Quatermass

I predict 4 votes max for this!

"The Pit" for me

Film, that is

Oh! Old ILX (pre-Livejournal schism) loved Quatermass!

I don't know that I've seen enough to pick one, but the one set in the oil refinery with alien invasion - which one was that? I really enjoyed that one.

Looking at the synopses of the films, I am hard pressed to figure out which one it was at all.

That's the first, isn't it? Or the second?

You're right, it's Quatermass II. But I've not yet seen Quatermass and The Pit, which looks AMAZING in synopsis, so I don't want to vote for it.

itv4 show the 70s quatermass fairly regularly

Unfortunately the 1979 TV mini-series thing is a bit rubbish, and John Mills didn't really work. Are the other TV versions any good?
Basic plot synopsis of the films :

The Quatermass Experiment (film 1955) - astronaut staggers round London turning into a big blobby thing.
Quatermass II (Film 1957) - oil refinery used by aliens for some nefarious doings, can't remember what. Sid James is in it!
Quatermass and the Pit (film 1967) - Hobbs Lane tube, thought reading machine, crane. Creepy as fuck.
Quatermass (TV 1979) - ver kids are feral punk hippies, everyone gathers at Stonehenge to be sucked into the atmosphere.
Slightly ropey Harvest label prog band (1970) - some guy I used to know claimed to have been in them, but it turned out he was lying. Why them? I never understood. It impressed nobody, even the people that believed him.

Quatermass Conclusion is pretty good too -- http://www.horror-wood.com/conclusion_quatermass.htm

my vote for best Science Fiction film of the 60's will go to Quatermass and the Pit (aka Five Million Years To Earth and my gut suspicion is that anyone who doesn't vote for it simply hasn't seen it

ah apologies 'Quatermass (TV 1979)' = Quatermass Conclusion

The BBC have issued a superb set of all their extant Quatermass episodes (most of the first series is missing, the other two are pretty much complete.) The serials are obviously much talkier than the truncated Hammer adaptations, and their production quality is often a bit rough and ready, but they also have great ideas and dialogue and a uniquely eerie quality that the films mostly lack (tho' nothing matches the terrifying and touching performance of Richard Wordsworth in The Quatermass Xperiment - that X in title a deliberate ploy on Hammer's part to emphasise their flick's adult, X-Rated Horror. The success of the film quickly steered them in the direction of technicolor gothic.) Nigel Kneale HATED Brian Donleavy's performance in the first two Quatermass films - too blustering, too bloody American - but I think he works well with Val Guest's slam-bang direction.

Having caught the John Mills series on freeview telly a little while ago, I would say that it has improved with age - as Norman sez, it is amazingly bleak, and unremittingly serious - even if some of the optical effects are terribly shoddy.

I love the album cover from the ropey prog band

http://www.etsmtl.ca/pers/jboisono/shawnphillips/friends/quatermass.jpg

that's awesome!

pteranodons! in a futuristic..thing!

http://www.quartzcity.net/wp-content/uploads/2007/05/zeppelin_v_pterodactyls.jpg

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

zeppelins v pterodactyls=new desktop image

speaking of:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2PkY3zSuw4

Voted for ....and the Pit coz it's amazing. I also like the other films as well.

Never seen the last TV series but the novel, a charity shop staple, was OK.

Quatermas and the Pit (the movie version wins this by a country mile. Brilliant stuff. But the '79 tv show gets a nod for scaring the shit out of me as a child.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

shock result

The BBC have issued a superb set of all their extant Quatermass episodes (most of the first series is missing, the other two are pretty much complete.) The serials are obviously much talkier than the truncated Hammer adaptations, and their production quality is often a bit rough and ready, but they also have great ideas and dialogue and a uniquely eerie quality that the films mostly lack (tho' nothing matches the terrifying and touching performance of Richard Wordsworth in The Quatermass Xperiment - that X in title a deliberate ploy on Hammer's part to emphasise their flick's adult, X-Rated Horror. [...]

― Ward Fowler, Monday, March 31, 2008 8:38 PM (1 year ago) Bookmark

im midway through the 1950s tv dvds, and this is spot-on. i think kneale was right, though, and prefer the english guy to donlevy as quatermass. on the commentary track of 'quatermass 2' there are bits from both kneale and (director) val guest, recorded separately, and taking pot-shots at one another.

haven't seen the 2005 version -- seems to have been only 90 minutes long so massively truncated. though the effects of the 50s ones are what they are, they seem more real to me than modern dr who-type low-budget cgi, the worst of both worlds.

2005 one memorable for being broadcast live and ran short because they were acting too fast.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Quatermass_Experiment_%282005%29

Bumping because the poll winner, AKA Five Million Years to Earth, is on TCM tonight.

