has the least changes to the story, I think. The first two Quatermass serials had great chunks of story shorn from them in their movie transitions but for this one, the condensation from the three hours of the serial to the one hour and thirty seven minute movie is quite an achievement and you don’t really miss any important story beats in the latter.

So I think the most useful thing do here is highlight the differences between the two and then, if you want more extended input as to the flavour of the story, visit my review of the Hammer adaptation of this.

Professor Quatermass is played by Andre Morel in this ‘incarnation’ of the main character. He plays him in the most authorative way I’ve seen and, for my money, is probably the best of the many actors to play the role over the years. He was no stranger to Hammer films, of course, and was later asked to come back and reprise the role for their movie version but I believe he didn’t really feel like repeating himself. The movie Quatermass for this one was played by Andrew Keir, who was writer Nigel Kneale’s personal favourite of the Quatermass actors if my memory circuits are firing on all cylinders (Keir was the only actor to ever play Quatermass twice, in the film version of this plus in Kneale’s radio show The Quatermass Memoirs). Brilliant as Kier is in the role, he still seems a little too passive for my liking whereas Morel immediately commands a sort of gravitas in the role and makes it his own.

He is ably supported by some truly great thespians with Dr. Rowney played in this version by Cec Linder (who James Bond fans may remember from his turn as Felix Leiter in Goldfinger), Anthony Bushell playing a somehow even more terrifyingly stupid version of Colonel Breen than the great Julian Glover managed in the movie version and Christine Finn, the voice of Tin Tin in Thunderbirds, as Barbara Judd. Although he was a Hammer regular, we also have Michael Ripper playing the Sergeant in this (he had appeared as a different character in the movie version of Quatermass II). You’ve also got John Stratton as Captain Potter and Richard Shaw as the all important drill operator Sladden. Now, I love the movie version of this and think the actors in it are exemplary but, I have to say, the cast in this original version are even more brilliant and you couldn’t want for a better bunch. I think the only actor who was actually in both the serial and the film was Noel Howlett, who plays the vicar in this and the Abbey librarian in the movie.

Like I said, the action and story are all pretty much the same between the two versions, with the serial obviously taking more time to grip onto the audience (the events in the movie version do seem unnaturally accelerated if you watch this one in close proximity before it, to be sure). However, they both have things which they do better than each other. The special effects on the serial for the great martian purge, plucked from the mind of Barbara Judd as she wears a headpiece which turns her hallucination race memories into something which can be recorded on a primitive video tape (or film, by the looks of it), are much more interesting and credible than the movie version. That’s because a) you can see various martian insects being singled out and killed and b) because the Hammer version of this scene contains truly atrocious special effects work, to be sure.

That being said the Hammer version of the story is much more visual in other ways. For instance, instead of Rowney sacrificing himself by earthing the, mostly unseen on camera, martian manifestation which has emerged from the disintegrated hull of the five million year old space capsule... by running into it and throwing the iron conductor to earth it before being obliterated... the movie version has him riding the top of a crane into it, which is much more interesting to look at. Similarly, the manifestation of the martian with all the colour bleached out of it and almost over-illuminated in the movie suggests exactly why primitive man saw it as Hob, or the Devil in that it’s much more of a horned demon looking thing (and one of the few horror films to give this 6 or 7 year old a complete lack of a good night’s sleep the first time I saw it). So in that way the movie version definitely wins out over this one.

Another big difference is that the movie version has diggers adding an extension to a tube tunnel at Hobb’s Lane first coming across the archeological finds and, eventually the space capsule, as part of the tube works. In this original version it’s already an archeological dig from a find on a building site at Hobb’s Lane... so it really is a big pit that this thing is mostly set around here... I guess Quatermass And The Tube Extension didn’t have the desired ring to it for the movie version.

Another major difference is the ending. The Hammer one stops on a characteristically bleak shot (typical for that period of Hammer film) of Quatermass and Barbara trying to get their heads together after Rowney’s sacrifice. Here, the sequence is followed by a, somewhat clunky, little press conference held by Quatermass to warn humanity that there are probably many more of these capsules spread around the Earth and we should be on the look out for them. It’s kind of the Quatermass version of the “Watch The Skies” monologue at the end of The Thing From Another World and, it gives things a less than exciting or haunting conclusion than the Hammer movie, it has to be said.

However, although it probably looks fairly dated to the youth of today, the TV serial has a lot to offer and the leisurely pacing in which it unfolds all the various incidents and drip feeds it to the audience is very well done. Yes, there are the occasional small mistakes which were part and parcel of live broadcast television, such as a camera operator moving to the other side of the room before his cue, panning back to the original speaker as he’s finishing his line and then having to quickly pan back to where he was going on the first place. This is all part of the fun though and I wouldn’t want it any other way. Some of this third serial, especially the outside locations, was pre-filmed to be slotted in between scenes, such was the ambition of Kneale’s script. Also, the music is quite effective and some of those electronic effects and scoring sections in the original serial mark this out as being the first sci-fi TV show to use electronic music (apparently, I need to check that out and see if that claim is correct). Whatever the case, it’s certainly damned atmospheric and is well used by the serial.

