Quatermass 2 (1957)

User Rating:

7.1/10   

Director:

Val Guest

Writers:

Nigel Kneale (story)
Nigel Kneale (screenplay) ...

Release Date:

September 1957 (USA)

Genre:

Sci-Fi | Horror

Tagline:

A horrible enemy from the unknown strikes terror across the earth!

Plot:

Professor Quatermass, still shook up from London's refusal to proceed with his project to colonize the Moon...

Plot Keywords:

Factory | Rocket | Meteor | London | Conspiracy

Cast

Brian Donlevy	...	Prof. Bernard Quatermass
John Longden	...	Lomax (as John Longdon)
Sid James	...	Jimmy Hall (as Sydney James)
Bryan Forbes	...	Marsh
William Franklyn	...	Brand
Vera Day	...	Sheila
Charles Lloyd Pack	...	Dawson
Tom Chatto	...	Broadhead
John Van Eyssen	...	The P.R.O.
Percy Herbert	...	Gorman
Michael Ripper	...	Ernie
John Rae	...	McLeod
Marianne Stone	...	Secretary
Ronald Wilson	...	Young Man
Jane Aird	...	Mrs. McLeod

Also Known As:

Enemy from Space (USA)
Quatermass II: Enemy from Space (USA)

Runtime:

85 min

Country:

UK

Language:

English

Colour:

Black and White

Aspect Ratio:

1.66 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono (RCA Sound Recording)

Certification:

UK:12 | Finland:K-16

Filming Locations:

Canvey Island, Essex, England, UK

Company:

Hammer Film Productions

Trivia:

John Rae appears as the same character in this film as he did in the original TV version.

Goofs:

Factual errors: The asteroid could not orbit as said. Short distance orbit implies several revolutions per day, while staying in Earth's shadow implies to revolve once per year, thus orbit about as far as the sun.

Movie Connections:

Featured in Fantastic Fantasy Fright-o-Rama Show Vol. 1 (1996) (V)

Boy! Do I Remember This One!

I was never aware that this movie was anything other than a stand-alone feature. I'm not familiar with 'Quatermass' in any way whatsoever. But I saw a movie when I was a kid that was titled 'Enemy From Space' and I've never forgotten it. The scene where a man who has been covered in some black stuff shockingly, jarringly shrieks out and stumbles down the outside stairway of some huge, weird, vat-like structure frightened me enormously. I didn't know what the stuff was exactly, I just knew it was burning the man horribly and his utterly convincing screams drove it into my brain permanently.

I was pretty young when I saw it at my local 'B-Movies Only' neighborhood theater. I'm not sure how it was elsewhere, but in my hometown there was a movie house that got all the A-List pictures (Cary Grant, James Stewart, Liz Taylor, Disney) and another that made the most of the plentiful supply of small-budget monster movies that were released in the late fifties and very early sixties. Triple Features were often offered in these 'lesser' venues. The beauty of it was that both types of theater thrived in those cable-less, vcr-less days. But I digress.

So I see this movie and I'm only about 7 years old at the time and that night I couldn't sleep. And though I had sat through the entire thing, my mind was locked into that horrifying scene so completely that I did not really recall another word spoken in the film. It came around to the Biltmore a couple more times and, though terrified, I was irresistibly drawn to see it again, each time absorbing a little more of the content. The challenging storyline wasn't all that easy to grasp - a lot of it went over my young head.

It was a long time ago but I remember a meteorite falling through a roof, a road that went nowhere, a silent and sinister industrial area, a man who becomes suddenly very sick (in the pub I think) and has a white splotch on his face, severely serious soldiers who seem to be bad guys, a window through which an alien something-or-other is observed and, of course, the unfortunate man covered in burning black oil.

A truly eerie movie, as engrossing as it is chilling. I would very much like to see it again