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59 reviews in total

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31 out of 34 people found the following review useful:
Xcellent! Xquisite! Xhelirating!!, 23 June 2005

Author: Coventry from the Draconian Swamp of Unholy Souls

You can't even begin to describe how essential (and quintessential) this legendary Hammer-movie in fact is! It was the unexpected success of this movie that single-handedly caused the horror-boom all over Europe! If this adaptation from Nigel Kneale's play hadn't been so popular, Hammer Studios probably never would have started with re-telling other famous franchises, such as "Frankenstein", "Dracula" or "The Mummy". It was "The Quatermass Xperiment" that all of a sudden showed that the audience's hunger for morbid Sci-Fi and fantasy tales is insatiable and Hammer cleverly exploited this given bit by bit. The film itself is about 50 years old now, but it definitely still stands as one of the uncanniest and mesmerizing Sci-Fi films ever made. With its uniquely tense atmosphere, the astonishing performance by Richard Wordsworth and the intelligent script, this movie is an experience that'll keep you on the edge of your seat the whole time. Quatermass is the name of a brilliant (but slightly obnoxious) scientist who – apparently without permission of the legal authorities – launched a rocket with a 3-headed crew into space, to travel distances no other space-mission ever reached. The movie opens when a catastrophe already took place and the rocket crashes just outside London. Two crew members seemly vanished into thin air while the other (Wordsworth) is "possessed" with something. The unfortunate astronaut inexplicably turns into a monster that threatens to extinguish the entire world…

The premise of alien-intelligence invading earth through an unfortunate space-mission is extremely stereotyped by today's standards, but "The Quatermass Xperiment" is one of the only oldies in the genre that still feels genuine and original. A form of criticism I often encountered while browsing through other users' comments is that this production supposedly hasn't dated well and that it's nowhere near scary. Frankly, I don't share this opinion at all. First and foremost because the film suggests more terror rather than showing it explicitly! I am aware that few people nowadays appreciate horror film if it doesn't contain graphic violence and tons of blood, but it really is the unsettling atmosphere what makes this film so brilliant. And besides, I do think that the special and make-up effects are staggering although half a century old. The images of Wordsworth mutating arm wrapped in a filthy overcoat and his facial metamorphose are still definitely creepy! To wrap it all up: "The Quatermass Xperiment" is an exhilarating and trend-setting genre film that should be viewed by every fan of fantasy-flicks. Giant thumbs up for director Val Guest who also made another Hammer classic, "The Abominable Snowman"

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21 out of 22 people found the following review useful:
Quintessential 1950s Sci-Fi, 5 July 2003

Author: Space_Mafune from Newfoundland, Canada

A secret rocket expedition to Space unexpectedly crashes back to Earth. One lone astronaut is found to have survived only he's disheveled, not quite himself as he seems to be on the verge of some bizarre transformation! And what happened to the other two astronauts on board - all that seems to be left of them is two empty spacesuits?! How and why? What and when? A mystery that needs unraveling, a strange journey into unknown previously unexplored territory and a scientist hero named Quatermass whose methods the viewing audience are not always going to be inclined to agree with even if he is in essence correct in his line of thinking on many levels. A likely inspiration for many later film and TV works including THE BLOB, THE FLY, "The X-Files" and much more. Science fiction does not get much better than this film which grips you with its terrific suspense as we see Victor Caroon (played as a tragic and terrifying figure all at once in a terrific performance from Richard Wordsworth) go where no man has gone before in more ways than one might imagine.

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14 out of 15 people found the following review useful:
Dashingly good sci-fi film with a strong stench of horror, 28 August 2005

Author: fertilecelluloid from Mountains of Madness

Well written and terminally fascinating British sci-fi thriller from director Val Guest and writer Nigel Neale. It is a film of big ideas and planet-sized concepts that stares up into the unknown with a combination of wonderment and dread.

Originally a highly popular TV series, it spawned two excellent sequels and decades of creative Hollywood pilfering.

Brian Donlevy is wonderful as Quatermass, a scientist with the bullying manner of a military drill Sargent and a fierce, pragmatic streak. After a rocket that he sent into space crashes back to Earth, Quatermass and unofficial partner-in-crime Inspector Lomax (Jack Warner) uncover a bizarre alien conspiracy in which a surviving astronauts's body has been "borrowed" by extraterrestrials keen on relocating.

