Perhaps it would help if I started with a minor digression on the Quatermass movies. Now I’ve written extensively about them over the years — for example, in these essays at IRoSF and Clarkesworld — and have reviewed both the TV and Movie versions of Quatermass 2 (1957) and Hammer’s version of the first serial for […]
Read more "Quatermass and the Pit [Five Million Years to Earth] (1967)"(aka, The Creeping Unknown) “Let me tell you something, Blake: they’ll fire the imagination so there’ll be a hundred men begging for the same privilege when we launch the second one. You can’t stop it now.” “You mean I can’t stop you now.” “That’s right.” It starts with nervous violins playing against a dark sky. […]
Read more "The Quatermass Xperiment (1955)"All right, let’s start with the strangest part of this film. This one starts out in space, with the shuttle Nautilus, a private vessel built by genius industrialist Rod Kendrick (played by Martin Sheen’s brother, Joe Estevez, whose voice you’ve probably heard if you think you just heard Martin in a commercial). You are allowed […]
Read more "Dark Universe (1993)"I quite like this one. Yeah, I know it gets its share of mockery — well, more than its share — thanks to the less than special “special effects” of its climax, but The Trollenberg Terror (better known here as The Crawling Eye) is actually a tense little horror film if you ignore the effects. […]
Read more "The Trollenberg Terror [The Crawling Eye] (1958)"I’ll admit it, I love this film. One of the main reasons is obvious: this was one of Ray Harryhausen’s movies, and we get lots of visual effects and creature animation. Which is the main reasons we love any Ray Harryhausen film. Another good reason is that Nigel Kneale, best remembered for creating the Quatermass […]
Read more "First Men in the Moon (1964)"(aka Enemy from Space) This is one of the lost treasures of the Fifties SF boom. I suppose it doesn’t help that the original Quatermass serials never played in the United States, or that the most successful and highly regarded film in the series, Quatermass and the Pit (renamed Five Million Years to Earth in […]
Read more "Quatermass 2 (1957)"Strange things start happening around an atomic research center on a US Air Force base in Canada. Before you know it, there are grisly and mysterious deaths they can’t seem to stop — and which seem to be the work of invisible creatures… This one has the strange distinction of being a British film, pretending […]
Read more "Fiend Without a Face (1958)"First of all, that’s “Quartermass,” not “Quatermass.” Dean R. Koonz isn’t quite the famous superstar horror author that Stephen King is, but I’m not sure which one actually sells more books. He’s had quite a few of his novels adapted for the big screen, although not as many as King. Mind you, those adaptations do […]
Read more "Sole Survivor (2000)"It was one of those rare, surprise successes. But could it be repeated? In 1953, BBC staff scriptwriter, Nigel Kneale, convinced the Beeb to let him write a SF/horror play to fill an empty Saturday night slot. It was a huge success, drawing a record audience, and inspired their competitors to make their own SF […]
Read more "Quatermass II (1955)"It seems strange, but one of the seminal SF film and TV series remains little seen in the United States. I refer, of course, to the original Quatermass serials and the Hammer film remakes that followed. While he had minimal impact on American SF movies, Quatermass inspired a generation of British SF movies and television […]
Read more "The Uninvited (1997)"
rivets on the poster 