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)"It can be a bit of a surprise to revisit a film you haven’t seen in a long time. This is particularly true if you’ve learned — or watched — more since the last time you saw it. Queen of Blood is perhaps the best of the films Roger Corman spliced together from other movies […]
Read more "Queen of Blood (1966)"(aka Demon) This one is almost impossible to sum up. This is partly because any attempt is going to carry even the most circumspect summary into spoiler territory. However, it is also because this is a film that starts in one place and then moves into stranger and stranger places which seem to have little […]
Read more "God Told Me To (1976)"(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)"It seems almost impossible, and yet there it is: A movie, in the twenty-first Century, without a word of dialogue in its first hour. The silence of this film is almost painful. Early on, there is only the faintest hint of a score, and a sudden noise is enough to make the audience jump. We […]
Read more "A Quiet Place (2018)"Larry Cohen seems to have earned himself a reputation as a horror director in the Eighties, despite the fact that he only made a handful of horror films. Enough of a reputation, at least, that he got a chance to direct a “Masters of Horror” episode back in the Nothings. He is best remember for […]
Read more "The Stuff (1985)"Saul Bass is one of those people whose work is instantly familiar and has been seen by countless millions of people. And yet few people would recognize his name. Saul created the iconic credit sequences for a lot of films, including Vertigo, North by Northwest, It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, and Casino. He also directed the decidedly […]
Read more "Quest (1983)"
rivets on the poster 