{"id":4061,"date":"2021-10-17T23:45:55","date_gmt":"2021-10-17T23:45:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sebpalmer.com\/blog\/?p=4061"},"modified":"2023-01-22T22:15:33","modified_gmt":"2023-01-22T22:15:33","slug":"film-quatermass-ii-1957","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.sebpalmer.com\/blog\/?p=4061","title":{"rendered":"FiLM REViEW: Quatermass II, 1957"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Sci-fi meets schlock horror, Hammer Style.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Dig the funky title text!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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What a bonkers movie! <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Teresa said she wanted to watch a \u201850s sci-fi movie. I browsed Amazon Prime, and found this. And it\u2019s Hammer! She\u2019s keen on Hammer, esp\u2019 the Cushing, Lee and Price stuff. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Quatermass bosses his boffins around.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

This oddity stars Brian Donlevy, a kind of pudgy moustachioed gone to seed Errol Flynn type guy, as the titular Quatermass. It\u2019s a sequel to the Quatermass Xperiment <\/em>(which we haven\u2019t seen), in which Donlevy also starred. He\u2019s the lone Yank in an otherwise British cast. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Vintage futurism looks great.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The plot is a kind of \u2018invasion of the bodysnatchers\u2019 type thing, also borrowing heavily from War of the Worlds<\/em>. Boffins detect a kind of rain of meteorites, and\u2026 well, it\u2019s too silly to bother synopsising, frankly. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is worth remembering, however, that this is pre-moon landing, etc. So it\u2019s more like Herg\u00e9\u2019s Tintin on the Moon<\/em> than things turned out; the rockets, for example, like Herg\u00e9\u2019s, resemble souped-up German V2s more than the real rockets that would soon take man to the moon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Donlevy and Sydney James.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Donlevy is clumsily enjoyable (legend has it he was practically paralytic during filming*), in a ham-fisted B-movie way. And Sid \u2018Carry On\u2019 James has a part, as a boozy newshound. There are several other familiar faces, such as John Longden and Bryan Forbes. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Cool visuals!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Menacing masked zombie colonists.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

But the acting isn\u2019t the film\u2019s strong suit. The best things about the film are the look of it; black and white, largely shot in a cool steel spaghetti pipe-filled oil refinery, with quite a few effective visual aspects, and the eerie post-WWII apocalyptic fear vibes. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Uh-oh\u2026 For Vincent Broadhead (Tom Chatto)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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\u2026 all is decidedly not well!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

As clumsy as it is, and as clunkily directed and acted as it may be, there is something paranoiac lurking within this film, just as the malevolently parasitic alien life form lurks in their asteroid pods. A certain post World War II Cold War era fear of pervasive ideological contamination. <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Seeing what should not be seen.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Woah! Like\u2026 crazy, man!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019d argue that most traditional myth is no more sophisticated than this, and that therefore what\u2019s best about this film – aside from or in addition to the visual allure – is the idea of insidious colonisation of the mind and body as myth or metaphor. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Far from being great, or classic, there\u2019s still a certain something about Quatermass II<\/em> that makes it worth seeing. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

*Not really 100% true, according to fellow cast members. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What a bonkers movie! Teresa said she wanted to watch a \u201850s sci-fi movie. I browsed Amazon Prime, and found this. And it\u2019s Hammer! She\u2019s keen on Hammer, esp\u2019 the Cushing, Lee and Price stuff. This oddity stars Brian Donlevy, a kind of pudgy moustachioed gone to seed Errol Flynn type guy, as the titular … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “FiLM REViEW: Quatermass II, 1957”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[15,74],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paGwUa-13v","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sebpalmer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4061"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sebpalmer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sebpalmer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sebpalmer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sebpalmer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4061"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/www.sebpalmer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4061\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8155,"href":"http:\/\/www.sebpalmer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4061\/revisions\/8155"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sebpalmer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4061"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sebpalmer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4061"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sebpalmer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4061"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}