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Year: 1955 Production: Hammer Director: Val Guest Starring: Brian Donlevy, Richard Wordsworth, Jack Warner Screenwriter: Ricahrd Landau, Val Guest Based on the BBC TV serial by Nigel Kneale 82 minutes, cut to 78 minutes; B/W
It was this film version of the BBC's tv serial The Quatermass Experiment that convinced the Hammer company there was money in horror. (The spelling "Xperiment" referred jokingly to the X certificate Hammer correctly expected the film to be given because of what seemed in those innocent days its alarming horror content.) An astronaut returns to Earth infected by spores from space that slowly take over his body, finally transforming him into an amorphous blob that retreats into Westminster Abbey, where it is electrocuted by Quatermass (The original tv serial ends with Quatermass talking to all the three astronaut psyches lingering within the monster, thus convincing the blob to self-destruct.) Richard Wordsworth's shambling, pitiful performace as the afflicted astronaut is quite moving, communicating (though he barely speaks) a sense of something utterly alien to human experience. The Quatermass Xperiment is a minor classic. The sequels are Quatermass II (Enemy from Space) (1957), Quatermass and the Pit (Five Million Years to Earth) (1967), and The Quatermass Conclusion (1980). |
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