And that’s that for this one. This, like most of the Quatermass serials, was a ground breaking and important event show of its day (you wouldn’t get shows like Doctor Who without the presence of Quatermass changing what was acceptable on television) and the central premise that our world was invaded by martians millions of years ago and the majority of our species is actually descended from genetic experiments created by the martians was pretty much a first at the time. The martians are already here and they’re us... was quite a bit of a scary proposition. Like both the central character and writer Nigel Kneale, Quatermass And The Pit was hugely influential and the legacy has never stopped being plundered... I can’t quite work out why it’s not been remade again for modern audiences. If you’re a fan of science fiction and you’ve never seen the Quatermass serials then... you really should add these to your list. Quatermass And The Pit, no matter which version you watch it in, is sheer genius and an important part of British science fiction. I’m glad the BBC have finally put this out on Blu Ray and, hopefully, the surviving episodes of the first serial and the full second serial won’t be too far behind this one, fingers crossed. Truly stunning.

Into The Unknown - The Fantastic Life of Nigel Kneale

Knealistic Tendencies

Into The Unknown -
The Fantastic Life of Nigel Kneale
by Andy Murray Headpress
ISBN: No ISBN on this hardback edition.


I wasn’t aware that there was already in existence a print biography of the creator of one of my favourite childhood heroes, Nigel Kneale, until this newly revised/expanded edition was just published by Headpress. Kneale was a creator who kinda popped into my life in terms of delivering striking television (and sometimes film) of the specific kind that leaves a mark on your soul as you watch and a proper celebration of his life in book form was something I’d always wanted to delve into. And now I have, courtesy of the research by author Andy Murray and his quite breezy and ‘matter of fact’ writing style which makes the journey of this book a pleasurable read.

I can’t remember which of Kneale’s works I saw first but it would have been around the age of 6 or 7 when I was first introduced to his writing via television. It might have been the time in the early 1970s when the BBC repeated the adaptation Kneale wrote of George Orwell’s 1984 (and I can find no evidence that they did repeat it in that decade but I know it for a fact they did because I remember it and I’m not old enough to have seen the original broadcast). It's truly the greatest version of 1984 put on screen to date. I remember it starred Peter Cushing as Winston Smith, who was an actor I already knew of when I was even at this young age... and the jingle using the words to a song... ‘“underneath the spreading chestnut tree’ somehow filled me with dread or, at the very least, a strong sense of foreboding, for many years to come.

I don’t remember if this was my very first exposure to his work or whether it was my parents letting me stay up for the Hammer Films remake of his first Quatermass serial, The Quatermass Experiment, which Hammer had retitled to capitalise on it being one of the first X certificated movies as... The Quatermass Xperiment (and which I reviewed here). The very first of the Hammer film versions of the character  didn’t actually use Kneale for the script adaption and he was bitter and demonstrative about it for years but, whichever way you look at it, The Quatermass Xperiment is still very much an interpretation of Kneale and a pretty well made one too, as far as I’m concerned. Either way, whether I saw this before the Orwell adapation or not, I do know that this movie scared me silly and I spent the entire night sweating out the fear... and, of course, my appreciation of it grew from there. Pretty much the same thing happened to me with the Hammer remake of the third serial, Quatermass And The Pit (which you can read my review of here, if you are so inclined).

The reason I’d wanted to see the movie was because my parents had loved the first three Qutermass serials when they were broadcast in the 1950s and often talked about people racing in from the street and stopping what they were doing so they could watch it on somebody’s television set. They even had a large, overgrown potted plant which they called Victor, after the character Victor Caroon in The Quatermass Experiment... who does himself turn into some kind of plant-like creature over the course of that first story.

Andy Murray’s newly revised tome takes you behind the scenes of the late writer’s life, to a certain extent but deals with his professional life much more than it does with his day to day existence, although I did find out a little more about that and it was news to me that his wife, Judith Kerr, is also a talented writer, best known in this country as the writer of such children’s books as The Tiger Who Came To Tea and the Mog The Cat books... although she is far more famous in her native Germany for her memoirs of her family escaping the Nazis a day before they came for them. Kneale also has two extremely talented offspring, too, who I knew nothing about until this book.

