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.

Scarred For Life Volume One - The 1970s

Charley Says...

Scarred For Life
Volume One - The 1970s
by Stephen Brotherstone & Dave Lawrence
Lonely Water Books
ISBN: Not listed

Subtitled Growing Up In The Dark Side Of The Decade... as it is, Scarred For Life Volume One: The 1970s is a fun, fond and infectious look at a lot of the really dark stuff which was either aimed at or consumed by kids growing up in that turbulent decade. Stuff which various companies and manufacturers just wouldn’t get away with in these days of bizarrely woke tolerances and youngsters who are, as one of the writers comments, wrapped in cotton wool. For anyone who was lucky to grow up in this decade (I was born in 1968 so am certainly able to appreciate most of the stuff covered by this tome), it’s a real rush of nostalgia accompanied by, in some cases (and certainly in terms of at least one of the authors of this tome... who seemed to me perhaps a little over sensitive as a child, perhaps), a few nightmarish moments that some of us would maybe like to not have wrenched back into the light of day after our defensive minds had promptly buried them away.

At 740 pages of text that must be set in something less than an 8pt font, it’s certainly value for money. I do have a few design issues with the volume and, I’ll surely bring those up later (not my job to sugar coat some of the obvious problems) but, in all honesty, those niggles with the text pale into insignificance when faced with the absolute brilliance of the majority of the content and, as importantly for a book like this, the fantastic, conversational writing style employed to talk about these subjects here.

So what does the book cover? Well everything and anything about seventies culture and it’s a diverse bag. Following a guest introduction, we have a prologue looking at the 1960s, attempting to explain how that decade ushered in the attitudes and values of the 1970s. Then the book is split into various topics, all split into further subsections of specific sections dealing with examples of these. For instance, the first 300 plus pages are devoted to TV shows and, like everything else in the book, this will bring back a lot of memories for some and, in my case, even prove somewhat enlightening as to the whole ‘did I really see that or did my worst nightmare make it up’ nature of some of the dark delights on offer... aka forced down the throat... of kids in that particular decade.

So all the usual suspects you might expect in a tome of this nature are present and correct... stuff like Sapphire And Steel, The Omega Factor, The Stone Tapes, Quatermass IV, Love Thy Neighbour, The Black And White Minstrel Show, The Tomorrow People, Horror Top Trumps, Public Information Films (including the absolutely brilliant Charley Says... amongst many traumatic ones), Guy N Smith novels, the Haunted House board game (watch out for that bloody Whammy Ball), British comics like Action, 2000AD & Starlord, sweets, crisps and ice cream such as Bones, Fangs, the Dracula Ice Lolly (which had red jelly as a surrogate for blood when you bit into it, remember?) and even the nation’s obsession with all things paranormal such as UFOs, alien encounters, ghosts, spoon benders and that whole Erich Von Däniken thing.

There’s also a lot of stuff I wasn’t expecting to remember such as a fake documentary show which I’d forgotten had put the absolute wind up me called Alternative 3, the cliffhanger ending of an episode of Armchair Theatre (which introduced sleuth Jemima Shore to the Black Nun) and Fumunchews. And this barely covers it, folks! This is a hefty tome crammed full of text and a few pictures to illustrate the majority of the sections. Like I said, you get a lot of bang for your buck here.

For me, it was two TV shows that are now identified and which have stayed with me all these years, that made reading this thing worthwhile. I’ve already forgotten the first again but it’s not a show I need to revisit... but I remembered it features a time travelling ghost story where a German sniper’s bullet nearly put paid to one of the kids, pulled out of the way just in time for it to once again penetrate the grandfather clock at the time it’s been stuck at all these years since. It was nice somebody else remembered that one. But the big one for me was a piece of television that really made me sit up and pause in the most horrible way... and you have to remember this was a kids show. It was a certain incident that took place in what was one of my favourite shows at the time, The Tomorrow People. I remember this happening and, even now that I have watched the moment again on You Tube after having the episode title correctly identified for me here, I still can’t believe they let this happen, in all its gory detail, on a kids show broadcast around late afternoon, just after school had finished.

