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QUATERMASS
aka
THE QUATERMASS CONCLUSION
Rating: 
UK. 1979.
Director – Piers Haggard, Screenplay – Nigel Kneale, Producer – Ted Childs, Photography – Ian Wilson, Music – Nic Rowley & Mark Wilson, Special Effects – Effects Associates, Makeup – Eddie Knight, Production Design – Arnold Chapkis. Production Company – Euston Films.
Cast:
John Mills (Professor Bernard Quatermass), Simon MacCorkindale (Joseph Kapp), Barbara Kellerman (Claire Kapp), Brewster Mason (Academician Gurov), Margaret Tyzack (Annie Morgan), Ralph Arliss (Kickalong)
Plot: The aging Professor Quatermass travels to a future London where society is decaying at the edges to take part in a tv commentary for an historical Russian-American space linkup. But as they watch, the ships destroyed by an alien force. Quatermass becomes fascinated by the Planet People, a counter-culture movement where youth en masse follow lei-lines across the country to ancient megalithic sites. But their arrival at the sites trigger buried devices left by aliens that feed on human lifeforce and cremate the teens in the thousands.
Nigel Kneale’s trilogy of Quatermass tv serials – The Quatermass Experiment (1953), Quatermass II (1954) and Quatermass and the Pit (1958), all originally broadcast live – and the Hammer films adapted from them – The Quatermass Xperiment/The Creeping Unknown (1955), Quatermass II/The Enemy from Space (1956) and Quatermass and the Pit/Five Million Years to Earth (1967) – are regarded as classics of the genre. Kneale created strong stories that balanced staple elements of the genre – mutated astronauts, alien body snatchers – with strong plot, good writing and fine characterization. But by the time of Quatermass/The Quatermass Conclusion it had been over a decade before we had last seen the Professor and two decades before he had appeared in an original story. And in this production, originally made as a four hour tv mini-series but cut down for release as a 102 minute feature film, Kneale brought the good professor back to round his tetraology off.
But the way that Kneale chooses to do so makes for a rather surprising end to the series. In the 1950s Quatermass was a bold adventurer – at the end of The Quatermass Experiment/Xperiment, Quatermass’s rocket launch had ended in disaster yet he was undaunted and making plans to launch another; here he is almost 180 degrees removed from that same character, a frightened old man who instead of seeking new bold horizons to conquer, sits cynically decrying a space link-up for its symbolic wedlock of two corrupt political dynasties. This Quatermass is even a different person in the casting of John Mills, a diminutive man who is almost the complete antithesis of brutish Brian Donlevy from the first two Quatermass films or the more authoritative Andrew Keir in Quatermass and the Pit. Indeed the entire exercise almost seems to represent a wearying of life on the part of Kneale – it seems a film written by someone who pictures the world as having gone down the drain and doesn’t appear to care about it any longer. It also seems to have been written by someone who can no longer understand what the generation gap is about to the extent that they literally view adults and youth as entirely different species.
Despite the prevailing mood of cynicism Quatermass/The Quatermass Conclusion has the familiar conceptual wildness one has come to associate with Nigel Kneale. The melange of ideas and images is striking – the Planet People, following lei-lines using plumb bobs, being drawn to ancient megalithic sites, which have in fact been erected as warning markers by the ancients over giant alien microwaves. Kneale even offers the amusingly wild idea that Wembley Stadium is one of these ancient sites and offers such as explanation for football hooliganism. The Planet People as leftover hippies however is an idea that seems well and truly dated by 1979. (The result of the script having been written in the early 1970s, originally for Hammer as an original film. Kneale also originally used Stonehenge as the megalithic circle but the series was refused permission to shoot on a national monument). Perhaps a better idea at the time would have been to have replaced them by punks. The actual appearances of the alien force in mid-air and the crisped ashy remains left on the sites have an eerie power. The images of a socially decayed London – of pay-cops, of books used for burning, of vehicles and bodies just lying in the streets, and cats being sold for their fur – are also well achieved.
This was not quite the end of the Quatermass saga. 25 years later the BBC revived the character in a remake, the live-broadcast The Quatermass Experiment (2005) starring Jason Flemyng.
Copyright Richard Scheib 1992
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