REVIEW: QUATERMASS 2
REVIEW: ENEMY FROM SPACE
REVIEW: VAL GUEST [ 1957 ] 81'
REVIEW: HAMMER PRODUCTIONS
CAST: BRIAN DONLEVY, JOHN LONGDEN
CAST: SID JAMES, BRYAN FORBES
PERSONAL RATING:
CRITICAL RATING:
WTF-FILMOMETER: BRIAN DONLEVY STRIKES AGAIN!

This review is part of
THE BLOB FAMILY PICNIC B-MOVIE ROUNDTABLE

A convertible speeds through the night - the driver is a young woman and beside her is a man who has been stricken ill both in body and mind. The man briefly takes control of the car and sends it careening across traffic, almost hitting an on-coming car. It's no small coincidence that the man in the on-coming car is non other than the esteemed Professor Bernard Quatermass (Brian Donlevy in his second and final time playing the character) - he scolds the couple briefly before noticing that the man has a strange burn on his face. The young woman hands him a few bits of rock that she claims burned him and mentions something about a little village that's disappeared. Quatermass herds the demented man into his car and, young woman following close behind, speeds off into the night.

So begins Val Guest's QUATERMASS 2.

Unlike the serial it was based upon, Guest (and screenwriter Nigel Kneale, putting in his first screenplay for a film adaptation of his Quatermass serials) realized the inherent need to set the action moving from a very early stage. Whereas the serial takes its time slowly building suspense towards the horrifying events of the latter episodes, Guest thrusts the audience directly into the action with suspenseful opening scene. It works well, and the film version of QUATERMASS II doesn't let up from there.

The film continues with strange events at a research station - the two men on station there pick up a multitude of small unidentified objects coming in low and slowly. They reset the angle on their scanner after losing the objects and begin making a more thorough search for them.

The research station soon shows itself to be Quatermass' own and is devoted to rocket research and his ambitious moon colonization project. He's none to pleased when he returns and finds the scanner angle altered, though his irritation is soon explained by other means - it seems that the talking heads at the ministry have no more faith in him or his rockets and have cut of funding for his project indefinitely. His latest rocket - powered by a nuclear motor - is a failure since its most important part is no more stable than an atomic bomb. Quatermass hands over the rocks he received earlier in the evening to his colleagues and heads out with a handful of books, intent on finding out where he went wrong so that he can save his floundering pet project.

Meanwhile, the unknown objects continue to fall. . .

The next morning Quatermass returns to the station, exhausted from a long and sleepless night, to find that his colleagues, too, have been working. The bits of rock the Professor brought in are like nothing else they've ever seen and, when put together, make a symmetrical shape with a hollow interior. The object Quatermass was given is soon connected to the mysterious traces the scanner picked up the night before and, in no time at all, he and his colleague Marsh are headed to the town of Winnerden Flats, where the object was supposed to have fallen.

Put off their course by a number of road blocks and signs announcing that they're on government property, Quatermass and Marsh eventually stumble upon something all together unexpected - an industrial complex that bares more than a little resemblance to Quatermass' proposed moon base, high pressure domes and all. The surrounding area is littered with the remnants of buildings - all that's left of Winnerden Flats - as well as a multitude of the strange falling objects. Most of them are decayed and crumbling, but Marsh stumbles upon one that's much more recent and blessedly untouched. After Marsh senses a faint movement within it Quatermass tries to get him to put it down, but he's too late. The meteor cracks open, jettisoning a thick ammonia vapor - and something else - into Marsh's face and leaving behind a strange V-shaped mark.

It isn't long before sirens begin blaring and squads of military-esque guards, machine guns and strange detectors in tow, from the industrial complex surround Quatermass and his stricken friend. Without so much as a word they take Marsh from the area and drag an understandably concerned Quatermass back to his car. He is forced to leave at gunpoint and heads off into the countryside.

He soon happens upon the prefab town where the workers who built the plant reside and heads to the committee office to make a report of the incident. He is met with nothing but secrecy in regards to the industrial complex and is sent on his way with little in the way of answers. Police from a town away are no more help, and Quatermass heads back to the lab. He tells his fellow researcher Dr. Brand about what had happened earlier in the day in spits of detail and decides his only course of action is to head to London to make an official inquiry into the matter. Before he leaves a model of what the strange meteors may have looked like prior to entering the atmosphere is shown to him - it's a simple and elegant design, entirely functional, and evidence that some high degree of intelligence is behind the objects.

Meanwhile, more of the mysterious objects are falling over Winnerden Flats. . .

