Too much of everything

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

The first must-see film of the year.

Watching it is like watching the spectacle of a class clown at their best: you laugh at their jokes, instigate their defiance, and "ooooh" when they get in trouble.

A very nice British sc-fi horror oldie, that may very well have some of the first body horror stuff in it, though I'm no expert. I saw part two years before, and I can say it makes no difference which one you watch first, story-wise.Although I thought there was quite some silliness in here (why would a rocket on fire be too hot to put water on, why is immediately opening a rocket door fatal, but a couple of minutes later safe, etc.?), but 'The Quatermass experiments' has a couple of important things going for it. The (body) horror I mentioned before may be minimal, but it is quite well done, there are plenty of terrific locations and settings used (Westminster Abbey even) and, finally, Richard Wordsworth's appearance and acting as the doomed spaceman Victor Carroon are pretty damn good.The story may have its fair share of silly details, but on the whole it works, and it is reasonably fast paced.A big 7 out of 10.

I saw this as a child and it scared the living daylights out of me. This is an excellent example where less is more. The less we see the more we are left to imagine. Much of this was budget-oriented, agreed, but the audience filling in the missing blanks ix excruciating. Donlevy is out of place here, unfortunately, but the "silent" character is absolutely phenomenal. The music works quite well for me and I'm a professional musician. The pacing is spot on. It's the first of the Val Guest movies for me and I'll keep my eyes peeled for others. What good horror movies they made in the fifties and early sixties! Curtis Stotlar

I saw this movie around 1958 and I always wanted to see the gauges more clearly. They appear several times in the scene where the camera footage is being reviewed - sort of like their version of a black box. There are 6 gauges: Flux Density, Temperature (perhaps inside and outside, words not legible), Speed, Thrust, Altitude. Quatermass exclaimed how high the temperature was as the crew were being harmed by something. However, both temperature gauges show about the same readings then as before. In fact, one is a bit lower. Thrust is a bit higher, and Speed is much higher. It remains unclear where the ship went during this time. It was supposed to go 1500 miles up. You may also see a similarity with the 2001: Space Odyssey movie, where the awake crew member runs around a round treadmill, at one point being upside down. One of the crew here walks up a wall. People had a mindset that rocket ships would look like the ones in Chesley Bonestell's The Conquest of Space: tall, silver, pointy nose. I always wondered how they could land on an uneven foreign world with unknown soils. Reality: the Lunar landing module looked like a T-4 virus -- short, stubby, short legs sticking out, with a low center of gravity.

The first Quatermass film was made at a time when it was not far-fetched to present a movie about a British Space Programme's first mission going horribly wrong. These days we can't even get our bins collected weekly! So even if a UK space ship is rather quaint today this takes away nothing from the impact of the film itself, which stands up remarkably well after over 50 years.The Quatermass X-periment is a tense, pacey, and atmospheric horror-thriller; based on Nigel Kneale's beautifully written BBC t.v. series, director Val Guest gives it a down to earth approach that really works. Gripping and full of imaginative touches, it holds the viewer in thrall right to the end.While Brian Donlevy is a boring Quatermass, bullying his way through the story and the cast some marvellous character actors like Jack Warner, Thora Hird, Richard Wordsworth and David King-Wood more than compensate. King-Wood would have made a much better fit with Kneale's troubled, humanistic professor than the immobile-faced Donlevy does; instead he's the big Q's assistant, Dr. Briscoe.The story of course, concerns the crash landing of the first UK space flight and the subsequent mystery of the disappearance of two of the crew, only Victor Carroon (Wordsworth - who is simply brilliant in the part) stumbling out of the rocket when the hatch is opened. Carroon seems strangely changed, physically and mentally. Why, for instance, is he so attracted to plants? Aha! To give away more of the twisting plot would be to spoil this marvellous film - but look out for Carroon's escape from the hospital, his encounter with a young girl (Jane Asher) while on the run, and a sequence in a zoo as particular highlights. One of Kneale's great strengths as a writer was to keep the air of normalcy through well-written small character parts while cosmic horror unfolds all around. All the Quatermass stories are about possession in one form or another, and they are all landmark pieces of sci-fi/horror. The success of this film, of course, would lead to Hammer's Gothic horror revivals.Quite simply this is a fantastic film all round.