Quatermass 2

This was one of the first of its kind; a subtlety scary vision of a secret alien takeover. X-FILES may owe a debt to this low-budget, but nevertheless effective film of the powers-that-be who are conspiring with the invaders, and one lone, determined scientist who accidentally uncovers the sinister plot.

QUATERMASS II (U.S. title: ENEMY FROM SPACE) was produced before INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS, the film it is often compared to, due to their thematic similarities (loss of identity, social oppression, dangers of conformity, and blind allegiance to a greatly questionable, authoritarian power). However, it was released in the U.S. shortly after BODY SNATCHERS, probably making it look like a copycat to some.

Superb writer Nigel Kneale (excellent script, highly original for its time, derived from the earlier BBC serial) was known to strongly despise Brian Donleavy's gruff performance as the lead character. Kneale did not like the fact that Donleavy presented the character as a cold, methodical misanthrope who treats his colleagues like expendable underlings. He will probably want to boil me in oil for saying this, but I felt that presenting the lead character as morally ambivalent and ethically questionable jettisoned the standard 50's scientist/hero sterotype (for once he is not nice and charming). It also added a further degree of tension to the well-plotted story. In many ways, his alienated character is somewhat alien; perhaps that's the only true way to resist social pressures and conditioning. The allegory here is strong.

As the story opens, Quatermass is driving one night on a remote country road. He is furious that the stodgy Whitehall bureaucrats rejected his funding request for a proposed moon colonization project. A speeding car nearly hits him head-on as it runs off the road. The shaken passengers are a frightened woman and her boyfriend, who is in a crazed state, and has a strange black mark on his face.

Quatermass returns to his isolated lab, where radar reveals to his assistants that many small meteor particles (at least that's what they assume they are) have descended over a rural village known as Wynerton Flats.

Going out there with his colleague, Marsh, they first discover his moon project, fully constructed, and some small, mysterious rocks. As Marsh examines one, it emits an eerie gas and pops in his face, leaving the weird black mark. Strange soldiers arrive, behaving like aloof zombies, abduct Marsh, strong-arm Quatermass in the typical fascist tradition, and order him to leave. (There may be one flaw here: Why didn't the "soldiers" either abduct or kill Quatermass, instead of letting him go, so he can inform?)

Naturally the authorities all have tight lips about the secret activities at Wynerton Flats, but Quatermass manages to convince a few officials to go out there with him. A government aid (with that strange black mark on his wrist) conducts a formal tour of the plant, where everything seems to be normal. Not so. The small group is indoctrinated by the zombies (who resemble Nazis), but Quatermass manages to escape.

(This scene truly exposes Donleavy's ruthless side: He and a woman are taken into a large dome, but Quatermass flees, leaving the woman behind, without any concern for her fate. Hell, he doesn't even abide by the old fifties hero tradition by risking his life to save the distressed damsel. In many ways Quatermass was an ahead-of-his-time anti-hero. I always felt that this added a disquieting strength to the drama and the severity of the dire situation, but I guess that Kneale will still vehemently disagree).

I'll stop here, but don't worry, the worse is still to come. The sense of growing unease and mounting terror (strong qualities of your finer British Science Fiction at that time) escalates. Be patient, for it does carefully build into a total state of alarm, as Quatermass and the local angered citizens challenge the invaders (who have taken over most of the government and military officials) to a brutal showdown. There is something highly menacing in those domes.

This impressive film is true Science Fiction at its best. It thrills without pandering and is thoughtful to the point of disturbing. You can't trust anyone. Its social and political implications are definitely troubling. This is not for your Lucas and Spielberg crowd, for we're not talking about commercial catering to eight-year-olds. Val Guest directs in a cold, cynical Kubrickian manner, accentuating the high degree of paranoia, and the picture's black & white photography conveys a bleak, creepy mood. (Sorry, no pretty pictures here). The intriguing story takes on true nightmarish proportions.

The few effects won't win any CGI awards (don't forget, computers weren't around then) but the briefly glimpsed monster (in the gothic Lovecraft tradition) is quite sickening. After all, it can manipulate man's dirty politics, you can't get more reprehensible than that.

From the late sixties to the late eighties this film was unavailable to the public, and it was feared to be permanently lost, but it later was released on video and shown occasionally on the Science Fiction Channel. Many notable Science Fiction and Horror authors (I believe that Harlan Ellison and Stephen King were among them) have championed this small, but remarkable early Hammer production. This is the film that many others have "borrowed from." Just a polite way of saying RIPPED-OFF!

For those seeking an intelligent challenge, check it out.

I first saw this film once when I was about five or six years old on TV. Because the film had location shooting at an oil refinery, for years I was always reminded of this film when ever I drove past one, wondering if something sinister was going on inside those tanks. However, soon after I first saw this film, QUATERMASS 2 (or ENEMY FROM SPACE-as it was called here in the USA), was pulled from distribution for various legal reasons, and this film was for years impossible to view. Then the film was released from its legal limbo in the mid eighties and I purchased a video copy as soon as it came out.

Unlike so many hard to view films that have been promoted as "a long lost classic", that often turn out not to live up to their reputations when finally viewed again*, QUATERMASS 2 truly deserves its reputation as a rediscovered lost classic. It is one of the best British science fictions films from the fifties.