Despite having got the feeling that I’d heard an awful lot about Kneale’s professional life from various DVD documentaries and tributes over the years, Murray manages to fill in the little blanks and puts it all in order for the reader and I was delighted to find that there were lots of little things about Kneale that I didn’t know. Such as his admiration for the work of H. G. Wells from which, I think, he got the sense of using ordinary people in recognisable locations for his stories, to give plausibility to the fantastic situations they found themselves in. And, although I didn’t know it for sure, it came as no real surprise to find that he was also a big admirer of the ghostly fiction of M. R. James too.

What’s good about this book is it doesn’t tone down Kneale’s contributions to the art of television and fully explores the way he, along with director Rudolph Cartier, completely changed the face of the medium by pushing the boundaries with serials like the Quatermass stories and various other things they collaborated on. They transformed the medium in this country from something very trite and harmless into something which was a bit more pacey and would challenge the boundaries of what to expect from that small box in the corner of the room. It also goes on to explain that Nigel Kneale’s love of film from an early age lead him to try and think about his writing in a more visual manner and I think this certainly comes across in his work.

Yes, all the familiar stories are in here which fans of Kneale will, like me, lap up. The outcry against 1984 until Prince Charles mentioned that The Queen had really liked it, the writer’s distaste for hiring Brian Donlevy to star as the titular professor in the first two Hammer remakes of the serials - The Quatermass Xperiment and Quatermass II (surely one of the first sequels to ever use a number to denote its status in the running order), the author’s bad experience working with John Carpenter on the early script of Halloween III - Season Of The Witch... and so on and so forth, it’s all in here. However, we also get stories which are, perhaps, a little less in the public consciousness and as the writer worked through various collaborations, we can get an idea of the man behind the mask of Thomas Nigel Kneale and it’s very, very interesting.

Murray uses a lot of Kneale’s words themselves in the text and also the testimonies and praise of various collaborators and also influential fans of his work, such as Mark Gattis and Ramsey Campbell. It also mentions the surprising public friction Kneale had with Verity Lambert over the show Doctor Who, which he hated and refused to write for, even though it’s pretty much a show (one of many) that would never have seen the light of day if Kneale’s Quatermass serials had not paved the way for this kind of TV science fiction. The two seemed to get on well enough decades later, though, when they worked together to get the fourth and final Quatermass serial onto television (it still frightens me to this day... Huffity, Puffity Ringstone Round... can’t think of that made up nursery rhyme used in the serial still without feeling chills down my spine). It’s a shame that Kneale hated Doctor Who so much because there have been quite a few Quatermass references in the show itself, over the decades.

The book includes synopses woven into the text, of scripts and shows that Kneale worked on, including some stuff sadly lost to time (missing presumed wiped, as the saying goes... the BBC still have a lot to answer for) and it’s fascinating to read about some of the ideas he came up with. I would love to see a revival of his TV play The Road at some point. It sounds like it must have been pretty special. The book also talks about some of his writing for short story collections and the like over the years and talks about the work he collaborated on with his famous wife too. It also gives you a very good idea as to his reactions and impressions of people over the years, which is a bit of an eye opener. However, I was interested to find that the most recent, ‘live broadcast’ remake of The Quatermass Experiment, aired in 2005, received a similar reaction from Kneale that I had when it was shown (although it didn’t annoy me half as much as the subsequent DVD release of this, where the BBC stupidly omitted the flubbed lines and accidents that happened on the night of that original broadcast...  I remember them fondly and believe that’s what makes live TV so charming, so they should have definitely left those in, I reckon).

All in all, barring a fair few typos (how does that still happen?), Andy Murray’s Into The Unknown - The Fantastic Life of Nigel Kneale is a pretty useful and entertaining tome and definitely belongs on the bookshelf of any self respecting fan of science fiction. It’s great as a reference work you can dip into for a quick fact or verification but it's also hugely interesting and written in a manner which makes it very easy to consume. Snap this one up before Headpress run out of copies.

Horror for Christmas

Jingle Hells

Horror for Christmas
Edited by Richard Dalby
Michael O'Mara Books Ltd
ISBN: 978-1854791412

After last year’s novelty of reading a book set at Christmas during the merry month of December, when I purchased the much talked about reissue of Mystery In White (reviewed by me here) I decided to make this something of a tradition on this blog from now on so, if at all possible, I’ll be reading and reviewing something seasonal around this time every year.

Now, I almost went for another Christmas mystery book but then I remembered it’s somewhat traditional to be told ghost stories around this time... at least in the UK... so I decided to have a look for something in the horror genre this time around. Maybe I’ll try another yuletide whodunnit next year.