The moment in question was where a young teenage girl, who had budding psychokinetic and telepathic powers (like all the titular people of tomorrow) dies in a most horrible way... she has had a time bomb implanted into her head and as the lead kid tries to save her, she realises it’s too late, throws him to the ground and jumps out through the glass of a window in a hospital, a couple of stories up. By which point the time bomb in her head has been triggered and we see her burst into flame on the way down, basically exploding right in front of all our ‘young kiddies’ eyes. It was one of two moments which really stayed with me as a kid (the other being the climactic death scene in Bonnie And Clyde). So I’m very grateful for this volume for reintroducing me to this horrifying moment so I know I didn’t make it up. It really was that horrible so, yeah, that made my day.

And yeah, the list is endless of the many things the authors have dredged up here... although I wish they’d also covered, in their section about music, Jeff Wayne’s War Of The Worlds concept album (The Red Weed theme brought the chills to every kid I knew). There are, however, a couple of things which bothered me about the book...mainly to do with the design.

Although some sections are double columned, most of them are not and the text goes straight across the page like it would on a regular paperback. But it’s a very hard thing for a human to be able to read in that fashion if the print is as small as what’s been used here. Design tenets like ‘length of line’, eye flick and so on come into play and there are only a certain amount of words a line that a person can comfortably cope with before it just becomes too much of a hassle. So what I’m saying is... you really have to want to read this thing if your subconscious brain is going to persist with this venture. Also, a friendly note to those who don’t think to account for the ratio of the size of the type to the length of a line... if you double column a long piece of text, nine times out of ten it will take up much less room on a page than if you keep it to single lines like this. Try it out if you don’t believe me. The page count could have either been less or, you know, the point size could have come up if it was double columned.

The other thing which really niggled me is the constant references to other articles in the volume. Yes, a very useful reference but not when, as in 90% of it, the page numbers it points to are... ‘xx’. Yep, somebody has forgotten, I would guess, to go back and fill in all the references and just left a temporary xx in and gone straight to print from that. I don’t know if this has been put right in future print runs as I bought this tome a while ago now bit, yeah, that was more than a little annoying, it has to be said.

Those issues aside though, I’d have to say I would recommend this well written, fun and exciting tome wholeheartedly. if you want to grab a copy, the place to go for it is here and you can also order Volume 2 - Television In The 80s here which I will be cracking open myself sometime in the next few months. I can recommend Scarred For Life Volume One - The 1970s enough for people of a certain age and I am certainly looking forward to following up with both the second volume and, hopefully soon, ordering the third in the ongoing series when it becomes available. Definitely worth a look. An entertaining and, dare I say it... educational, enlightening read. Expecially when it comes to girls leaping out of windows and exploding, for sure.

Tales Of The Shadowmen 15 - Trompe l'Oeil

League Of Mental Men

Tales Of The Shadowmen 15
Trompe l'Oeil
Edited by Jean-Marc Lofficier and Randy Lofficier
Black Coat Press ISBN: 978-1612278131

I previously reviewed the first 14 collections in the Tales Of The Shadowmen series here and explained about my annual ritual of receiving the next volume in the series either at Christmas or for my birthday a couple of weeks later. And, as I said before, since these things aren’t published until December each year I’m usually one year behind when I get to finally read these things. It’s a cycle I keep meaning to break (if I ever get time around all the other things I’ve got to read) but for now I will quickly... very quickly in this case... cover the December 2019 release which I read a little while ago, Tales Of The Shadowmen 15 - Trompe l'Oeil.

As usual, the gallery of stories by different authors on offer, all utilising two or more heroes, villains or supporting characters from known literary (and other) works and then mixing them together in the same stories, is a bit of a hit and miss affair. As is sometimes the case, actually knowing the characters that are being continually referenced in these stories is part of the fun. This is not to deny that, when a really good writer gives these tales a go, even if you are not acquainted with the character of choice, they will be gripping reads. Usually these books are, once you get the first few volumes out of the way, more hit than miss but occasionally you get a volume where it’s maybe not quite as engaging as previous volumes and, I think that’s definitely the case here.

