The Quatermass Xperiment [The Creeping Unknown] *** (1955, Brian Donlevy, Jack Warner, Margia Dean, Gordon Jackson) – Classic Movie Review 3164

The Quatermass Xperiment is notable as Hammer’s first venture into horror movies, and the first X-certificate movie from a British company.

Director Val Guest’s 1955 first spin-off from Nigel Kneale’s BBC TV serials is a cheaply but carefully made slice of sci-fi horror, in which sole surviving astronaut Victor Carroon (Richard Wordsworth) returns to planet Earth in a rocket that crashes on a farm with an alien fungus drinking up his lifeblood. Soon his arm grows, reproduces and needs to kill to eat.

American star Brian Donlevy plays Professor Bernard Quatermass, the rocketship’s designer, and you don’t expect to find cosy Jack Warner (swapping his TV role as PC Dixon for an inspector’s job) in a sci-fi film — nor Thora Hird come to that, especially as an old drunk. Nigel Neale’s thoughtful original story writing comes across well in the screenplay by Val Guest and Richard H Landau, while director Guest keeps a tight rein on the movie.

Also in the cast are David King-Wood, Gordon Jackson, Lionel Jeffries, Harold Lang, Jane Asher, Maurice Kaufmann, Margia Dean, Sam Kydd, Jane Aird, Margaret Anderson, Basil Dignam, Michael Godfrey, Donald Gray, Betty Impey, Arthur Lovegrove, Barry Lowe, Marianne Stone and John Stirling.

X the Unknown (1956) was intended as a sequel but, after objections by Nigel Neale, the eventual actual sequels are Quatermass II (1957) and Quatermass and the Pit (1967).

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© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 3164

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