In London Quatermass meets up with Inspector Lomax, a man who aided him considerably during the events of THE QUATERMASS XPERIMENT [1955]. After relating the information he's gathered thus far, Lomax lets on for the first time what the Winnerden Flats industrial facility is supposed to be - a harmless plant dedicated to some new process of synthetic food production. Lomax sends the Professor to meet with Vincent Broadhead, a member of Parliament who's attempting an official inquiry into the workings at the plant. Quatermass and Broadhead are allowed an official inspection of the facility later that same day - a look into the infirmary shows no sign of Marsh.

Quatermass and the rest of the officials in the inspection group, are eventually led to an air-locked room where they are told they will be shown the process of the synthetic food production - but Broadhead is missing. Ominous actions on the part of the conductor of the inspection leave Quatermass feeling more than a little uneasy and he opts to remove himself from the party - narrowly making his way out of a closing airlock, thus escaping an unknown but unquestionably horrid fate. In the end he does find Broadhead - clambering out of one of the food storage tanks and covered in a corrosive black slime. "This is the food!" he screams in fits of spasms, "and it burns!" Broadhead dies and Quatermass narrowly escapes form the plant's trigger happy guards.

From this moment on, Quatermass and Inspector Lomax are tossed into a conspiracy of invasion that reaches from the lowest levels of the working class to the highest levels of government - a conspiracy spearheaded by a malignant alien force bent on world domination. The facility at Winnerden Flats turns out to be a synthetic food production site after all, but only for the service of them. It's a race against time for Quatermass to stop the terrible threat - towering amoebic monsters of black with the power to compel lower life forms to do their bidding until such time as they are of no more use - leading to the very real possibility of launching the unstable Quatermass 2 rocket.

The previous Hammer produced Quatermass film, THE QUATERMASS XPERIMENT (released here as THE CREEPING UNKNOWN) was a wild success and the production house was eager to make another of its ilk. X - THE UNKNOWN [1956] was originally conceptualized as the first film sequel in the Quatermass series, but rights issues prevented Hammer Studios from being able to use the Professor's namesake. In 1955, when the script for the first serial sequel in the Quatermass series was scripted, Hammer jumped at the chance and quickly purchased the rights to make a film adaptation of the story using the same cast and director of the first film. Nigel Kneale, who had always been unhappy about his lack of involvement in THE QUATERMASS XPERIMENT was no long contractually obligated to the BBC at the time of QUATERMASS 2's production, so he signed on as screenwriter for the project.

Though condensed to under half the running time of the original serial, QUATERMASS 2 retains all of the horrifying imagery - the towering black alien monsters as well as the unfortunate man covered in their food (an image that haunted me for years after having seen a still of it in a science fiction film book) as well as the quiet conspiracy that surrounds it all - that made the serial so successful. While the overall scope of the story is diminished - Quatermass no longer rockets himself into space to personally destroy the home of the alien invaders - the rewrite by Kneale remains intelligent, witty, and thought provoking to this day, possessing much of the same commentary on post-war industrialization and the rampant political conservatism of the day.

Val Guest, successful director of other fine films like THE ABOMINABLE SNOWMAN [1957] and THE DAY THE EARTH CAUGHT FIRE [1961], proved a suitable choice to substitute television director Rudolph Cartier. Guest had directed the previous entry in the Quatermass film entry and imbued QUATERMASS 2 with the same sense of impending horror that had made that film, which was considerably slower paced, as successful as it was. Though this film is more often than not overlooked in lieu of the first and third films in the series, Guest's direction in QUATERMASS 2 helps make it one of the best overlooked science fiction films of the decade.

That's not to say, as is always the case, that it doesn't have some issues. First and foremost is the casting of American actor Brian Donlevy (BEAU GESTE [1939]) as the imminent Professor Bernard Quatermass. To his credit, he seems a bit more keen on the role this go around but, when compared to the other actors who played the part over the years, he is the most unsuccessful. Other problems include the sound mixing of the various scenes of gunfire in the film - the same single sound effect of machine gunfire is looped ad nauseum and, occasionally, is even out of sync with the gunfire itself. Special effects work for the film is limited mostly to miniature and matte work, which varies in their quality but are generally successful in invoking the necessary audience reactions.

These faults are quite overlookable in regards to the film as a whole and should not serve to deter anyone looking for a good sci-fi outing. All in all, QUATERMASS 2 is intelligent science fiction cinema that, in spite of its many merits, never seems to receive the credit it deserves. Regardless of that lack of acclaim, this one comes highly recommended from me.