The Quatermass Xperiment (1955) is the movie for this Sunday’s “monsterdon” watch party over on Mastodon, our fediverse sibling!

  • Just start watching that movie this Sunday, Jan 25 at 9pm ET / 8pm CT / 6pm PT which is 2am Monday UTC
  • and follow #monsterdon over on mastodon for live text commentary. For example, you can follow that hashtag here: https://mastodon.social/tags/monsterdon
  • I usually open two web browser windows side-by-side on a computer. But you could follow the mastodon commentary on a phone app while watching the movie on TV or something.

How to watch the movie:

FYI there was a TV show with the same name a couple years before but apparently it’s difficult to find online?

a.k.a. The Creeping Unknown in the United States … The film concerns three astronauts who have been launched into space aboard a single-stage-to-orbit rocket designed by Professor Quatermass. It crashlands with only one of its original crew, Victor Carroon (Richard Wordsworth), still aboard. He begins mutating into an alien organism, which, if it spawns, will engulf the Earth and destroy humanity.

…

The Times newspaper critic gave the film a generally favourable assessment: “Mr. Val Guest, the director, certainly knows his business when it comes to providing the more horrid brand of thrills… The first part of this particular film is well up to standard. Mr. Brian Donlevy, as the American scientist responsible for the experiment, is a little brusque in his treatment of British institutions but he is clearly a man who knows what he is doing. Mr. Jack Warner, representing Scotland Yard, is indeed a comfort to have at hand when Things are on the rampage”.[104] Positive reviews also came from Peter Burnup in the News of the World, who found that “with the added benefit of bluff, boisterous Brian Donlevy… all earnest addicts of science fiction will undoubtedly love every minute of it”,[105] while the reviewer in The Manchester Guardian praised “a narrative style that quite neatly combines the horrific and the factual”.[105] Today’s Cinema called it “one of the best essays in science fiction to date”.[53] Film historian Bruce G. Hallenbeck notes a degree of national pride in some of the positive reviews.[76] For instance, Paul Dehn in the News Chronicle said: “This is the best and nastiest horror film I have seen since the War. How jolly that it is also British”![53] Similarly, William Whitebait in the New Statesman, who found the film to be “better than either War of the Worlds or Them!”,[96] also called for “a couple of cheers for the reassurance that British films can still, once in a while, come quick”.[106]

On a less positive note, Frank Jackson of Reynolds News quipped “That TV pseudo-science shocker The Quatermass Xperiment has been filmed and quitermess they’ve made of it too”,[96] before slating the film as “82 minutes of sick-making twaddle”.[105] The horror content of the film was mentioned in several reviews: Patrick Gibbs of the Daily Telegraph said the film “gives the impression that it originated in the strip of some horror comic. It remains very horrid and not quite coherent”,[105] while the reviewer in the Daily Mirror found the film to be “a real chiller thriller but not for the kids”[105] and Dilys Powell of The Sunday Times found the film “exciting but distinctly nauseating”.[105] Another unimpressed critic was François Truffaut, who wrote in Cahiers du cinéma that “this one is very, very bad, far from the small pleasure we get, for example, from the innocent science fiction films signed by the American Jack Arnold… The subject could have been turned into a good film, not lacking in spice; with a bit of imagination… None of this is in this sadly English film”.[107]

…

Among the critics and film historians who have reviewed The Quatermass Xperiment in the years since its release have been John Baxter who said, in Science Fiction in the Cinema (1970): “In its time, The Quatermass Experiment was a pioneering sf film… Brian Donlevy was stiff but convincing… Much of the film is saved, however, by Richard Wordsworth… one of the finest such performances since Karloff’s triumphs of the Thirties”.[111] This view was echoed by John Brosnan in The Primal Screen (1991): “One of the best of all alien possession movies”,[112] he wrote, “not since Boris Karloff as Frankenstein’s monster has an actor managed to create such a memorable, and sympathetic, monster out of mime alone”.[46] Bill Warren in Keep Watching The Skies! (1982) found that “the buildup is slightly too long and too careful”[113] but also said that “it’s an intelligent, taut and well-directed thriller; it showcases Nigel Kneale’s ideas well; it’s scary and exciting. It was made by people who cared about what they were doing, who were making entertainment for adults. It is still one of the best alien invasion films”.[114] Steve Chibnall, writing for the British Film Institute’s Screenonline, describes The Quatermass Xperiment as “one of the high points of British SF/horror cinema”.[115] The horror fiction writer Stephen King praised the film in his non-fiction book Danse Macabre (1981) as one of his favourite horror movies between 1950 and 1980.[116] The film director John Carpenter, who later collaborated with Nigel Kneale on the film Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982), has claimed that The Quatermass Xperiment “had an enormous, enormous impact on me – and it continues to be one of my all-time favourite science-fiction movies”.[117]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Quatermass_Xperiment