Truly Dreadful Film

Great Film overall

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

Professor Bernard Quatermass is in charge of a manned rocket mission that has gone awry. They lost contact with the spaceship at one point and have no idea how far into space it may have traveled. When the rocket crash lands in a farmer's field they find that only one of the three occupants, Victor Carroon, is on board; the others have simply vanished.Somehow when you say "1950s science fiction", this film tends to be overlooked. Often for more American films, some of which are better and many of which are worse. Why? And most interestingly, this comes from Hammer, the fines folks who brought life back to Dracula and Dr. Frankenstein. They are not really known for their science fiction, but maybe they should be.Jeff Szpirglas calls Kino Lorber's Blu-ray release "well worth the wait" Americans had to endure. Indeed, beyond the crisp picture, we get some nice interviews: John Carpenter and Ernest Dickerson, as well as director Val Guest. The latter, of course, is a real treat, but for me Dickerson is the hidden treasure. He has not yet received the attention he deserves.

Val Guest directed this science fiction tale based on a Nigel Kneale TV miniseries that stars Brian Donlevy as American rocket scientist Bernard Quatermass, who is called to the English countryside to investigate a rocket ship of his that has crashed. Two of the crew have disappeared, and the third is injured and uncommunicative. It turns out that the crew came into contact with an unknown life form in space that infected them, and now threatens to break loose upon the world, unless Quatermass and Inspector Lomax(played by Jack Warner) can stop it... Well directed and written thriller has nice atmosphere, but hurt by the miscasting of American Donlevy playing a British scientist, and the monster itself(at the climax) isn't that impressive, but otherwise this is a passable version.

Scripted by Richard Landau and director Val Guest, based on Nigel Kneale's BBC TV serial, "The Quatermass Xperiment" a.k.a. "The Creeping Unknown" is an intelligent, atmospheric, and genuinely creepy movie.A spaceship crashes back down to Earth with only one of three astronauts returning with it. Something is clearly quite wrong with the man; as it turns out, he's in the beginning stages of transforming into something else, and the stakes get raised when he inevitably escapes.Brian Donlevy is the stubborn, gruff scientist in charge, Bernard Quatermass, and he's not your typical hero from sci-fi of the era, as he doesn't exactly try to be friendly or likable. He doesn't really have the time for people with different agendas than his own. Kneale and Guest have disagreed on Donlevy's interpretation, with the author failing to be impressed with this take on the role. A strong supporting cast helps to make the movie fun to watch: Jack Warner as the intrepid Inspector Lomax, David King-Wood as Dr. Gordon Briscoe, Lionel Jeffries as Blake, Maurice Kaufmann as Marsh, Thora Hird as the comedy relief character Rosie, and especially Richard Wordsworth as the doomed astronaut Victor Carroon. His role is nearly a silent one, but he conveys a lot through the tortured expression on his face throughout. That's Jane Asher as the little girl who encounters Carroon.Guest generates some pretty good suspense at select points, and the makeup effects are definitely very good for the time. The final incarnation of the creature is appropriately hideous. One scene that really stands out is at a zoo where the music score drops out and the silence becomes palpable. This is, in this reviewer's humble opinion, the creepiest portion of the movie. James Bernard's music is quite scary, and the movie gets off to a Hell of a great start; it hits the ground running. And the pacing is efficient all the way through. This proved to be an early success for Hammer, who entered their long running Gothic period with "The Curse of Frankenstein" two years later; at this time they were known as Exclusive films.Science fiction fans will be sure to find this a genuinely interesting and tense movie that entertains solidly from beginning to end.Eight out of 10.

One of the most impressive things about "Quatermass" is that the creators involved with the concepts seem to be consistently good at making a modest budget go a very long way towards an impressive story.I remember seeing the "Quatermass II" television serial a few months back and being completely pulled into the suspense and mystery of the story in spite of the tiny budget for special effects because the writing was intelligent, well thought out, and without a dull moment in the screenplay. The same is true here.While the budget is obviously considerably higher, it's still a modest little thing compared to contemporaries like "This Island Earth" and "The Day The Earth Stood Still", but it doesn't matter, because this is a movie about ideas. It works well on many levels, from the underplayed makeup and transformation effects for the "returning" astronaut to the staging and execution of the final showdown in a local British landmark.It's also pretty cool that the creators stayed with the idea of Quatermass as a gruff, headstrong and abrasive man. But the character always means what he says and has solid reasons for his actions; and when a character like Quatermass starts showing concern and anxiety, it's much more effective in enhancing the suspense than if he were usually a "warm fuzzy" kind of guy.In short, this is a minor classic, well worth taking the time to see if you get the chance.