Meanwhile, The 1955 Quatermass Experiment film is currently available on the BBC iPlayer:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b007y4fk/The_Quatermass_Experiment/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrIPrgD-4hc

The Pit was on the other night. Even though I must have seen it about a dozen times I'd forgotten about some of the more egregious plot holes. So the site of a possible alien spacecraft, or gigantic World War II bomb, but where in any case unique remains of an ancestor of the human race has been found - and which, into the bargain has been the focus of frenzied media speculation such that the government has had to step in to ward off possible mass hysteria - is being guarded by some little bloke in a raincoat with a bowler hat on.

in the quatermass ep of the goon show (= the scarlet capsule) they announce the discovery of the "skeletons of three blue serge suits and the bones of a bowler hat"

2005 one memorable for being broadcast live and ran short because they were acting too fast.

I was at the 70th Anniversary restating last year in Alexandra Palace which was largely great (although Alice Lowe absolutely phoned it in as Judith and sucked the life out of all her scenes) but it had the opposite problem and overran by a whopping 90 minutes. Admittedly much of this was Toby Hadoke delightfully chewing the scenery.

The whole sequence where the little bloke in the raincoat and the bowler hat lets the drilling engineer into the underground station to collect his equipment - in the middle of the night - and the engineer kind of dances down through streets wreaking havoc where he goes is possibly my favourite part of the film. Also when Duncan Lamont asked Roy Ward Baker how he should play the scene below, I wonder what he was told...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0KeDIVbp-Y

I've been really enjoying the recent 4k Hammer reissues of Quatermass Xperiment and Quatermass 2. It's hard to argue either of the movies really deserves this level of care and attention, but the other stuff in the sets is fantastic - some great new documentaries (as long as you find Hadoke's mugging endearing rather than annoying, which I do), tons of older documentaries and interviews, excellent essay books, plus all the extant episodes of the original two tv shows. And I haven't even started on the commentaries yet. Fair bet that Quatermass and the Pit will get a similar release soon, I think.

Lots of focus on non-Quatermass Nigel Kneale stuff too.

Different rights holder for Quatermass and the Pit, so won't be part of this reissue series.

Oh, shame!

Yeah, I haven’t kept up with these new reissues but this new Hammer will own the rights to Tha Abominable Snowman, also written by Kneale, so they’ll likely do a similarly deluxe edition of that sooner rather than later, if they haven’t already. They would also own X the Unknown, a Jimmy Sangster Quatermass knock-off directed by Barry Norman’s dad.

Really enjoying this podcast: https://bergcast.room207press.com/

Most recent episode has the guys from Hammer talking about how they do hope to put out similar releases of some of the films with more complicated rights issues (including Quatermass and the Pit if they can manage it). They're doing the simple stuff first and trying to demonstrate there's money to be made from this kind of high end reissue, in the hope that'll make other rights owners more inclined to get involved.

(Also, I've just finished watching Beasts which is bleak, seedy, largely great - especially Baby and During Barty's Party, not so much Buddyboy!)

Thanks, again, haven't kept up with their releases but I know they've just done a deluxe Curse of Frankenstein, previously controlled by Lionsgate/Icon for R2, so they're obviously having some success already with rights wrangling. Good!

Oh and I've only just seen this - they're going to be putting out non-Hammer stuff too, weirdly. Though I like their "everyone always assumes this stuff is Hammer anyway" justification.

https://hammerfilms.com/blogs/news/introducing-hammer-presents

a small very funny thing in quatermass & the pit (movie) is when barbara first shows BQ the cuttings of old press stories abt hobgoblin activity in the area and he excitedly exclaims "photocopies!"

Peter Copley bringing the ultimate British Character Actor look to his role

https://www.moviedude.co.uk/Peter%20Copley%20%20Quatermass%20and%20the%20Pit%20(1967).jpg

i moved onto the TV version (1958): it's terrific --0 BQ was just confronted by an old cockney lady who reads tea-leaves: she dismisses him scornfully as a “sceptic” and he leaves, then she reads the tea-leaves & is alarmed by what she sees

ilx first mentions - Peter Copley

oh whoops

Raymond Douglas Dadaismus (Dada) wrote this on thread S/D: Gay movies of arty qualities on board I Love Everything on 23-Sep-2005

"Victim" was on Channel 4 last week, what a great 60s UK cast: Bogarde, Sylvia Syms (what a babe!), Dennis Price, Anthony Nicholls, Peter Copley, Norman Bird, Peter McEnery, Donald Churchill, Derren Nesbitt (hooray!), John Cairney (!), Nigel Stock, Charles Lloyd Pack, Frank Thornton