Director Guest gives the drama a no-nonsense, almost documentary feel. The special effects are perfectly acceptable for the period and the brooding sense of mid-century paranoia is well conveyed.

The hero is the script, though. The dialogue is fresh and colourful and writers Guest and Neale always keep the scientific jargon interesting. All the characters are believable and the performances are top notch.

Despite the fact that James Bernard's solid score is a little overbearing at times, this is a dashingly good science fiction film with a strong stench of horror.

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17 out of 22 people found the following review useful:
Richard Wordsworth is extraordinary, 6 January 2005

Author: chexmix from Brooklyn, NY

Horror/science fiction films have rarely been singled out for the quality of the acting in them. Over the decades, a couple of "monsters" have been tapped for praise: Fredric March won an Oscar for his turn at Jekyll and Hyde, & Jeff Goldblum was rightly seen as an example of "inspired casting" in David Cronenberg's remake of _The Fly_.

But I think Richard Wordsworth has them both beat.

I enjoy _The Creeping Unknown_ overall, but it is Wordsworth's performance as Victor Caroon that lifts it into the stratosphere for me. I mean, sheesh, _look_ at him! This is an incredibly painful and, yes, passionate portrait of a man whose _body_ is being taken over and is changing into something else, even as he fights to retain possession of it. What might such a battle _feel_ like? Wordsworth lets you know, and in doing so anchors an almost cliché science-fiction "what if ...?" in raw human nerve endings. Watch him battle the frightening desires that overcome him; watch him try to stay ... human. He's first class, and why his career never really took off ...

I am probably all alone on a windswept plain in this, but I think Wordsworth's acting here is as frenzied and solid as that of Klaus Kinski in any of the great movies he did with Werner Herzog. So shoot me! :)

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12 out of 14 people found the following review useful:
Brilliant British SCi-Fi, 26 December 1999
Author: BaronBl00d (baronbl00d@aol.com) from NC

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

The Quatermass Xperiment is the first of the well-written British Sci-fi films based on Nigel Kneale's Professor Quatermass. The film tells the story of how a rocket had been sent up to space with three aboard and how it lands with seemingly two missing. The man in charge of everything is the professor himself, played starchily by Brian Donlevy. Donlevy's professor has no purpose except to succeed and to do anything and everything his way. He is certainly one of the prototypes of the determined, logical scientists to grace films afterward. The film has a slow start as it really spends a great deal of time showing the two different ways of looking and doing things. On the one hand is the Quatermass way, the logical, scientific, and survivalistic way, and on the other hand is the government way, slow, plodding, and indecisive. Through these the story unfolds that the one man that returned is in actuality a carrier of an alien that has grown through the consumption of human vitals into a slithering blob, growing bigger in stature all the time. Quatermass, with the aid of a Scotland Yard Inspector Lomax, wonderfully played with an amusing turn by Jack Warner, finally succeeds in saving our planet from the menace he was responsible for bringing down. Is he contrite? Does he see the errors of his ways? The film ends with his sending another rocket into space to explore the unknown. The film definitely sees the value of science over all us, including life here on Earth, through the vision, imagination, and drive of Donlevy's Professor Quatermass.

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11 out of 13 people found the following review useful:
Rather Simplified But Still Effective, 13 August 2002

Author: Theo Robertson from Isle Of Bute, Scotland

Unfortunately Nigel Kneal had absolutely no input into the film version of THE QUATERMASS EXPERIMENT . Out goes the philosophy and long discussions of the human condition and in comes the more formuliac and streamlined plotting of a hostile alien endangering the human race , but to be fair to Richard Landau he also jettisoned many underdeveloped subplots from the serial ( When episode one of TQE was broadcast on television Kneale was still writing episode 5 so some subplots were abandoned by Kneale in order to meet the deadline ) and - unlike film viewers in 2002 - the oft used premise of an alien entity coming back to Earth from a spaceship would still be very new to cinema audiences in the mid 50s. I might even be right in saying this is the first time this idea had appeared in cinema .

