Here's where his luck ran out......Quatermass's daring, uncompromising attempts to explore the universe invariably invited gruesome repulsively slimy aliens to invade the earth. Even after barely saving us all from being eaten by huge pulsating intergalactic blobs, Quatermass remained undeterred in his singular vision. He couldn't wait to blast off the next rocket.......while we quaked at the idea of what his next space probe would return with.....
Quatermass's feature film adventures got off to a rousing start with The Quatermass Xperiment (1955).( aka: The Creeping Unknown) Brought over from the U.S. to play Quatermass was weathered Hollywood veteran Brian Donlevy, at the down-and-out stage of a long career. Nigel Kneale vociferously despised Donlevy's interpretation of Quatermass........but as much the BQ reveres Kneale, we always got a kick out of Donlevy's brusque, no-nonsense, short-tempered Quatermass. Donlevy (whom Kneale claimed was drunk throughout filming) barks out his dialogue, suffers no fools, and storms around the film as if he's late for another appointment. His Quatermass is such a single-minded visionary he treats every near-apocalyptic alien invasion as a minor setback in his quest for the stars and pursuit of scientific knowledge.
The Prof's first manned rocket has crash landed back on earth missing two of the three astronauts he sent up. The poor surviving astronaut (the astounding Richard Wordsworth) staggers out of the rocket infected by an invisible alien entity that dissolved the other two guys, leaving nothing of them but empty spacesuits. Donlevy huffs and puffs about, but the film really becomes a showcase for a simultaneously heartbreaking and terrifying performance by Wordsworth.......playing an physically agonized human being losing his humanity as the alien inside him transforms him into a slithering, tentacled, God-only-knows-what. It's one of the greatest, epic pieces of acting in all of cinema and not to be missed......
As we pointed out, you can't keep Donlevy's Quatermass down and he returns several years later in Quatermass 2 (1957) (aka: Enemy From Space). The Big Q has even bigger plans....a proposed moon base colony. And this time around, the government's even given him some infrastructure.....a control bunker and a launching pad. (In the first film, Quatermass and his browbeaten staff don't appear to have offices or headquarters at all.....they travel around together bundled up in a mini-van.)
But Quatermass's science has gone awry.....the faulty engineering of his latest starship renders it nothing but a rocket-propelled bomb. And to add grievous insult to injury, his grand moon base has been stolen and and constructed in the countryside by alien-zombie-fied humans. They're using the moon base's huge pressurized domes (actually a Shell Oil refinery) to feed and grow their alien masters in the aliens' true form.....giant, ammonia-breathing,, shuffling blobs, festively decorated with ribbons of tripe.....they look like what would happen to a Big Mac if you let it sit for a few days......
Consider the irony: Quatermass, who does nothing but piss off the authorities he needs to fund his dreams of space exploration, gets told to hit the books and re-learn his science. The aliens, who first arrive as gaseous blobs hiding in tiny spaceships, get all the funding they need for their project by zombie-fying members of Parliment......they may be from outer space, but they sure know how to lobby for the big bucks.
So "Quatermass 2" has it all for you......Big slimy blobs and alien zombie-humans in one jumbo explosive package. (Speaking of explosive....in another wonderful twist, Quatermass deploys his defective rocket bomb against the aliens' outer space HQ, thereby finding a use for his failed technology and deterring any future alien theft of his moonbase blueprints) Many favorite BQ moments throughout the film: when Quatermass pumps lethal oxygen into the domes where the blobs reside, the dutiful alien-zombies stuff the pipes with human beings to stop the flow......and when things really start to go south for the blobs and their minions, the zombies' pronouncements on the PA system become increasingly frenetic and panicked, like Sean Spicer at one of his press conferences. As in the first film, the frenzied string section of composer James Bernard's orchestra gives the proceedings an almost berserk energy.
Ten years go by before Prof. Quatermass makes his next big screen appearance, in "Quatermass And The Pit (1967) (aka: Five Million Years To Earth) No more Donlevy....the Prof is now played by stalwart Scotsman Andrew Keir and unlike Donlevy, he has Nigel Kneale's seal of approval and blessing. No longer the cranky, monomaniacal wonk, Keir's Quatermass is far more civilized, humanistic and quite professorial. The government ministers still hate him for his starry-eyed idealism about travelling to the stars......but Prof's no pushover though, and he defiantly rails against their attempt to militarize and weaponize his future planetary colonies.
Just as they saddle an outraged Quatermass with a tightass martinet Field Marshall (Julian Glover), startling discoveries pop up in a London underground station under construction.......... .....skeletons of mutated Neanderthals with enormous skulls and a Martian spaceship populated with the corpses of dwarf, insect-like creatures. Armed with Kneale's superb, breathlessly paced script, Quatermass untangles a slew of monstrous, stunning revelations about these creatures and their purpose on earth. The whole thing's a near perfect mixture of wildly imaginative sci-fi, horror and suspense. Unilke the first two films, capped by Donlevy's pithy, ominous quips, this one ends with an exhausted, disheveled Quatermass trying to catch his breath while the credits roll.
The BQ heartily recommends all three of the Prof's exploits with 4 twinkling Milky Way stars (****) and we wish Quatermass better luck and solid funding for the next rocket he sends up.....and someplace good to hide from whatever it brings down......
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