Great British Cinema: Quatermass and the Pit (1967)

quartermass and the pit

I’m obviously a fan of Hammer Studios’ horror productions of the 1950s and 1960s as I’ve talked about them numerous times on these pages. I’ve also talked about how my wife doesn’t like horror films and that I usually watch them without her. She does like Hammer Horror as they usually aren’t too scary or gorey and so when my daughter is away I’ll sometimes throw one of their films on.

So it was with Quatermass and the Pit. My wife was actually busy doing something else when I put it on, but when I hollered down to her that I was watching a Hammer movie she came right up. Quatermass and the Pit is actually the third film in a loose trilogy. The first film The Quatermass XPeriment came out in 1955, Quatermass 2 followed in 1957 and then this third film came out in 1967. I’ve seen the other two but I couldn’t for the life of me tell you anything about them now. This isn’t to say that they were bad, but perhaps they just weren’t all that memorable.

All three films follow Professor Quatermass (played by Brian Donlevy in the first two films, and Andrew Keir in this one) a brilliant scientist who keeps finding himself involved in strange occurrences and alien invasions.

Quatermass and the Pit begins with some scientists down inside a London Tube station. Some construction workers had been digging out a new tunnel and came across some strange ape/man-looking skeletons. After some more digging, they come across a smooth, roundish object. Fearing it is a leftover Nazi bomb they call in the military. A little more digging shows it to actually be some kind of alien ship.

That’s when Quatermass is called in. There is a lot of silly sci-fi nonsense that comes after and the inevitable clashes between science and the military. The Quatermass films always remind me a bit of Jon Pertwee-era Doctor Who in that he’s this brilliant scientist who is amazed at new discoveries and alien lifeforms, and he winds up butting heads with military forces that just want to shoot things and blow them up.

The whole thing is a bit ridiculous and wonderful in the way science fiction films often were in the 1950s. The fact that this was made in the late 1960s makes it somehow even more awesome.

Dreamscape (1984)

dreamscape poster

I’m watching one movie from every year I’ve been alive in chronological order. We’re now up to 1984. I’m also running behind on writing these things as I watched this one a couple of weeks ago. I also skipped ahead and already wrote about my 1985 entry, Runaway Train. As such my brain is already a little foggy on this film, so this will be short.

Dennis Quaid plays Alex Gardner, a psychic who used to get probed and prodded by some big government agency, but then ran away to pursue gambling by way of the ponies. When he runs afoul with a gangster, he joins back up with the feds (run by Max Von Sydow, slumming).

They’ve got a big new project where psychics can link with a sleeping person and interact with their dreams. Alex uses it to help people. In one of the film’s best and dumbest sequences, he joins up with a kid who has nightmares about an awesome-looking cobra-man and teaches him not to be afraid anymore. There’s a nice touch inside that dream. As Alex and the kid are running from the cobra-man they see another man in a suit sitting at a table, the kid says something like “That’s my dad, he won’t help.”

Kate Capshaw is the love interest. This is the type of movie that finds it funny for Dennis Quaid’s character to invader her dreams and try and get sexy with her.

Christopher Plummer is the government agent who figures they can use this dreamscaping to assassinate undesirables. Which includes the President of the United States (Eddie Albert). The President has been having nightmares about starting World War III three and Plummer’s character is afraid that’s gonna turn him into a peacenik. Seriously.

It gets dumber from there. One would hope a film about dreams would be more interesting visually, but other than the cobra-man it is all pretty boring looking. The rest of it doesn’t fare much better.

Outland (1981)

outland poster

It has been a lot of fun working through my life in movies. That sounds wrong. These movies actually have no connection with my life, my one rule is that I’ve never seen them. I should say I’m having fun watching movies from all the years I’ve been alive in chronological order. But that’s a mouthful, I really do need to find some snappy title for this feature that will easily describe what I’m doing.

The one rule is that each movie has to have never been seen by me before. But that’s not always easy to follow. I keep track of what I watch through Letterboxd, but it isn’t always accurate. Sometimes I forget to log a movie. And for movies, I watched before Letterboxd existed, before even IMDB existed, well those are hard to track. Who can remember all the films they watched when they were a kid? Sometimes I watch a movie I think I’ve seen before only to find absolutely none of it ringing any memory bells. Other times I start a movie that I think is new to me and realize that I have actually seen it before.