This Richard Dalby edited tome, Horror For Christmas, was what I ultimately decided upon after trawling amazon for a quarter of an hour or so. Partially because a compendium of short stories written by a variety of authors was almost certain to have at least one story I liked but, mostly, because a nice hardback copy on amazon costs only one penny at time of writing this. It even, if you make up the price and order it with any other required items, qualifies for free super saver delivery so... yeah, got this one totally for a penny and, since it’s such a hit and miss affair, I’m kind of glad I paid no more for it, to be honest.

There are many great names with a short story credited to them in the book... some of whom I’ve heard of and many of whom I’ve not. The absolute decider for making the purchase for me, other than the modest asking price, was the inclusion of a short tale by Nigel Kneale, the creator of Professor Quatermass, no less. However, as it happens, it turns out that, of the ‘hit and miss’ stories found here, Kneale’s story definitely ventured into the ‘miss due to being vaguely incomprehensible’ category, as far as I was concerned. It's the shortest thing in here at only a few pages long and I even resorted to a Google search after, to find out if I was missing anything about what the story was about. Not that I ever found an answer to that question.

Now, I must confess to having a bit of a mental block when it comes to the specific short form of ghost story fiction. Don’t get me wrong, I love a good ghost story and wonderful novels such as Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting Of Hill House are not pieces of prose to be trifled with. However, when it comes to spectral short stories, I always seem to read things which are almost all very similar and with more or less the same few duplicate endings... presumably because there’s only so much you can do with a ghost story in such a short form. These things are almost always completely predictable and usually for me, as a result of this, somewhat frustrating and disappointing. That being said, not all the stories in here are spirit manifestation stories and, asides from the looseness of the term ‘horror’, which I don’t think should be applied some of the stories in here (human monsters are not monsters people... these are just thrillers), there a few little gems to be found near the back of the book  and even some of the ghosty ones are quite good... but just not very many of them, it has to be said.

I found the first half of the book to be mostly very dull, to be quite honest and, even the most interestingly constructed one of the early tales in here, the Switzerland set The Sinister Inn by F. S. Smythe, is devoid of an actual spooky monster with which to clearly label this tale an exercise in horror. For the most part, though, the majority of the stories are absolutely as predictable as I expect a short ghost or horror story to be and it’s only my single bloody mindedness about not giving up on something I’ve started that kept me from flinging the thing aside and looking for something else to fulfill my Christmas book review. However, the book really and, quite unexpectedly, starts to come into it’s own with the last five stories, one of which is a very long one and these last tales are actually something worth reading.

The good stuff starts with Ronald Chetwyn Hayes ‘strange fiction’ style tale Christmas Eve, which basically tells of a man who is recruited by a young lady into perpetrating what amounts to an extremely gory act on a live ‘victim’. However, not all is as it seems and it leaves both the main character and the reader with a question mark over the head as to what the story was really about and what the consequences are for this character in the future.

After that we go into a story called The Night Before Christmas by Psycho author Robert Bloch, which is one of those tales which really isn’t, in any way, shape or form, an example of the horror genre but which, at the same time, wouldn’t have looked out of place in comic strip form in an old 1950s EC comic such as Tales From The Crypt or The Vault of Horror. This tells the story of a desperate artist who gets a king sized commission but who gets, against his better judgement, too close to the subject of his painting. Lets just say that Bloch manages to give us a savagely gory conclusion (this would really suffer under the knives of the censors if it was ever filmed) which is also merely conjured up in a single last line which is a real killer of a pun. Bloch wraps his violence up in humour so... you have been warned.

Next up we get The Great Arcana by Ron Weighell which is a proper supernatural tale and tells of moving statues and portals out of hell. It isn’t too far away from being an H. P. Lovecraft Cthulhu sketch in some ways... but as if it were being retold by someone like M. R. James. It’s exactly the kind of story that the Italians would have made a commercially successful horror film of in the mid 1980s... and for all I know, they probably did possibly borrow from this at one time or another.

Wish You Were Here by Basil Cooper is the longest (and best) story in the book, almost a novella, and it’s very much a traditional ghost story. It’s also set quite local to where I work, in a village called Hoddesdon. Now the thing about this one is... yes, it is an obvious, much telegraphed ending... just like the other ghost stories in here but, because the writer spends a lot of time building up the characters in this and stoking the fires of suspense, I found I really quite warmed to this tale of a successful writer being haunted by old postcards and... something else.

The last story in the book is To Dance by the Light of the Moon by Steven Gallagher, who I knew from reading his novelisation of Saturn 3 (the movie is reviewed by me here) when I was in my teens. Now this tale of a newsreader of a small, independent radio station is not nearly as good as the four stories which come before it and, it’s up to interpretation as to whether the story delves in to the realm of the supernatural or not (I think it probably does but there is an alternate solution to the tale's grim ending note, I suspect). It is, however, refreshingly different from a lot of the fodder in the early part of the book and after the front loaded disappointment of the earlier section, it continued to be an entertaining read... even after the four, really quite interesting, previous excursions into horror tinged mayhem.