The book starts off fairly strongly following a short, dimension hopping tale called The Vertigo by Daniel Alhadeff. Like many of the characters in this particular volume, I hadn’t heard of the central protagonist and the brief intro to this tale gave him the hint of an atmosphere which didn’t seem to tally up with what I was actually reading. Frankly, the style it had been written in reminded me of an entirely different flavour, that of the Jerry Cornelius books by Michael Moorcock (I reviewed the movie version of one of them, The Final Programme, right here). So I was pleasantly surprised when a character from that series, Miss Brunner, turned up as one of the main characters a little later on... now it made sense as to why the writer was delving into this style.

Another stand out would be when the human-sized spider detective character, Spiridon, goes on a mission where the villain turns out to be another in a long line of Dr. Moreaus, who is also in this tale, responsible for the creation of the giant ants seen in the film THEM!

In other stories you will find the usual mash up of characters and ideas and, if you want to see what happens when Professor Challenger invents time travel, or when a very young Alfred Hitchcock gets involved in a plot involving Rouletabille and Harry Dickson, then this is a tome for you.

I particularly liked a tale by Travis Hiltz set around a time traveller marooned in Medieval France being assisted by the Wandering Jew to help rid the locals of Rotwang, from Metropolis, who was controlling not just Maria but the Volkites from the old Republic serial Undersea Kingdom. Another story has the Nyctalope and others trying to round up Edgar Allan Poe from 1940s America after he has been displaced by 'The Philadelphia Experiment'... a story in which a certain Ian Fleming spots James Bond’s name on a copy of the Field Guide To Birds Of The West Indies and notes how bland a sounding moniker it is (which parallels the real life creation of his famous character of course). They also refer to Edith Keeler in this story and how two other time travellers (which would be Kirk and Spock) allow her to die at her alloted time. You may remember this character played by Joan Collins in the Star Trek episode City On The Edge Of Forever, of course.

Other appearances of note might be the son of Bernard Quatermass, Indiana Jones, Doctor Omega, Liz Shaw, The Master and an interesting Carnacki tale where the Bachus is responsible, in a roundabout way, for the Whitechapel murders believed to have been committed by Jack The Ripper. Not to mention more than a few appearances in various stories for Les Vampires’ number one figurehead, Irma Vep. Another interesting story by Nigel Malcolm called Enemies Of The People is set in Paris in a future that is obviously an homage to the world created by Ridley Scott in Blade Runner. In this, after a near fateful encounter with the being that may or may not be the original Fantomas, Judex joins forces with Michael Moorcock’s character Una Persson and the Nyctalope to try and survive the corrupt government that wants the ‘terrorist’ Judex dead.

Out of many of the Shadowmen collections, I wouldn’t say this particular one is a good jumping on point. Asides from taking on some tales originally written for an unpublished volume collecting stories about characters from the Hexagon Comics range (an imprint I’m not familiar with myself), there are also a lot of tales which are follow ups from various yarns told in other volumes... such as Brian Gallagher’s latest chapter in the ongoing history of Captain Vampire or the latest yarn in the continuing exploits of Felifax.

All in all, it’s not the best in the series but, honestly, some of these collections are so entertaining that they can afford to have a few misses every now and again. I’m not a hundred percent sure I was fully on board with the Madam Atomos, tale where it turns out she was responsible for the death of John Lennon... I dunno, it just felt a little in bad taste to me but that’s no excuse not to let any writer or artist do what they want so, yeah, no real complaints from me there.

Tales Of The Shadowmen 15 - Trompe l'Oeil is not one of the best entries in the series but regular readers should get something out of this, I think... especially if they are enjoying the specific tales which, in some ways, could be seen as multi-parters. As I said, though, I wouldn’t jump into this one if you’re new to the series. Best to start off with one of the earlier collections if this is the case. Check out the full range of these and many other interesting curios at https://www.blackcoatpress.com if you want to peruse a publisher who has some very interesting volumes on the market.

