I can see why this 'alien' invades Earth film would have been influential to directors and perhaps shocking as well to cinema-goers in the fifties. It would certainly have had more power back then and yet while the black and white 'gore' is effectively done it is still relatively tame by today's standards.I was impressed however with some of the ambition and intelligent ideas running throughout the film, and this is important for the film to remain pretty watchable.It concerns the arrival of an alien presence via a crashed rocket. It has managed to inhabit the body of the only survivor of three astronauts who where on the rocket. The alien then mutates with other life forms of both animal and vegetable varieties It inevitably kills animals and humans in the process of doing so, and whilst doing this, it threatens to generate millions of alien offspring. The only person who seems capable of stopping it is Quatermass (Brian Donleavy) with the help of a high ranking police inspector.The actual alien is rendered in an extremely impressive way for the time, and would hold up well today. It is perhaps Richard Wordsworths portrayal as Carroon that gives this film its best moments. Carroon is the surviving astronaut, the alien first inhabits before it transforms into the alien proper. The early moments in the film when you sense the menace and uncanniness in Carroon are very well done. You expect something bad to happen and when it does happen it is done in an effective manner.Another nice moment is when the alien comes across a kid hosting a tea party with a doll, and the kid engages the Carroon character in disarming conversation - the kid herself being blithely unaware of any possible danger. The kid is unharmed by Carroon who instead dismembers her doll before he runs off.The drawbacks are the occasional stilted dialog and rather clumsy 'natural' seeming scenes. It perhaps doesn't quite work as a horror thriller today - the film alien as you might expect does rather put it in the shade in that regard. Yet it is a well done film given the limitations of the time, and central idea of an alien presence who walks or slithers amongst us remains a good one.

Professor Bernard Quatermass is in charge of a manned rocket mission that has gone awry. They lost contact with the spaceship at one point and have no idea how far into space it may have traveled. When the rocket crash lands in a farmer's field they find that only one of the three occupants, Victor Carroon, is on board; the others have simply vanished.Somehow when you say "1950s science fiction", this film tends to be overlooked. Often for more American films, some of which are better and many of which are worse. Why? And most interestingly, this comes from Hammer, the fines folks who brought life back to Dracula and Dr. Frankenstein. They are not really known for their science fiction, but maybe they should be.Jeff Szpirglas calls Kino Lorber's Blu-ray release "well worth the wait" Americans had to endure. Indeed, beyond the crisp picture, we get some nice interviews: John Carpenter and Ernest Dickerson, as well as director Val Guest. The latter, of course, is a real treat, but for me Dickerson is the hidden treasure. He has not yet received the attention he deserves.

Based on the 1953 television series, in which Reginald Tate took the leading role, THE QUATERMASS XPERIMENT consciously adopts a cinéma-vérité style of filming. Much of the action takes place at night in the Rolling English countryside; the period vehicles and the use of crowds make us aware of just how significant an event has taken place when the rocket crashes. The climax takes place in Westminster Abbey in the middle of a BBC broadcast; director Val Guest cleverly combines stock footage with studio sequences to suggest an entire community under threat unless the mutating organism can be destroyed.In the leading role of the Professor, Brian Donlevy comes across as a determined personality - so determined, in fact, that he cannot contemplate the idea of giving up on his experiments, even though this particular mission has gone horribly wrong. He is firmly convinced of the rightness of his cause, no more so than in a memorable confrontation with Police Inspector Lomax (Jack Warner), where the Professor leaves the details of the missing astronauts and storms out of the inspector's Office. At the end of the film we see the Professor walking away from the camera down a deserted Street, thereafter to continue his researches, leaving us wondering whether he is not entirely responsible for the catastrophe. If he didn't seem so obsessed by the idea of progress, perhaps he wouldn't put people's lives in danger.Jack Warner has obviously been cast as a foil to the Professor - a dependable presence, preferring to believe in the Bible rather than the miracles of science. Director Guest uses him as a representative of logic; not the logic of science, but the kind of logic that binds societies together. The Inspector understands Quatermass's ultimate responsibility for what happened, but there is absolutely nothing he can to do apprehend the Professor.The idea of familiarity gone wrong - due to the catastrophe - is further reinforced by the casting of a gallery of familiar faces in supporting roles, from Gordon Jackson as the harassed BBC director, to Sam Kydd as a police constable, and Thora Hird as a down-and-out (speaking in a dreadful London accent) telling her experiences of having witnessed the missing astronaut who has been possessed by the organism (Richard Wordsworth). The presence of these figures among the cast reinforces the thematic purposes; that an organism can destroy even the most tight-knit societies, unless people pull together to defeat it. This is precisely what Warner, his fellow police-officers, and half the electricity workers of London manage to achieve.

Val Guest directed this science fiction tale based on a Nigel Kneale TV miniseries that stars Brian Donlevy as American rocket scientist Bernard Quatermass, who is called to the English countryside to investigate a rocket ship of his that has crashed. Two of the crew have disappeared, and the third is injured and uncommunicative. It turns out that the crew came into contact with an unknown life form in space that infected them, and now threatens to break loose upon the world, unless Quatermass and Inspector Lomax(played by Jack Warner) can stop it... Well directed and written thriller has nice atmosphere, but hurt by the miscasting of American Donlevy playing a British scientist, and the monster itself(at the climax) isn't that impressive, but otherwise this is a passable version.