So there you have it. My verdict is in. I’m not sure I’d be totally at ease with recommending this tome to many people, in all honesty and, though I really enjoyed the second half, I think you’d have to be quite up for giving up time on more frivolous pursuits if you want to wade into this one. I certainly don’t regret buying this one... especially for a penny... but I think next year I might look around for either another Christmas mystery story or try yet another genre. And if you have any suggestions for future Christmassy reads, please leave it in the comments section below and I’ll see if I fancy it.

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.

The Stone Tape

The Stone Ranger

The Stone Tape
Airdate: 25th December 1972 UK
Directed by Peter Sasdy
BBC DVD Region 2

Okay, so I’m really not that happy about having to write this review. It’s not going to be what people want to hear from me on this particular TV drama and I can’t tell you how dissapointed I feel about this.

The Stone Tape is a very highly thought of phenomena in terms of classic British horror TV and, honestly, I can see why. It’s got a good script and the acting is mostly not too bad... definitely of its time (“Alright, luv?”). Why does 70s TV acting seem to date more than any other decade, I wonder? I am more shocked and surprised that I didn’t personally think a little more of the show given its pedigree and the fact that I absolutely love things like this normally.

This aired when I was four years old and I don’t believe I saw it at the time. But I wish I had done because, when I was four, it would have frightened me silly and given me nightmares (just like other shows and movies by this writer did) and I would probably have very fond memories of this indeed. It comes from the pen of one of my all time favourite genre writers, Nigel Kneale, responsible for terrifying me with the Quatermass films and serials (without which, frankly, there would be no shows like Doctor Who on the air today... at least not in the way we are familiar with) and also such landmarks as the Peter Cushing TV adaptation of Orwell’s 1984 and various other, quirkier things, like a comedy show called Kinvig I used to watch (goodness knows what that looks like these days).

Also, it’s very much kin to two TV shows which used to terrify us kids in the late 70s and which were always the ‘talk of the playground’ the next day at school - The Omega Factor and Sapphire and Steel.

So it really surprises me that The Stone Tape felt just a little less than my expectations of it had allowed for, but I can’t really put a finger on just why it didn’t quite jell for me.

I thought some of the acting was good but Jane Asher, although she was definitely locked into a specific and fairly intense performance, was a bit misplaced with her acting choices, I thought. She seemed to be a touch too over the top in the portrayal of the sensitive nature of her empathic condition and while this might have been the best way to go with the character, I felt the style of the performance didn’t really fit in with a lot of the other actors around her. And its strange because she’s doing brilliant and not very easy things in the role and congratulations to her in some ways (because I think the problem lays a bit more in the editing and pacing, rather than her talent) but it feels like it should have maybe been toned down a little in relation to the claustrophobic, in your face feel of the “haunted room” atmosphere which so fascinates the many characters crammed into their new research facility.

The Stone Tape tells of a group of researchers trying to discover the next big recording technology device and, when they relocate to larger premises, the stumble across a ‘haunted’ room. After experienceing a few audio and visual hallucinations which can’t be picked up on their equipment, they try to find out what makes this phenomena tick so they can harvest the results in their race to find the next best recording medium. This is after they realise the stones in the room have obviously recorded the death of a maid from another century in the very material of their walls... The Stone Tape of the title.

Now, I’ve had a bit of a think about this and I have concluded that maybe the writing on this is a little bit ambitious for the hour and a half running time. Certain sections and jumps seemed a little too rushed for my liking.  I’m very much a fan of slow creeping dread as opposed to other kinds of horror but I do like a less speedy appointment with tales dealing with a “haunting menace” and The Stone Tape just felt a little too pacy for me. Although, some of the scenes were quite eeire I just felt... well, let me put it this way. I’m fairly squeemish and quite easy to scare when it comes to ghost stories and I watched The Stone Tape on my own in the dark one evening, and I didn’t feel scared or chilled once. Didn’t look around in the dark to see if anything “against nature” was creeping around the house with me as a direct result of my viewing experience. It just didn’t make much impact on me.

Which I do feel is really strange. The 1963 version of The Haunting, for example, never fails to chill me no matter how many times I see it... and nothing much actually happens in that.

My other problem is that The Stone Tape not only has a very predictable fate for its main female protagonist, but even the final little ‘twist” is so obvious that you are kind of waiting for it to happen from very early on in the programme. Which is a shame because I’m used to Nigel Kneale being a lot more mind blowing than that, to be honest. This ending was just so expected, even used as a way of haunting a character, brilliantly played by Michael Bryant, who has progressed into more of a villain by the end of the play (indeed, the subtle ruthlessness of the character’s driven obsession reminded me of the way Brian Donlevy used to mis-play Quatermass in the first two Hammer adaptations from Kneale’s original serials... but in The Stone Tape that’s the right tone to go with for that character, I think).