The films acting and direction are uniformly good. The black and white photography is excellent and the film has an excellent musical score (although sometimes the music is a bit too loud.) The scene where the giant aliens burst from the domes is one of my favorite scenes in a fantastic film. Its like something out of a nightmare: the dome begins to crack, like a giant egg, and emerging from is not a cute little chick, but a hideous malignancy. The gloomy dark gray lighting enhance this scene. However, the aliens that emerge, while gross and repulsive looking when viewed for the first time, begin to look a tad bit silly after repeated viewings.

Perhaps one of the most interesting thing about this film when viewed today, is the films story has many similarities to the "Area 51" mythology. In the film there is government owned plant where everything is top secret, it gets unlimited tax payer funding, but no one in the government dare asks whats going on. This sounds lot like what we are told about the so-called "Area 51." I'm surprised " psycho/social reductionists" like Curtis "Watch The Skies" Peebles overlooked this film. Then again, maybe we are lucky they have.

QUATERMASS 2 is an excellent fifties science fiction that should be more widely shown. Like the other films in the famous "Quatermass" series, its literate, suspenseful and thrilling.

*Sometimes the films promoted as "long lost classics" aren't even lost!

'Quatermass 2' is even better than the excellent 'The Quatermass Xperiment'. Like the first movie it was a remake of the original British TV production which I have sadly not seen (both are lost I think). Val Guest directs once again, Brian Donlevy reprises the role of the crusty Professor Quatermass, and this time Nigel Kneale was allowed to adapt his own original script, which probably explains why it improves on the first movie. Quatermass stumbles across a mysterious secret Government installation which is supposedly developing synthetic food, but is in fact something quite different and frightening. Donlevy isn't my favourite Quatermass but he is better here than in the first movie, and the supporting cast includes John Longden in the role originally played by Jack Warner, Bryan Forbes as Quatermass' assistant Marsh (another change of actor), comedian Sid James of 'Carry On' fame, and Hammer regular Michael Ripper. 'Quatermass 2' is a very entertaining and suspenseful thriller, which hasn't dated as half as much as you'd expect. It will particularly be interesting to fans of 'Invasion Of The Body Snatchers', which it shares certain themes with, and 'The X-Files', which many people, myself included, would argue owes this movie and the next in the series 'Quatermass and the Pit' a large debt. Nigel Kneale is one of the most underrated writers of SF and horror of our time (over 80 years old and still active!), and the Quatermass movies are his best known and enjoyable achievements. I highly recommend them all.

The second of the Quatermass films (the first was THE QUATERMASS XPERIMENT, the "X" used to emphasise the adult X-rating the film received on its initial release) was allowed a slightly larger budget and benefited enormously from Nigel Kneale's participation in the screenplay. In this film, at least Brian Donlevy behaves a little more like Quatermass ought to, though I still don't think he was right for the part.

For my money, Quatermass should be a pipe-smoking English boffin with leather patches sewn on the elbows of his jacket. The original character was conceived as a kind of Barnes Wallis type, as portrayed by Michael Redgrave in THE DAM BUSTERS.

The movie is set in a post-war Britain that was a little panicked by the idea of nuclear weapons and even more unsettled by the knowledge that our former allies, The Soviets, had the same weapons and they were pointed at us. This was the climate that gave us Orwell's 1984 and Don Siegel's INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS. Paranoia was out to get us ...

This same atmosphere lasted well into the 1960s and can also be glimpsed in TV shows like THE AVENGERS. This was the era I grew up in, so I speak from personal experience :-)

This movie is one of Hammer's better offerings of the period. Released the same year as CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN, it more than holds its own against the other, better-known Hammer colour offerings. Indeed, it benefits from its monochrome photography, which brilliantly communicates the austerity of the years immediately following WWII.

Thoroughly recommended, this film will appeal to anyone who can get beyond the admittedly primitive 1950s special effects to be rewarded by the rich and clever story that lies beneath the slightly dodgy veneer ...

Val Guest's Quatermass II is my favourite film ever. The cold, dawning revelation that builds up all the way through the first half of the film that the invasion is actually underway and that the 'zombies' not only WALK AMONG US, but are actually IN CHARGE and IN POWER is terrifyingly atmospheric. I always like to think that if the invasion ever did come, it wouldn't come through massive mother ships as per Independence Day, but from within, from the suburbs, the rural villages. Really clever invaders would use Earth's own power structures, governments and resources against it without anyone noticing, not turn up en masse in flying saucers spoiling for a fight. The idea of the invasion falling to Earth in meteorites through a form of collective intelligence (recycled in the 1973 BBC Doctor Who serial Spearhead From Space) continues this threatening vein of invasion, and provides the most atmospheric scene in the film when Quatermass stands in the open night air as whizzing sounds around him give away the increased number of the meteorites now falling (the invasion is now fully underway!). Other scenes are just downright terrifying and follow the Kneale tradition of 'terror through revelation': the lorries in London carrying the symbol; Quatermass' first glimpse through the dome viewing panel; and when it is revealed how the zombies are blocking the pipes!! This 'revelation' aspect can be seen in all of the Quatermass films and serials (in The Quatermass Conclusion: when it is revealed by the body parts that the hippies weren't 'transported', in Quatermass and the Pit: 'you mean WE are the Martians!!'). Storytelling, atmosphere and terror like this hasn't survived the onset of today's special effects. Film makers like Dean Devlin just don't need to employ methods like this anymore, and this is why thinking people's science fiction relying on chilling, atmospheric and scientifically valid stories, plots and concepts will never ever be repeated.