British Cult Cinema: Hammer Fantasy & Sci Fi

Nailing Hammer

British Cult Cinema: Hammer Fantasy & Sci Fi
by Bruce G. Hallenbeck 
Hemlock Books
ISBN: 9780955777448

There’s both good and bad things about Bruce Hallenbeck’s 2011 book looking at these specific genres of output from the old Hammer Horror studios. One of the obvious positives of a tome such as this being that it’s rare for any book to focus quite so specifically on a subsection of Hammer films for which they are not the best known. Asides from a few crossover gems which also, it could be argued, fall into the category of horror... such as The Quatermass Xperiment (reviewed here), X - The Unknown (reviewed here), Quatermass 2 and Quatermass And The Pit (reviewed here), this book is dedicated to films which perhaps only the casual Hammer fans might know of and which are, perhaps, not something the general public at large would necessarily have in their minds when they come to think of the output of one of Britain’s most fondly remembered studios.

That this work is well written and, perhaps as importantly, entertaining as well as at least a little informative, is not in question. Hallenbeck weaves words without beating around the bush and leaves you with a very clear idea of just how things were going down on these kinds of movies... at least in the broadest sense. And that’s one of my major problems with this particular volume and one which I know also troubled a friend of mine quite recently when we “compared notes”, so to speak, on this particular volume... the lack of detail and in depth information on the Hammer movies this book focuses on is not as exhaustive as one might have expected for a volume of this kind.

The book’s big strength, that of context, is a bit of a double edged sword because it’s also, at least it seems to me, something which maybe contributes to the lack of exhaustive information throughout the page count. By that I mean, the writer has done a very good job, an excellent job in fact, of contextualising the films he is talking about by giving a brief history of the genre in cinema terms and then continually looking at what else was happening in the realm of science fiction and fantasy cinema at the time of whatever film he is talking about. This is great because it lets the novice film goer understand how certain things fit in to their place in cinematic history... for instance, it’s always good to be reminded that one of my favourite Hammer movies, Moon Zero Two (reviewed here), was released into cinemas the year after Kubrick’s seminal work of science fiction, 2001: A Space Odyssey. It helps one keep things in perspective.

However, this does have the effect, and I know I’m not the only person to feel this way about this particular volume, of diluting the actual emphasis on the Hammer content which the book is supposed to be about. I don’t know if the book had a specific page count limit it had to stay within but I would have liked a lot more detailed analysis of the experience of working on all these things than we have here. A chapter or two on each movie, along with notes about the way the actors interacted with the directors, more detailed history of the censor cuts required, set design information and a full coverage of the creation of the scores to each one would really not have gone down badly. I appreciate that this kind of detail takes a while to research and that, the older these films get, the less eye witnesses to the original events we have, but I really did feel a little short changed while I was reading this, it has to be said.

The structure of the book, where similar projects are lumped in together, rather than give you the chronological history of a specific series in context to the other Hammer titles in this volume, such as certain of their prehistoric and Quatermass movies, was a tad annoying, especially since the writer did such a good job contextualising everything else around these things so nicely. But... that’s an aesthetic decision and one which I am sure was made for good reasons.

Asides from that, though, you have to hand it to this writer for really knowing how to engage the reader’s interest and, also, hearty congratulations are due for not lumping the Hammer Frankenstein films in with the science fiction output like certain documentary pieces have over the years... presumably because the directors of these things don’t have enough faith in just the specific sci-fi and fantasy titles Hammer produced. That being said, another of my favourite Hammer films, Four Sided Triangle, is not that well emphasised in its being a kind of “dry run” for the Frankenstein series, although it does at least compare it to the original source novel of the film... but since I’ve never been a big fan of Hammer’s attempts to bring Mary Shelley’s classic creation to life, I’m not complaining about it too much.

The impression I get from having only a smattering of knowledge about Hammer, just enough from having seen a fair number of their movies and reading a few books on the subject, is that this book has been put together with the absolute novice in mind, as opposed to someone who already has an active interest in this particular branch of the Hammer Family Tree... however, bearing in mind the start of the Marketing conscious title (if you look in a proper dictionary which doesn’t include silly made up new-fangled words from the 20th Century and later, you’ll realise there’s no such thing as “cult” movies anyway), the supposed target audience is already going to be familiar with most of the information garnered in this book. So I did find myself developing a bit of a split personality while reading this one, it has to be said.