All in all I’m glad I saw the play finally. It’s not without its charm and its certainly a time piece which will remind older viewers of the British attitude towards life back in the 70s and, possibly, provide comical amusement for less older viewers. I will even be watching it with the commentary included on the DVD at some point so I can try to decode why it’s held in such high regard. Alas, on this viewing, my body temperature only dropped to lukewarm and was, it has to be said, far from chilly.

Quatermass And The Pit

The Necropolis Xperiment

Quatermass And The Pit

aka Five Million Years To Earth

1967 UK Directed by Roy Ward Baker

Screening by The Flicker Club at The Vault.

Warning: Spoilers if you’ve never seen this movie but... it’s still worth reading the intro even if spoilers bother you because the location of the screening was just so interesting.

Last weekend I saw one of my favourite movies, featuring one of my favourite fictional characters, screening in what was probably the most unusual but appropriate place that this movie had ever been screened before...

In the Victorian period, getting rid of the dead was such a problem due to overcrowding in cemeterys that people would just dig corpses up, dump or toss them somewhere, and then bury their freshly deceased relative in the leftover plot. This was, to say the least, beyond unhygienic... not to mention deadly dangerous to those who had not yet shuffled of this mortal coil... and so a solution was needed. In 1854, the Victorians built the London Necropolis Railway, building this on big arched bridges to compensate from the fact that they were building this over a swamp. They built two stations in London, right next to each other, on this line: Waterloo Bridge Station (which is now, of course, known as Waterloo Station) and the other was Necropolis Station (or some such, my research here is a little hazy but I’m going by what one of the presenters to Quatermass And The Pit told the audience at the screening).

The dead would be stored (or piled up, if you like) under the arches of Necropolis Station, waiting for the “train of the dead” to whisk them away (in First Class, Second Class and Third Class accommodation for the dead, believe it or not) to the massive Brockwood Cemetery in Surrey. Groovy stuff!

And, of course, it was inside one of these very arches, where the dead would rest in what has to be the ultimate in train station waiting rooms, that we all sat and watched a screening of Quatermass And The Pit as part of The Flicker Club’s season of Hammer at The Vault (The Vault in the Old Vic Tunnels being an entertainment space underneath the former Necropolis Station). After two brilliant introductions by Stephen Jones and a gentleman whose name I can’t appear to find (think it could be Tim Wilson, but whoever it was he was brilliant) the screening began...

Now Quatermass has always been a hero to me. As a kid at the age of 8 or 9, I remember staying awake all night out of fear that Victor Caroon would come and get me after seeing the first movie remake of the first of Nigel Kneale’s four TV Quatermass serials. If you’ve never seen the movies or serials, or even heard of them before for that matter, I should probably give you a little background on them because, as one of the presenters at the screening quite rightly pointed out, without Professor Quatermass paving the way for science fiction/horror that was both truly excellent and immensely popular, you never would have got programmes like Doctor Who on television these days (Quatermass has, in fact, been referenced at least twice in the history of Doctor Who, once in a Sylvester McCoy episode set in the sixties with the daleks and, again, in the David Tennant story Planet Of The Dead, where a scientist is using “Bernards” as a unit of measurement).

I can tell you now that, when I was a little boy, my parents explained to me just how popular Quatermass was in its day. All the kids would be playing in the streets and then... time for Quatermass and the streets would empty and, believe it or not, the pubs would empty out all over Britain and, without exaggeration, the majority of the population of Great Britain would be tuned in to one or other of the three original Quatermass serials... The Quatermass Experiment (changed to The Quatermass Xperiment in its movie remake to exploit the fact that it was one of the first films in the UK to receive the X certificate), Quatermass 2 (the film was quite possibly one of the earliest... but certainly not the earliest, to denote a film by a roman numeral, as is the standard practice nowadays) and Quatermass And The Pit (which is frankly the scariest of the lot)... Kneale wrote a fourth serial which debuted in 1979 and also had a shortened movie version released in foreign cinemas (which included alternate footage and storyline to make sense of the sequences which were cut) but the character was never as popular as it was in the fifties (although the fourth serial, Quatermass aka The Quatermass Conclusion was still damned scary). I even heard that Battersea Power Station ran into trouble keeping Britain alight during at least one of the episodes of the original because so many people were switched on to it. My mum and dad also had a big rubber plant before I was born which they named Victor after the character who turns into an alien plant-like creature at the end of the first movie remake (I think the serial has a more complex ending to it... only two episodes survive of it that I’ve seen... although all the other serials are available)... including a dire remake of the original in 2005 starring Jason Flemyng and David Tennant.

