Quatermass 2 (1957)

"This is the food, and it burns..."

I understand this is the first ever time a sequel was demarcated with the number "2" in the title?

It's interesting seeing this so shortly after its TV predecessor, as I was unable to do with the last film for obvious reasons; it all seems so rushed and fast paced. So many characters don't appear. The ending is more rushed than anything. No one goes into space. And Sid James is playing Roger Delgado. That's weird.

Add to that the fact that Brian Donlevy isn't at all likeable and you have a film that seems to be treading water and is disturbingly lacking in charm. Yes, it's in colour, it's often on location and it's all so much more expensive, but the sense of scale is so much less. There's only a vague sense of where the meteorites come from and the end- just firing a rocket- comes as a sudden deus ex machina. And don't get me started on all those Cockney natives of Cumbria.

Something of a damp squib, then, although I'm left wondering if I'd have liked it more if the TV series hadn't have survived.

The Quatermass Xperiment (1955)

"It's me legs!"

This is the third version of The Quatermass Xperiment I've blogged, easily the shortest and, to be brutally honest, the third best. It's a very perfunctory, rushed version with none of Nigel Kneale's subtleties and Brian Donlevy's Quatermass (no characters comment on the fact that either he or Judith Carroon are American) is unsympathetic and entirely devoid of charm.

Still, in spite of the first half of the film actually being quite dull with the absence of the interesting bit (the alien is just possessing Carroon, not a gestalt entity, and Judith hasn't been sleeping with Gordon), the second half becomes more interesting as it suddenly turns into a horror film, and Richard Wordsworth clearly basing his performance on Boris Karloff: there's even a scene with a little girl that strongly evokes James Whale's Frankenstein.

Other interesting performances are a comic turn from a cockney Thora Hird and a young Gordon Jackson as a to producer, but the film never quite takes off. 

It's strange that this is considered the first of the Hammer horrors; having seen this, X the Unknown and The Abominable Snowmen I wouldn't really consider any of them as such, not really being "horrors" and not necessarily featuring the cast and crew we would expect. Still, from little acorns..