Director Val Guest treats THE QUATERMASS EXPERIMENT as SF film noir and brings in a heavy dose of mood and atmosphere especially during the night time zoo sequence. Unlike QUATERMASS 2 there`s no feeling that the night scenes were achieved by sticking a dark filter over the camera . Guest is less successful with his cast . Donlevy is relatively good at playing double crossing mobsters in the likes of THE BIG COMBO but he`s utterly unconvincing as a rocket scientist and it doesn`t help that he keeps pronouncing his name as " Qittermiss ", Margia Dean is utterly appalling as Judith Carroon , but Richard Wordsworth is outstanding as Victor Carroon even if he doesn`t have a single line of dialogue.

The BBC serial of THE QUATERMASS EXPERIMENT shocked the viewers of Britain when it was broadcast and in its own way the film version is almost as groundbreaking , it was a big hit at the UK box office which led to Hammer Films to concentrate solely on horror films something they would excell at for the next 10-15 years .

Trivia point 1 - The montage scenes of soldiers searching for Carroon at night time are actually culled from another British SF flick - SEVEN DAYS TO NOON

Trivia point 2- The last four episodes of the BBC serial were shown live on television but because of an industrial dispute they weren`t - unlike the first two episodes - recorded onto film which means no one will ever see the complete BBC QUATERMASS EXPERIMENT

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8 out of 8 people found the following review useful:
A great, "film noir" monster movie., 31 January 2005

Author: stanhyde from Canada

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

MGM brought this film out as part of their Midnight Movies series in 2001 on tape . . . it just cries out for a good DVD release now.

The first of 3 film versions of Nigel Kneale's Quatermass BBC serials, the odd choice of Brian Donlevy as lead may ultimately end up what is the most distinctive element of Val Guest's direction for the first two films.

My copy of the tape is the MGM/UA film from 1996 . . . the International Version - which apparently has 3 extra minutes. I know watching "THE CREEPING UNKNOWN" on TV when I was young, there were none of the fairly grisly corpse-shots.

Oddly enough, one of the CREEPING UNKNOWN posters features a creature that is somewhat reminiscent of Godzilla (though I suppose it's suppose to be an unseen phase of the creature that exists after it absorbs the lion and other big cats in the zoo).

Richard Wordsworth (who is also very memorable in REVENGE OF FRANKENSTEIN and CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF . . . as well as THE TRIPODS on TV much later) is great as the astronaut possessed by an other-worldly presence. At times his performance seems a bit inspired by Boris Karloff's Frankenstein . . .as do events like his brief encounter with the young girl by the bank of the river. Wordsworth is not only great at conveying the pain of the transition, but also at getting across the impression that the mind of astronaut Victor Carroon is still fighting to gain control at times.

Of course, the thing that struck me when I was young was the fact that he could absorb other life-forms, squeezing a cactus to bring about the thorny,gray cactus hands that he (off-screen) uses to clobber and absorb others. But then there's the horrific shot of his face from the bushes and the trailing whatsit (his pants, his leg, a tail) as he goes hunting for the zoo animals. The piece of Carroon that Quatermass finds and later feeds white rats to (until it's big enough to break out of a glass aquarium and crawl around the room) is a really clever touch that helps us visualize just how BAD the monster probably looks . . . and of course it's a touch of genius to have the BBC crew doing a documentary on Westminster Abbey, where the monster ends up finally, so that details can be obscured on the small screen. (Of course by this time the monster leaves a slug-like slime trail wherever it goes . . . and like the Thing it's going to let loose spores.) Apparently Les Bowie used bovine entrails and tripe to help embellish the monster - tripe is a quality it shares with it's later cousin, the ALIEN, of course.

As well, cut-away edits to an Octopus eye are quite effective and pretty much consistent with what we see of the monster.

There's been frequent talk of a re-make of this film, and I worry a bit about that, since the fairly restrained details and the generally competent cast are what make this film scary. Like Jan de Bont's awful re-make of THE HAUNTING, a bunch of CGI details and too much viewing of the monster could make the events seem a bit laughable . . . it's the actors like Jack Warner and Lionel Jeffries that pull the film off, as their reactions make you believe.

That said, my favorite Quatermass is Andrew Keir, and I find Brian Donlevy a nasty piece of work (he was nicer in GAMMERA). Basically Quatermass seems like a blustering thug . . . completely unapologetic for the near disaster he has created. Admittedly sometimes, as when he stalks past all the police and government officials to find his men and "start again" on his deadly Xperiment - the film has a kind of giddy noirish quality.