Outland is a film I thought I had never seen. But after I watched it the other day, I discovered that I had actually logged it on Letterboxd. But there wasn’t a single scene, a single image that was familiar to me. The logging was dated before Letterboxd existed which means I found it at some point, thought I had seen it, and guessed when that might have been. So, I really have no idea whether or not I had actually seen it before. Maybe I did and have forgotten the film altogether, or maybe I just thought I had and logged it.

Either way, I’m counting it for this silly little endeavor of mine.

Outland is a space western. It’s basically High Noon (1952) in space. Sean Connery plays Federal Marshal William O’Niel who has been assigned to a tiny mining outpost on Jupiter’s moon, IO. He quickly becomes concerned with the number of workers who seem to be going crazy and committing suicide. Everybody else, including the operations doctor, Marian Lazarus (Frances Sternhagen) chalk it up to the poor living conditions on the station and the utter isolation. But O’Neil figures it is happening way too often for it to just be bouts or stir craziness.

Eventually, he discovers an illegal drug trade. A synthetic stimulant is being brought in and given to the workers to increase production. Use it enough and you eventually go psychotic. O’Neil tries to put a stop to it, but naturally, he comes up against the Company (who don’t officially approve of the use of the drug, but sure do like the boost in productivity).

There is a lot of Alien (1979) DNA in Outland, especially in the rugged, lived-in quality of the outpost, and the blue-collar nature of the people. Outland is rough and dirty, and the workers are tough and rowdy. They live in small spaces, their beds stacked one on top of the other with little privacy afforded to them. In contrast, O’Neil and the other high administrative positions live in comparatively fancy quarters with plenty of space and luxury. Also as in Alien, the real villain of the film is the faceless corporation, always putting profit above human lives.

It isn’t nearly as good as Alien. Director Peter Hyams doesn’t have nearly the skill or artistry of Ridley Scott. The script (also by Hyams) isn’t as tight either. But the world that he has created is really quite something, and Sean Connery gives one of his finer performances.

Doom (2005)

doom movie poster

One of my oldest and dearest friends and I had our first bonding moments while playing Doom. It was freshman year of college and another buddy of mine had Doom and the Doom-like Heretic on his computer. For reasons I won’t get into I had a key to this friend’s dorm room and used to sneak over to play while he was at work. The guy next door, Jamison, would then pop his head in and seeing what I was doing, would start playing when my turn was up. Many weekends were spent just like that, and through those games we became friends.

I suppose it is a pretty typical man thing to bond over playing games that focus on big guns and blood baths, but there we have it.

A movie based on the game was destined to be bad. Hollywood has a horrible record of converting games to films, and games are inherently difficult to map out into a two-hour piece of celluloid. Games are often low on plot, and give the players control over behavior. And for some dumb reasons, Hollywood producers can’t seem to grasp the things that make games so much fun in the first place.

In the film, the demon creatures are no longer from the depths of Hell but are genetic mutations created in a lab on Mars. It seems the scientists discovered ancient bones of Martian creatures with 24 chromosomes instead of the typical humanoid 23. Being dumb scientists they decide to inject humans with an extra chromosome to make them “super” and instead make them crazy mutant killers. (and yes that was a spoiler, but with a movie this dumb you’ll forgive me instantly.)

In the game, the scientists accidentally opened a portal to Hell while creating transport portals like in Star Trek. There is absolutely no reason to remove that part from the movie except that some screenwriter thought including a portal to Hell was too unbelievable and would hurt sales. Instead, we get this dumb mutant plot which is just as stupid and manage to alienate fans of the game in the process.

There is also more backstory than we need and a ridiculous subplot involving one of the marines and his sister who happens to be one of the scientists. It would have been so easy to use the game’s back story in a quick voice-over or title sequence and then dropped us straight into our marine killing demons. It could have been a great hour and a half of killer action and suspenseful horror. It wouldn’t have been great art, but it would have pleased fans and made more money. Instead, we get a big ball of stupid crap.

The one supposed redeeming moment is when the camera moves into first-person mode just like in the game, but even this looked mostly stupid. It looked too much like the game, actually, and ruined it. In the game, it was fun to not be able to see around corners only to turn them and find a bad guy lurking, but in a film, it was just kind of silly.

So, leave the movie at Blockbuster and download the game to relive those college memories