Quatermass

Nigel Kneale wrote a story here equally as inventive and thought provoking as QUATERMASS AND THE PIT. Perhaps more cerebral and decidedly less horrific, but no less disturbing in its connotations. The concept of an alien technology "harvesting" the world's youth for its own physiological needs is both original and brilliant in its execution. Like its forerunners, originally shown as a mini-series, this being an arguably effective re-edit!

Where the film cannot hold-up to its predecessors unfortunately, is that it was done "on the cheap" and much as I personally respect and admire Sir John Mills' wonderful career (its unassailable highlights being the village idiot in RYANS DAUGHTER and Captain Anson in ICE COLD IN ALEX) for me, he doesn't have the physical presence for the role of Professor Quatermass! Simon MacCorkindale additionally, is a bit on the wussy side for my money. But hey, let's move on to the positives!

The setting of England, moving into a near post-apocalyptic state with anarchy ruling, the Police in the hands of Private ownership is pretty cool for 1978 - we're getting there nicely! Mills portrays the old disillusioned and resigned-to-it-all Quatermass so well. Retired now, all he wants in life is to find his missing grand-daughter. When the first terrifying beam from space sucks up its first victims and destroys a joint Anglo-Russian Space project, he is summoned to assist the Ministry.

Kneale has his knee on the viewer's neck at times as the beam returns for more of the world's youth. Although the budget ran obviously to limited fx, the attack on Wembley Stadium leaves any aware and thinking person with real spinal tap! Again, Kneale resorts to an association with lore and magic and the images of the hippie-esque multitudes as they converge on Stonehenge singing "Huffity Puffity Ringstone Round" are as chilling as any scenes I have ever seen. Kneale reaches right out of the screen here and puts one in an arm-lock. You ain't going nowhere, but WITH them to Ringstone Round!

Quatermass' ultimate understanding of the code and what it all means is literate stuff, his plan to rebuff the alien threat sheer genius. Without giving anything away, the final scene with his granddaughter ranks as one of the most moving and shatteringly emotional scenes in film history. If you can't SEE that, what a shame!

I first saw this TV series as young child and it scared the hell out of me. Having recently watched it again 38 years later I was amazed at how good it still is. The TV acting is stilted in places but it's budget was used to good effect to produce a world steeped in chaos and slipping towards an abyss. I certainly think the 2006 film 'Children of Men' was inspired in part by this mini-series.

Central to the plot is professor Quatermass who is called back from disgrace to investigate the mass extermination of young people at pre-historic sites around the world. The budget barely stretches to evoke all this, but none the less it delivers and the drama and sense of urgency in Quatermass is palpable.

What ultimately is examined is the sense of growing alarm and division between the older generation and the new age generation that emerged in the 1960's and evolved into Punk in the 70's. The film brackets this generational divide in a story that is compelling and tragic, and it has to be said the series wisely chooses to concentrate on the gravity and graveness of the situation rather than cheap mawkishness.

Secondary characters in Quatermass are deployed to good effect, and modern film makers should take note about how such characters can be used to fill out a plot and create interesting characters, rather than props or dumb cannon fodder. They are used well to bolster the sense of discovery and revelation about what is happening and treated with intelligence and compassion.

Across all it's outings Quatermass has always been a work of it's time and dealt with the themes of the era each was made in. This outing is no different and indeed a generation later it's message about the dislocation between generations still resonates. Cleverly Quatermass takes this, something that is a tangible concern in the real world, as the central theme of it science fiction story. Even though it was made in 1979 my kids who watched it this time around were as impressed and disquieted as I was at there age.

John Mills is excellent as Quatermass. Embracing his role he obviously drew on his age and paternal experience to inject the famous scientist with pathos and real focus.

There are stilted moments in Quatermass and the effects have aged a lot. But none of that can detract from a fine and brave science fiction mini-series.

It is the near future. Britain struggles with the collapse of civilisation and violent bands of urban guerrillas rule. Also Earth is being harvested. Ancient sites of gathering all over the globe turn out to be the focal points of a blinding and powerful ray from outer space that leaves a pile of ash where thousands once stood. Various elements of Homo sapiens are essential to an anonymous alien race, and once again the time is, or rather we are, literally, ripe. It falls on the now retired Professor Bernard Quatermass, veteran of weird goings on long before Fox Mulder, to basically save the planet. Again.

The idea of a fourth Quatermass serial was kicked around the BBC for three years before being finally commissioned in 1971, and then later dropped by them as being too expensive. The production was picked up by Euston Films, Thames Television's TV film-making subsidiary (their most famous production at the time being the uncompromising and controversial police drama 'The Sweeney'). Euston increased the budget to £300,000 per episode with the criterion that the final product be produced in two versions: four fifty-minute episodes plus a single, shortened version for theatrical release and overseas markets in order to recoup some of their production costs. This created a writing dilemma for original creator and writer Nigel Kneale who now had to come up with two scripts for the same story. He neither wanted the theatrical release to be an edited version of the series, nor the series to be a padded out version of the film. Both had to work in their own right, and, thanks to Kneale's skill (he was an experienced screenwriter and at one time 'script doctor' for the BBC), they do. Unfortunately with the story having been written in 1972 and reflecting the political and economic concerns of that time, by the time it reached the screens in 1979, with it's new-age hippy type characters, it was already out of date (though it is still superior to the recent and dreadful '28 Days Later').