So I guess in some ways, I am interested by the way that Val Guest plays Quatermass like a monster himself. (When Carroon's wife springs him from the hospital, she has to hire a private detective - again, very noir - and tells Carroon she's going to "get you out of his (Quatermass') clutches!")

Still, I'm sympathetic to writer Nigel Kneale, who felt his sympathetic scientist had been turned into a bully.

Anyway, this is a great, atmospheric, and scary science-fiction horror movie, and well worth catching up with.

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6 out of 6 people found the following review useful:
Classic Brian Donlevy Film, 1 January 2006

Author: whpratt1 from United States

Always enjoyed the great acting of Brian Donlevy in most of his films and for some reason I missed this film or series he appeared in. Brian Donlevy, (Prof. Bernard Quartermass), "Kiss of Death",'47, specializes in Space Exploration and had a rocket crash back on earth and some very strange things started to happen through out England. The film takes you from local police departments to the London Zoo and many Medical Labs and some good CSI and DNA samples even in the year 1955. This Sci-Fi film was way a head of its time and did a very good job of showing what a 1955 rocket into space would look like and it will definitely make you laugh in comparison to 2006! This was a very well acted film by most of the actors, I was surprised to learn that Brian Donlevy was related to Bela Lugosi Jr. as a Father-in-Law and the fact that Donlevy had quite a colorful life off the Stage.

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6 out of 6 people found the following review useful:
"An important film in the development of British horror cinema.", 23 December 2004

Author: jamesraeburn2003 from Poole, Dorset

POSSIBLE SPOILERS Government scientist Professor Bernard Quatermass (BRIAN DONLEVY) sends a rocket into space containing three astronauts. Radio contact is lost and later it crash lands in the English countryside. Two of the crew members are missing, but the survivor, Victor Carroon (RICHARD WORDSWORTH) is slowly being taken over by an alien fungus that feeds on the blood of animals and human-beings.

In a bid to win audiences away from their TV sets (something that was a real threat to cinemas at the time), Hammer elected to film the popular BBC serial THE QUATERMASS EXPERIMENT (the E was replaced with X in order to emphasise it's X certificate), which was the creation of writer Nigel Kneale. The gamble payed off and Hammer had a box office hit on their hands in 1955.

Seen today, THE QUATERMASS XPERIMENT is obviously very tame in comparison to modern day sci-fi and horror films, most of it's shock sequences occur off screen with the camera cutting away and harping back on reaction shots. Yet it is a milestone in the development of British horror cinema and along with the company's THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN, it spawned this country's horror boom of the 1950's and 60's. Richard Wordsworth's Carroon is one of the most sympathetic monsters in British horror and there is a classic scene at the London docks where the former is hiding out in an abandoned boat and is awakened by a little girl who is having a pretend picnic with her dolly. Unaware of the true horror that's going on, the little girl naively asks Carroon if he wants to join them. One can see that Carroon is fully aware of what would happen if the girl touches him and runs away accidentally breaking her dolly.

Wordsworth is brilliant as Carroon and so is Brian Donlevy as Quatermass while director Val Guest's documentary approach gives the picture a sense of conviction.

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8 out of 10 people found the following review useful:
Excellent sci fi from Hammer, 22 December 2004

Author: Chris Gaskin from Derby, England

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

The Quatermass Xperiment was one of the first sci fi movies to come from Hammer Studios, long before the Dracula and Frankenstein movies.

A rocket with three people aboard launched by Professor Quatermass crash lands in the English countryside on its return to Earth. Two crew members are missing and the third one is still alive but is gradually turning into a monster and escapes from the hospital where he is being treated and starts murdering people and animals to stay alive. He has been taken over by some sort of alien life form while in space. The chase ends up in Westminster Abbey and he is electrocuted at the end.

This was the first of Hammer's trilogy of Quatermass movies and possibly the best.

The movie stars Brian Donlevy as Quatermass, Jack Warner (Dixon of Dock Green), an early role for Thora Hird (Last of the Summer Wine), Sam Kydd (Island Of Terror) and Lionel Jeffries (Chitty Chitty Bang Bang). Donlevy returned as Quatermass in Quatermass 2 in 1957.

The movie has an excellent, haunting score and is a must for fans of 50's science fiction like myself. Great stuff.

Rating: 4 stars out of 5.

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