Kneale initially wouldn't do the deal.......already famously irked about Hammer's importing a washed up, barely sober Brian Donlevy to play Quatermass as an angry crank in the first film.....
Undeterred, Hammer had their fledgling young screenwriter Jimmy Sangster (soon to become their prolific go-to scribe), write them an imitation Quatermass movie, complete with an American nuclear physicist facing off against an intelligent mass of radiation-gobbling goo bubbling up beneath the earth.....
In place of Kneale's space exploration visionary, Sangster substituted Dr. Adam Royston, played by Dean Jagger with way more even-tempered humanity and wit than Donlevy's suffer-no-fools, obsessive Quatermass.....
American politics, of all things, intruded into the film, as staunch right-winger Jagger refused to be directed by HUAC blacklist refugee Joseph Losey......so Leslie Norman, a no-great-shakes-but-gets-the-job-done-on-time Brit took over.....
While lacking the edge-of-hysteria urgency that Val Guest brought to the Quatermass films, "X The Unknown" manages to work up it own little share of dread and suspense. And the film throws in a genuine ahead-of-its-time showstopper in its scenes of the oozing blob's effects on its victims, melting the flesh off their bones like Popsicles in a microwave.......
Jagger's Dr. Royston makes for a less imposing but still quietly authoritative figure, as opposed to the blustering Donlevy. When a young boy falls victim to the malignant, radioactive mud, the child's grieving father excoriates Royston for being "not safe". Jagger humbly and
silently accepts the accusation and agrees with it. (If this were Donlevy's Quatermass, he might have spat out at the dad, "Get over it. Your kid died for Science.")
Overall, a jolly good time for all classic sci-fi movie buffs.......with the added attractions of the forever wonderful Leo McKern as an atomic energy inspector.......and future London/Broadway musical comedy star Anthony Newley as a wisecracking Scottish soldier.....(no, he doesn't get to sing "What Kind Of Fool Am I?" as he encounters the lethal blob....)
It didn't melt our hearts as fast as its melts people, but we'll radiate 3 stars (***) for "X The Unknown".....maybe three-quarters of a Quatermass......
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