The original serial of Quatermass and the Pit was obviously a lot longer than the subsequent Hammer remake and, therefore, a lot more atmospheric and spookier (in my opinion). It also starred Andre Morrel as the good professor and he did it so wonderfully, in my opinion, that to me he is the one actor who will forever be Quatermass in my mind. The movie version of this one starred Andrew Keir as the professor and Nigel Kneale, who hated Brian Donlevy from the previous two Hammer remakes, has gone on record many times to acknowledge that Keir was his absolute favourite actor in the role... so much so that when he scripted the radio serial The Quatermass Memoirs in 1995, Andrew Keir was brought back to play Quatermass some 28 years after his first time in the role.

Quatermass And The Pit, the movie version, does not, ironically, start off with builders unearthing a skull and then a large spaceship in a builder’s pit (and I have to say that it was a missed opportunity from Hammer to not include Michael Ripper from the original serial in their movie version, since Michael Ripper was in a good number of their movies, of course). Instead, it relocates the action to a tube station where another set of builders, including a blink and you’ll miss him appearance from young Gareth Thomas who would later lead the crew of The Liberator in Blake’s 7, discover the ancient skulls leading to archeologists discovering a “missing link” skeleton in the evolution of man and... well... a spaceship, which has been buried for millions of years. Since the majority of the action takes place in this station, it was particularly appropriate that we should be watching this movie while the odd train would rush noisily overhead as we watched.

The cast is fantastic, including performances by genre favourites and national treasures such as Barbara Shelley, Julian Glover and Sheila Steafal, while the script is... frankly... superb and features what was, at the time, a truly original idea...

You see, the action which takes place at Hobb’s End (Hob being an old name for the devil) has always been associated with scary and supernatural activity when any excavations or earth works have been conducted there in the hundreds and thousands of years that those particular activities have been recorded. This all, I promise, ties into the dead occupants of the spacecraft from Mars (as it turns out) who resemble giant grasshoppers and who have the power to unleash man’s race memory of a time millions of years ago when the martians adapted us genetically and left us to our own devices to interbreed etc. This race memory is still active and will cause us to purge our race, it turns out, once this ancient evil is unleashed. The spooky stuff really gets going when a guy with a specialised kind of drill tries to get into the front chamber of the spaceship with the drill and the sound vibrations start to... unleash something best left... erm... leashed. I should probably point out, at this juncture, that the guy who plays this character, Sladden, in the movie version is the same guy who played the original Victor Caroon in the 1953 TV serial of The Quatermass Experiment... another eerie connection to the past there then ;-)

The movie is very scary and hugely influential, even to this day, as you’ll find references to the Quatermass saga, and to this third story in particular, in a lot of modern movies and novels etc. The idea behind this one, you see, was not that the aliens were coming to get us or, indeed, coming to colonise us or harvest us for food... the premise on this one is much more chilling. It turns out, you see, the aliens were here all along and they were, and still are, us. Something which wows a lot of people when they see the serial or the movie version the first time around.

It’s a beautiful movie to look at too, shot in windscreen format and with some gorgeous colour schemes and camera work. It has to be said though, that in a scene depicting a “martian culling” which has been reconstructed from the brainwaves of one of the central characters, the special effects in the 1967 movie version are, quite surprisingly, not as effective as the ones in the original BBC serial from 1958... no seriously, I know that sounds daft, but they’re just not... they’re laughable, in fact. It doesn’t really matter, though, because the sheer audacity of the yarn on this one and the perfect performances and dialogue make for an absolutely rivetting movie... one which you’ll want to revisit more than once (I know I’ve seen it dozens of times by now). The ending is very deadpan and drab and basically features two shocked and tired characters in the wake of... well, an attack by the devil for all intents and purposes... you’ll have to see it to know more. This ending is very reminiscent in tone to the way quite a few of the Hammer movies from that specific period of their output ended and it suited their MO perfectly that the explanatory “afterword” scene from the original serial is not included (nor is it needed, truth be told) in this remake.

I would heavily recommend this... and indeed all the Quatermass serials and movies... to anyone interested in science fiction and horror as they always manage to be a perfect blending of the genres in an absolutely astonishingly gripping tale. Full marks for The Flicker Club for including this one in their screening.

It’s been rumoured recently that Hammer want to revive the Quatermass character and, while I’m all for doing another version of Quatermass And The Pit, I’m getting mixed feelings about this resurrection process because my understanding is they want to bring the Professor back for some new stories. Now I believe Kneale was very precious about his character when he was alive, and for good reason. I’m not sure if modern producers could pull off original stories featuring the character and, if they did, they would have to have a real humdinger of a story idea and an absolutely first class writer to see it through with anything like the dignity and aplomb that Kneale injected into the character. Still, it might make an interesting Xperiment and it would certainly revive interest in the Professor again, methinks... we shall see what we shall see.

