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James Carroll

Nigel Kneale's Quatermass & the Pit is a masterclass in building apocalyptic tension on a small scale. It's a wonderfully British Sci-Fi story. While Flash Gordon runs around with Ray Gun in hand fending off Ming's Armies, Professor Quatermass is in a hole in the ground contemplating what it means to be human. The third and I think the best of the Quatermass movies (Based on the earlier 50s BBC TV shows) starts off at the dig site at a London Underground station at Hobb's End. Digging up what is at first thought to be an unexploded WWII bomb turns out to be something very different with far greater implications for the human race.

 

Covering everything from Poltergeist activity to alien genocide, Quatermass & the Pit has a very sophisticated script that is way ahead of it's time.

 

 

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Michael James Nicholls

Quite simply, one of the finest British science fiction films ever made.

A stripped down version of the 1958 television serial, it nonetheless has an intelligent, frightening script that works extremely well. Andrew Keir makes a magnificent Professor Bernard Quatermass, not quite the aristocratic savant as portrayed by Andre Morrell in the television serial, he instead brings an air of searing intelligence coupled with a healthy disregard for officialdom.  The set design is highly convincing, and it has some very striking - and indeed unsettling special effects, particularly the scenes where the Martian space craft comes to life.

A disturbing, intelligent and thrilling film from Hammer.