This is not a bad book by any means... but neither is it the kind of resource I suspect the target audience would have hoped for in this slim tome, it has to be said. Ultimately, if you know next to nothing about Hammer or are studying the films in this book for an academic subject, this will do fine and, like a lot of these kinds of books over the last few years, it’s still a pretty essential volume for fans to have on their bookshelves, until something more thorough comes along. Tim Lucas’ book on Mario Bava, All The Colours Of The Dark, was pretty exhaustive in it’s coverage of a specific subject and I think the industry can learn a lot from that specific book, truth be told. Still, British Cult Cinema: Hammer Fantasy & Sci Fi is a reasonably priced read which beginners can use as a starting block to expand their knowledge from... so that’s pretty good. One to be recommended.

The Joy of X

X - The Unknown 1956 UK

Directed by Leslie Norman (replacing Joseph Losey)

Hammer Films DVD Region 1 (Anchor Bay)

X- The Unknown is a low budget Hammer sci-fi horror in the same vein as their movie adaptations of the Quatermass serials and movies such as The Crawling Eye (the big screen adaptation of The Trollenberg Terror). In fact, the character of Bernard Quatermass was supposed to headline this film but Nigel Kneale wouldn’t let Hammer use his creation for their own sequels... so instead you have a science hero who is working on... something to do with radiation... well, something other than rocket engineering and space travel anyway.

Similarly, the movie was supposed to be directed by the more famous director Joseph Losey (and some of his early footage does survive in the final cut) but he was “replaced” when the American actor Dean Jagger refused to work with a “communist sympathiser”. Dean Jagger, of course, is the token American hero imported into such movies at the time to sell it to the US distributors. The first two Quatermass movies had Brian Donlevy fulfilling that role and The Crawling Eye had Forrest Tucker.

Other than Dean Jagger, other interesting acting appearances in the movie include Edward Chapman (Mr. Grimsdale in those Norman Wisdom films), a dashing young Leo McKern and in a schoolboy role, a very young Frazer Hines - a decade or so before he grew up to be Jamie opposite Patrick Troughton in Doctor Who. And of course, no Hammer movie would be a true Hammer movie without the participation of Michael Ripper... playing a sergeant in a similar role to the one he had in the original TV serial of Quatermass and the Pit.

There are, amazingly for a 1956 movie, no recognisable female leads in this movie. There are very few female characters and they seem to be only on screen for five minutes. That seems quite strange for the time.

The film is very much a poor cousin of The Quatermass Xperiment but what it lacks in script and dialogue, it more than makes up for in pacing and... well, shall we say enthusiasm of performance?

The wild plot involves a radiation eating monster that escapes from the centre of the earth and eats any handy radioactive materials.... oh, and people. For some reason it likes to eat people and melt them with what I can only deduce is a forerunner of the Dracula-melting effect in Hammer’s first take on Bram Stoker’s seminal vampire. It’s all quite fun and Anchor Bay’s DVD offers an effectively crisp transfer of a well lit, excellent black and white print... as they often did back in their early days as a DVD company, when they were second only to Criterion as the DVD supplier of choice. I’m not so sure they’d care very much about doing as good a job with it these days but back when they released this little gem they were truly doing a service to the film watching community.

James Bernard’s cracking Quatermassesque score serves this kind of movie well - in my opinion he was much more effective at scoring these things than the Gothic horrors he is more famously associated with and if the film has any major week point it’s the ending. Where some fizzy, jammy, blob-like foam is fizzled to death until it explodes unconvincingly by using some cleverly rigged up, scientific looking apparatus powered by a wildly implausible but exuberant pseudo-science shilly-shally to give the “creature” a convincing sounding demise.

All in all, a nice gem of a British sci-fi horror movie which perhaps deserves more of a mention from time to time.