I am not generally familiar with a lot of 1950s science fiction movies. For reasons that I can't fully identify I associate the genre with cheesy drive-in fare such as I Married a Monster From Outer Space or The Space Children*. Of course, I know that this mental image isn't correct, or at least isn't entirely correctl counterexamples include The Incredible Shrinking Man and The Day The Earth Stood Still. But this perception persists.
So, going to Keith's class, I wasn't expecting a particularly intelligent mo. Not that that's a bad thing -- stupid films can be fun. And this was a Hammer film. Showing a month of Hammer films was Ethan's idea, since Hammer is his favorite production company.
At any rate, The Quatermass Experiment far exceeded my expectations. A story of space flight gone wrong, it actually was a reasonably intelligent film, and it told its story very well. There was a bit of techy mumbo-jumbo mixed with unreasonable conclusion-jumping, but that was necessary in service of a compelling tale. In many ways, this was sort of a Lost in Space plot with the cerebral quality of Twilight Zone. Though, lest anyone think I'm saying this is a ripoff of those films, I acknowledge that it predated those films.
Of course, I have to note that, despite the intelligence of this film, I am thinking that it had enough M&A (that's Monster and Action) that I am betting it satisfied the drive-in crowd. In fact (as you may have noticed if you watched the trailer above), it was released in the US under an alternate title: The Creeping Unknown. I'm not crazy about the original title; The Quatermass Xperiment is a little too enigmatic. But it's better than the American title, which (if anything) reinforces the image I described above.
All in all, a really good choice to open Hammer month.
*Confession: I haven't seen either of these movies. I chose them as examples because of their blaring titles. Hell, for all I know they're actually intelligent films.
No comments:
Post a Comment