I Watch Films: The Quatermass Xperiment

The Quatermass Xperiment

The inexplicably American Professor Quatermass (Brian Donleavy), head of the British experimental rocket group, has sent a first mission into space with three astronauts on board, on his own initiative. They lost contact, but then came down in a field. Eventually they are able to get into the rocket but mysteriously there is only one astronaut left, and he is non-responsive.

The police want to get involved with the disappearances, to the annoyance of Quatermass, who has no better ideas to be honest. The astronaut’s wife insists that he be taken to a hospital. They manage to develop a film from the rocket and see some mysterious stuff going on; meanwhile the astronaut’s wife hires a private detective and they break the astronaut out, but first he fuses with a cactus (?) and drains the life force of the detective.

Despite some dodgy effects in the last sequence, this film still manages to maintain tension and even be scary and mysterious in places. The idea of everything in outer space being hostile to human life is one than runs through all the Quatermass stories, and this first (surviving*) installment makes that quite clear.

Watch This: For some classic old science fiction horror
Don’t Watch This: Slow moving, the fact no one had gone into space when filmed does not forgive the bad science
More Quatermass: The film of Quatermass And The Pit and the TV show Quatermass that I've reviewed before.

* The Quatermass Experiment was first broadcast as live episodes on the BBC; the surviving recordings are incomplete