Quatermass And The Pit

Back in the fifties when television was trying to find its feet and the majority of it was working on the assumption it was pretty much just a filmed theatre production - albeit without an audience - one writer, Nigel Kneale, and producer Rudolph Cartier, set out to prove that this wasn't the case. They had enormous success with a production of 1984 which was so good it was performed a second week after the first production (bearing in mind that this was the day of live television broadcast, without recording for posterity) . They also had a lot of success with a sci-fi television series called The Quatermass Experiment, to the point where they made two sequels to the original production. Now, at this time in England, it was considered to be quite a good idea if excellent television material was turned into a movie, and the horror production company Hammer quickly stepped in and purchased the rights to make movies based on The Quatermass Experiment, Quatermass II and Quatermass And The Pit.

Nigel Kneale, displaying a contempt for the movie versions of his material rivalled only by Alan Moore, was less than impressed with either Experiment or Quatermass II and so was particularly happy when a new actor was cast as Quatermass in The Pit. Andrew Keir took the role on, dumping the raincoat his predecessor wore, and having a full beard from behind which he could grumble with annoyance.

The movie version doesn't take too many liberties with the original source material, although clearly a lot is cut as six half hour episodes are condensed into one ninty minute movie. The major cuts are things like Quatermass' speech at the end being dropped, and a lot of exposition being removed; unnecessary since, rather than showing the story over six weeks, one would watch the whole thing in one day. As a consequence, QATP fairly rollicks along without slowing down for anyone.

The cast are uniformly superb, particularly the brilliant Julian Glover as Colonel Breen, and Barbara Shelley as Quatermass' new assistant. It is Andrew Keir however who steals the movie as Quatermass, performing the part differently to any of his television or movie predecessors, and giving us a character who is world weary but happy to take a back seat to those around him who are perhaps better at dealing with the situation than he is.

The major problem with the movie is the conveying of the story idea that the Martians perform what is effectively a culling, and it is this race memory which scares us when, at the end, the god of the aliens is brought forth. The biggest disappointment is the aliens themselves. On the original television series, there is something quite disturbing about the design of the aiens, but this design is completely thrown away and replaced with a design that makes the alien creatures look more like plastic grasshoppers. It's a disappointing effort.

The story, however, still works well, and it's good to see that there is a strong element of humanity running throgh the work.

"B"