The Abominable Snowman

Yeti Day, All My Troubles Seemed So Far Away...

The Abominable Snowman

(aka The Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas)

UK 1957

Directed by Val Guest

Hammer Region 2

I’ve always been a big fan of productions boasting stories and screenplays by Nigel Kneale. I absolutely adored all four of the original Quatermass serials... and the Hammer remakes of the first three... and the Radio show set between the third and fourth serial... although I was left unimpressed with the condensed down “movie-spliced-together-from-TV-episodes” adaptation of the fourth serial and similarly unimpressed by the still fairly recent TV remake of The Quatermass Experiment, despite featuring the excellent acting talents of Jason Flemyng and David Tennant.

This is the first time I’ve seen The Abominable Snowman and, I have to say that, while it’s not as absolutely terrifying as the Quatermass serials... it does still have that sense of nagging, lurking, building terror coupled with a keen intelligence which seems to be a signature of Kneale’s work. Of course, it helps that we have an experienced director working with Kneale’s material and director Val Guest had already made the Hammer Horror remakes of Kneale’s first two Quatermass serials The Quatermass Xperiment (based on The Quatermass Experiment) and the appropriately named Quatermass 2.

In The Abominable Snowman, Hammer veteran Peter Cushing stars as Dr. John Rollason, a researcher in the Himalayas who teams up with an American “hunter”, Tom Friend, played by the token lets-put-an-American-in-it-so-we-can-sell-it-overseas actor Forrest Tucker... who did the same kind of token American duties that Brian Donleavy was doing in the Quatermass remakes but in films like this one and such genre classics as X-The Unknown and The Crawling Eye (based on the TV serial The Trollenberg Terror). Like Val Guest, Cushing was also no stranger to working on Nigel Kneale’s material since he’d starred in both Kneale’s much lionised, infinitely superior TV adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984 and also the original TV play The Creature, which is what The Abominable Snowman is a remake of... Cushing plays the same role in this movie that he played on TV but I believe Stanley Baker played the part which Forrest Tucker has inherited here... it’s a shame that The Creature is a lost “classic” as I would dearly love to see that one.

The film starts with Dr. Rollason, his wife and his fellow researcher studying artefacts in a Tibetan monastery. Rollason breaks it to his wife, much to her alarm, that he is going with Tom Friend and his crew on a fairly dangerous expedition up a mountain to research evidence of recently sighted Yetis. He leaves his wife and colleague behind the next day and goes off with Friend and his small band, who have pre-loaded the trail with buried food while passing through with a larger expedition previously.

As the crew bed down for the first night, it becomes clear to Rollason that his ideas of locating The Abominable Snowman for scientific study are at odds with Friend’s “commercial showman” mentality, who is definitely there to capture said Yeti and bring it back, King Kong-like, to civilisation and make large amounts of "Yeti cash" from the proceeds. However, what Friend and the gang don’t realise (although Rollason twigs it a lot quicker), is that one of the expedition has payed Friend to be there after seeing one of the beasts (and it is definitely Abominable Snowmen in the plural that our decidedly unheroic heroes eventually find) which has established a psychic link with him and is susceptible to what I can only describe as... “the will of the Yeti!”

And of course, once it’s been established that the Yeti can get inside the minds of humans, it’s not long before members of the expedition start dying by their own hand... at the instigation of the abominable snowmen who, in all fairness, just want to be left alone.

I don’t want to spoil this movie for any enthusiastic Hammer or Kneale fans among you so I won’t tell you who, if any, survives to the end of the movie. What I will say is that director Val Guest has kept the Yeti mostly unseen until an up-close-and-personal encounter near the end... relying instead on just glimpses of the odd Yeti arm or the reactions of the actors to what is left slightly off screen for the most part. A shrewd move by a director who, I suspect, had less faith in the design and execution of the creatures themselves... although I personally thought they were pretty good Yeti suits (and none of them were wearing a watch like their real life counterparts). Although, with people like Richard Wattis turning up in the cast... I was half expecting to see Yeti Jacques walk on!

Definitely not the best of either Kneale or Guest's works but certainly well worth a watch, especially for the seasoned veteran who like’s nothing better than to watch a solid British horror production and have fun playing spot the actor. It also boasts a score by the composer Humphrey Searle, who horror music fans may remember was the composer for the score of Robert Wise’s 1963 horror masterpiece The Haunting. There’s a recent new release of The Abominable Snowman from Hammer on Region 2 and it’s also quite inexpensive to boot. Pick it up if you’ve got nothing better to spend your hard earned cash on. Rawwwwr!