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.

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

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.