Director: Val Guest
Writers: Nigel Kneale
Stars: Brian Donlevy, John Longden, Sidney James
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Also known as “The Enemy from Space.”
A couple are rushing to the hospital, but the man runs the car off the road. He’s been burnt, and the girl says it was this handful of stones that did it.
The radar guys are watching a handful of small objects coming in slowly. They’re not meteors. Meanwhile, Quatermass has had the budget for his moonbase cancelled. They’ve got a rocket, but it’s untested. Quatermass drives to where the meteorites fell, but finds a dead end. The government has the area cordoned off.
They see a full-size replica of Quatermass’s moon base and a bunch of meteorites. One of the meteorites blasts his assistant in the face. Suddenly, they’re surrounded by the military. The soldiers have all been infected. The soldiers keep his assistant, perhaps as a prisoner.
Quatermass goes to the police, but they refuse to help. He goes to the inspector in London. The base at Wimbledon Flats is top secret, so whatever has been going on there, they ignore it. It’s supposed to be research into a new kind of synthetic food. He talks to Mr. Broadhead, and he gets an invite to go see the base. The man who goes to pick them up as a scar on his arm.
They begin the tour, and sneak off to check out the base’s medical center. Broadhead wanders off again, and something nasty happens to him. He gets the so-called “synthetic food” on him, and it burns him to death. Quatermass jumps in a car and speeds off, dodging machine gun fire.
Quatermass goes back to inspector Lomax and tells a story of body snatchers. He explains how Broadhead died, and then sees the newspaper that announces Broadhead had left to country on a trade mission. Lomax goes to talk to the commissioner, but he notices a mark on the commissioner’s hand; he’s infected.
They trace the meteorites to an asteroid about two hundred meters across in orbit around the dark side of the Earth. He thinks the aliens cannot live in Earth’s oxygen unless they take over something that lives on Earth, like a human. The “moonbase” they built is for allowing aliens to live on Earth instead of humans on the moon.
Quatermass sneaks inside the plant and sees a giant, pulsating blob inside the dome. This is what the creature really looks like. The local peasants get roused up and start overrunning the base, killing the “zombies,” who now start shooting back. They all hide in the dome supply control room, where the ammonia is pumped in to keep the creatures alive. Quatermass turns that off, and turns up the oxygen, which he believes is poisonous to the aliens. There’s a standoff and a battle, leaving three hundred-foot-tall blobs rampaging around the facility. They steal a jeep and get out of there.
Quatermass has a backup plan: he wants to launch his moon rocket at the asteroid and blow it up like an atomic bomb. His assistant launches the rocket just as the “zombie” guards shoot him in the back. When the rocket hits, the blobs explode and die.
Commentary
Quatermass was about twelve years too soon for the moon landing, but you could tell a lot of thought went into his “moonbase.”
This was one of, if not the first, movie to use the number “2” to denote it is a sequel. Although the original “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” came out in 1956, a year before this one, there are some similarities. Even so, it’s really obvious to see the film’s influence on later films, everything from “Body Snatchers” to “Beneath the Planet of the Apes” stole liberally from this.
The movie had exactly the same mood and atmosphere as many of the (Third Doctor) Doctor Who episodes from the early seventies. I wonder how many of the same people worked behind the scenes on both. Just the fact that this movie felt like something from the seventies tells me it was way before its time in 1957.