Hammer Studios is not very well known for its science fiction. Perhaps their showiest effort, the ridiculous western-in-space Moon Zero Two, may very well be the only Hammer movie spoofed by MST3K (I’m sure I will be corrected if I’m wrong). But when they were able to meld their gothic sensibilities with hard sci-fi like in this adaptation of a Nigel Kneale teleplay, it’s amazing.
If you don’t know who Nigel Kneale is, you should. He’s as instrumental in the fashioning of genre televisual storytelling in Great Britian as Rod Serling was in the United States, utilizing horror and science fiction tropes to comment directly on the world around him. The thing was that unlike Serling, who seemed to always hold out a modicum of hope for humanity, Kneale was convinced we were fucked from the beginning. Hell, this whole movie hinges on the concept of humankind being an experiment by alien grasshoppers--who had hardwired us to hate any of our kind who wasn’t the ideal they had in mind! We were just pawns in Kneale’s mind, and his dark visions served as inspiration for John Carpenter (who got Kneale to write the script for Halloween III: Season of the Witch, and utilized the Quatermass teleplays as a template for Prince of Darkness) and Chris Carter (who supposedly asked Kneale repeatedly to contribute a script for The X-Files, only to be turned down every time).
This film gets Kneale’s most beloved character (and star of two previous Hammer films)Professor Quatermass (Andrew Kier) involved with a curious artifact uncovered during a subway renovation. The military, represented by the stiff-upper-lipped Colonel Breen (Julian Glover) feels that its an unexploded Nazi bomb, even after it’s revealed that the material used to fashion the artifact is unlike any known substance and there’s the mummified remains of weird, tri-legged insects inside. Quatermass, with the help of a paleontological team on site (James Donald and Barbara Shelley) suspects that the artifact is a spacecraft and the insects are Martians whose experimentation on the simians that were our ancestors led to the myths of demons throughout the world. Not surprisingly, the military ignores Quatermass’ theory and things go horribly, horribly--one could almost say apocalyptically--Wrong.
This film is a slow burn, but that’s to be expected; Kneale’s script is interested in hard science fiction, which means a lot of investigation, speculation and discussion. Sure, director Roy Ward Baker slides in a telekinetic freakout or a disturbing, lo-fi video of rampaging devil insects to alleviate any potential boredom, but this is a story of ideas...and that’s probably why it works so well being made in the Hammer tradition. If anything looks kinda off, it’s the very end of the climax with model buildings crumbling and James Donald ramming a construction crane into a wavery energy image of a devil insect...but the final shot of Kier and Shelley leaning against a ruined wall, looking emotionally and physically numb is pure Hammer aesthetic. Why the studio felt compelled to pursue a pulpier, poppier kind of science fiction is beyond me; if anything, I think that maybe they should have mined the works of British science fiction writers like John Wyndham, which leaned more towards the Gothic sensibilities they knew how to pull off.
Watching this make me think this should be put in the ‘Never Could Be Made Today’category...not because it’s offensive or because it’s outdated, but because it’s specifically adult. Like all of Kneale’s work, it demands a certain level of intelligence that defies the ‘Four Walling’ mentality. Kneale wants you to be engaged by his stories, not just entertained. He wants you to think, for the film to linger in your consciousness as more than just a good time. I shudder to think how dumbed down a modern version would be.
I certainly recommend this. Sure, some of the elements are dated (not the sexual aspects of it, surprisingly; Shelley is awfully proactive as the female lead), but it’s still an effective bit of storytelling.
And speaking of dated, on to some vintage Hippies-Versus-Bikers stuff...maybe the most famous Hippies-Versus-Bikers Jam of all time.
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