The Quatermass Experiment is a serviceable little horror film made by Britain's Hammer Films in 1955. The movie is a shortened version of a live TV series shot consisting of six episodes (two of which are lost today) shot by the BBC in 1953. (In those days, series were filmed live -- this accounts for the rather static quality of the movie which, apparently, mimics the style of the TV program.) In its day, the movie was thought to be shocking -- it was rated "X", a feature xploited in its advertising: "The most Xtreme Horror!" The movie is an example of what we now call "body horror" avant la lettre. It's pretty entertaining although the shocks are very mild by today's standards.
A rocket-ship shot to the moon misses and ends up in deep space. Then, for an unknown reason, the space ship returns to earth. A young couple are literally having a roll in the hay when the rocket falls into the farm field and embeds itself half buried in the ground. The proprietor of the rocket, a certain Quatermass, appears at the location of the fallen rocket. Quatermass is played by Brian Donlevy, an American who can't avoid looking like a particularly smarmy used car salesman. After various preliminaries, a survivor tumbles out of the rocket, badly traumatized and unable to speak except to croak "Help me!" The survivor is hospitalized. The other two men who comprised the crew of the rocket have vanished -- their space suits are empty. (It turns out that the space monster has turned them into some kind of pulpy slime.) There's a bad kinescope showing the doings in the rocket before it crashed. It's not clear what the pictures show but they look eerie. The survivor whose name is Victor Caroom is hospitalized. He is very gaunt with long anguished face -- he is effective as the man-monster in the movie. Caroom shows a strange affinity for a bunch of roses brought into his room. We learn he's trying to merge his genetic material with the roses to become some sort of man-monster rose bush. A little later, Caroom smashes his fist into a cactus plant. This act causes his fist to turn into a club-shaped cactus complete with thorns. Caroom is slowly turning into a cactus and escapes the hospital wandering around the more seedy, if picturesque parts of London. Like Frankenstein's monster, he meets a little girl who is playing with her doll next to the Thames at a spectacularly grim series of concrete lagoons and rotting ships -- the crumbling boat is called The Plaudit. The monster kills a few people (I can't recall x-actly what happens with the child except that her doll ends up beheaded). Meanwhile, Quatermass and a group of scientists are trying to hunt down the man-monster who has eloped from custody. The creature hides in a thicket where we see his face is now coarsened to grimacing cactus. The monster decides to hide in Westminster Abbey and there is some excellent hard-edged black and white photography of the tombs and crypts in the Abbey. Quatermass gets all of the power plants around London organized to provide a jolt of current to the man-monster who is otherwise impossible to kill. (We get an excellent brooding shot of what is now the Tate Modern looming over the dark river.) By this time, the monster has become a cactus-skinned octopus with one glaring eye and some asymmetrical tentacles. It's a nasty pile of meat that leaves a slime-trail where it goes. The creature is shown briefly and its far more pathetic than threatening, a kind of heap of goo with some gangly tentacles sitting on a couple of girders like a gymnast on a balancing beam above an ornate medieval chapel. Quatermass zaps the monster and it obediently dies right away in a cloud of smoke, flashing sparks, and steam. Quatermass, mindful of the need for a sequel, struts away saying he will continue his experiments, He strides along dark streets and past odd ominous shadows and so the movie ends. (There were, in fact, three sequels, both on the BBC and, then, as Hammer films, the most well-known being Quatermass and the Pit, also a very good picture of its kind.)
The movie has its oddities. There's a cop or chief of police who x-tolls the virtues of reading the Bible. It seems they're still fighting it out over Darwin versus religion in the UK. A comical cockney trollop speaks in an accent totally indecipherable to American audiences. Some critics purport to find all sorts of anxiety in the movie over the cultural state of Britain in 1955. I don't see anything of that sort in the movie. It's just a cheap monster movie with some very unpleasant stuff -- the scenes with the monster in its final incarnation, a shambolic mess, is no more frightening than an acacia ot hydrangea bush, and is completely uninteresting and laughable. But the images of the cadaverous Caroom wandering around in agonizing pain, the mask of his face drawn tightly over this skull, are, indeed, quite frightening. If you like this kind of thing, I recommend this picture. Quatermass and the Pit (1967), which is in technicolor, is better and so, if you have to choose, opt for this later picture. By reputation the BBC TV shows are said to be even better than the Hammer Films based on them but how does anyone know? -- not all of the episodes of the Quatermass Experiment as a Tv show even x-ist today.
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