Euston also wanted a big name to play the lead, hence Sir John Mills, who is badly miscast and clearly looks as uneasy as he reportedly was with the role. Gone is the bombastic, resourceful yet flawed character played in the '50s BBC serials by Reginald Tate and brilliantly by Andre Morell, and later more famously by Andrew Keir in Hammer's 1967 'Quatermass and the Pit' (American actor Brian Donlevy had played the role in the first two Hammer Films but Kneale so hated him in the role he withheld permission to make a third Quatermass film for ten years). Here Mills plays him as a semi-senile, despairing, doddering tired old man. He is as much Quatermass as Peter Cushing was Dr. Who, but he fulfilled the need of the 'big name' at the time, being not only an already established British film dignitary and household name, but also then still familiar to TV audiences as having recently appeared in the popular 'Zoo Gang'. But it is hard to believe this is meant to be the same Quatermass we have seen in previous incarnations.

The plusses though are in the production values. At that time most British TV drama series tended to be controlled environment, studio bound affairs with the odd bit of grainy location footage (a la 'Dr. Who', 'Doomwatch' etc.) but 'Quatermass' was, strikingly for the time, shot entirely on location on 35mm Panavision, with great expense being laid out particularly on Joe Kapp's radar facility and home. It was also intended that Stonehenge would be one of the main locations. Permission to use it was however withdrawn by the British Tourist Board because it had become very popular with tourists and they didn't want anyone, or anything, even by inference (in the script several thousand people get fried simply by gathering there, so I suppose not a good selling point from their point of view), jeopardising their little earner.

Sci-Fi/Fantasy film and TV buffs will enjoy early appearances by Simon MacCorkindale, later of the short lived series 'Manimal'; Brian Croucher (the second 'Travis' in 'Blake's 7'); Declan Mullholland (the original, later CGI'd out, actor who played 'Jabba the Hutt' in 'Star Wars') as a TV Studio guard; David Yip, who would be Indie's ill-fated accomplice in the 'Club Obi-Wan' in the opening sequence of 'Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom'; and, talking of Indie, a major role played by Margaret Tyzack, who would later become the young Indie's long-suffering Oxford tutor in 'The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles'. Also featured in an early role is Brenda Fricker, later to win an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress in 'My Left Foot'. Executive Producer Verity Lambert was already well known to fans of this genre for her involvement with 'Dr. Who' and 'The Avengers'.

If you are a Quatermass fan, a fan of British Sci-Fi, or even a budding screenwriter wanting to pick up a few tips, then this is an essential addition to your library. The set is nicely presented and is released to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the first broadcast of 'The Quatermass Experiment' in 1953. The package folds out to an 18" picture of (ironically) Stonehenge. The two discs containing the four episodes, simply called 'Quatermass', feature extensive production notes, animated menus, the opening and closing titles for each episode with each episode having a spectacular cliffhanger ending, making you eager to watch the next, and the hours pass swiftly. The third disc contains the theatrical version, retitled 'The Quatermass Conclusion', and a previously unseen Sci-Fi Channel interview with Nigel Kneale. Also enclosed is a booklet on the Quatermass history.

Overall it is an engrossing watch, but as Nigel Kneale himself says: "It was a product of its time."

"The Quatermass Conclusion" is one of the few 'true' pieces of science fiction ever committed to film and Nigel Neale's script rates up there with "2001" and "Dark Star" for inventiveness. Unfortunately it suffered from an obviously low budget and there are lapses here and there into melodrama. The story, set in a dystopian Britain, concerns the arrival of an unknown alien force which is 'harvesting' the youth by leading them to ancient ritual sites. Professor Quatermass (John Mills) comes out of retirement to look for his missing granddaughter and is drawn into the fight to save the planet's population. There are some disturbing images such as Wembley Stadium reduced to a 'killing ground' and the pensioners forced to live underground for safety. Many of the predictions in the film have since come about, such as the upsurge in 'hippy travellers' and the general social decay of the inner cities.

I remember seeing this broadcast. It was made by Euston Films so I was expecting th usual "Sweeney" type over-grain in the picture (1970's high speed 16mm), but instead it had the full gorgeous look of a motion picture, having been shot in 35mm with full motion picture negative (whereas most American productions were shot on 35mm television stock). The special effects where not all that good where the space shots were concerned - even by 1970's standards (to see good examples of these effects look at Space 1999 (1976 - 1978) whose Director of Effects, Brian Johnson, went on to win an Oscar just a couple of years later - for Alien). But the idea that a beam would come through space and consume vast number of people and turn them into a diaphanous web was effectively executed. It would be nice to see it again in its full version - perhaps the BBC could show it without breaks in two parts. Also it was an early appearance for Simon McQuorkindale (Manimal!).