What Films Did You Watch Last Week? (03/08-09/09) CLOSED
Sept 15, 2018 0:33:51 GMT
petrolino likes this
Post by Deleted on Sept 15, 2018 0:33:51 GMT
Been on a classic sci fi movie binge.
The Quatermass Xperiment
Man, this is a WAY better movie than I thought it would be!
I remember seeing this as a kid and being scared by it. I guess I just wrote it off as scary for the time but kind of silly to an adult in modern times, as many fifties films are.
Boy was I wrong about that. This is a genuinely scary, horrific movie. Special mention must go to Richard Wordsworth as Caroon, the astronaut infected by 'something' in space. I've seen plenty of people play the role of a human gradually turning into an alien, but I've never seen anybody play it as well as Wordsworth does here. The man practically radiates tortured agony in every scene, you can see him desperately struggling against what's happened to him - and failing, inch by inch. He almost never speaks a word, but it's a tremendous performance nonetheless.
Gotta say, Brian Donlevy's Quatermass is kind of an ass. I'm not sure what they were going for with him, but this Quatermass is relentlessly nasty or at least insensitive to pretty much everybody he talks to for at least the first half hour. I think the idea was that he's the one man who 'gets it', surrounded by idiots who don't. But honestly it just makes him come across as a jerk. Especially in comparison to the good old British copper, who is eminently reasonable to everyone and comes across as a really nice guy.
The monster does fall into the realm of 'good for the time'. Love the conception, but it is let down a little by the limits of the special effects.
That's a pretty minor downside to a film that has a huge amount of upside, though. This is well worth seeing. I wouldn't mind seeing a remake, either!
Quatermass 2
Not as good a movie. Quatermass continues to be an asshole to all around him. Apparently the director of these two movies, Val Guest, absolutely hated Brian Donlevy in the role, in large part because Donlevy was a serious alcoholic. Guest has claimed that Donlevy was barely functional on set, though others have said this is a huge exaggeration.
Anyway, pesky aliens are attacking Earth and possessing Humans to control them (a feature of all the Quatermass work). The aliens come down in little projectiles which burst open when handled, letting an alien infect your body. It's a good movie, and there's some genuinely effective stuff, but it's just a bit lacking compared to the previous one. Ho hum.
Quatermass and the Pit
Some years on and a new Quatermass arrives on our screens. This one is in colour. It concerns the discovery of a strange object underground during tunnelling operations, and the implication that the ship, which is millions of years old, may have been on a mission to create Humanity by hybridisation between ape creatures on Earth and Martians. It's spends a lot of time on the mystery of what the object could be, and gives it various weird qualities - it's impossible to cut or drill through, it's almost frictionless and nothing will stick to it, it's not cold and yet touching it with bare skin causes frostbite, etc. It's also tied in to various supernatural phenomena. It's all good stuff, and almost as good as the original movie.
It! The Terror From Beyond Space!
The 50s B movie that may have somewhat inspired Alien! In truth there are some similarities, but they are pretty general.
The first rocket ship to Mars was destroyed and all but one of the crew killed. The survivor claims a monster killed them, but he's convicted of murder in his absence (!) and another rocket dispatched to return him to Earth to be put in front of a firing squad. But of course the monster is real, and stows away on their ship.
The setup is actually kind of clever, because as a rocket the ship is a series of small vertically stacked decks. With the monster near the bottom, the crew are gradually forced to retreat upwards every time it busts through into the next level. So you get this sense of increasing claustrophobia as their options are gradually reduced along with the space they have to work in - and in the end, you get a sense of impending doom when they're on the top deck with nowhere else to go.
The creature itself is pretty effective - it's more or less unkillable - bullets, electricity, grenades, gas bombs, bazookas, even radiation, do nothing at all to it.
Which is one of the amusing aspects of all this, incidentally - this rocket is armed like it was going to Mars to start a war!
On the up side - the crew do reasonably intelligent things throughout, the threat of the monster is pretty intense and it's an all-around solid slice of entertainment. On the down, the monster is reasonably effective but the monster suit is pretty bad - apparently the actor wasn't available for a fitting, so it was fitted to somebody else. The result was that the actor's chin sticks out of the bottom of it's face. So they painted his chin to look like a tongue and hoped for the best.
There's a bit of sexism on display - the only two female characters do the dishes. But then maybe it was just their turn that day. And we never do find out what happened to the infected crewmember. But all in all, it's a nice little B Movie and well worth seeing.
The Abominable Snowman
Peter Cushing! Need I say more?
Okay, I'll say more. Cushing is a scientist and expert high altitude climber who is working in the Himalayas. An American team turns up - having stowed all sorts of supplies at high altitude the year before, they are now back to mount a search for the titular beast. Their intention is actually to capture one. Cushing agrees to help them, and they all trek off into the wilds.
It's a good movie, both interesting and exciting. It's also a bit more philosophical than most movies of the type, with Cushing wondering about man's relationship to nature and the world. Definitely worth checking out.
The Beast Must Die
A rich businessman invites a varied group of people to his remote country estate - and reveals that he thinks one of them is a werewolf. He intends to hunt and kill the beast as the ultimate sport, and has tricked out his estate with hidden sensors to assist him.
A silly movie, but one I have a bit of a soft spot for. It does at least put a new spin on the werewolf story by making the beast the hunted rather than the hunter - at least in theory. In practice the wolf puts up a good fight! The characters are a varied bunch, and there's some fun verbal jousting between them as they try to work out who's the wolf - much of the film comes across as very Agatha Christie in that respect. All in all a fun little B movie.
And I love that at the climax of the movie they stop the film for a "Werewolf Break" in which the audience can use the clues provided by the movie to make a prediction of who the Werewolf is. They literally put a clock up on the screen, a narration recaps the main characters, and asks you to make your guess. It's a ridiculously silly gimmick but it makes me laugh every time
The Quatermass Xperiment
Man, this is a WAY better movie than I thought it would be!
I remember seeing this as a kid and being scared by it. I guess I just wrote it off as scary for the time but kind of silly to an adult in modern times, as many fifties films are.
Boy was I wrong about that. This is a genuinely scary, horrific movie. Special mention must go to Richard Wordsworth as Caroon, the astronaut infected by 'something' in space. I've seen plenty of people play the role of a human gradually turning into an alien, but I've never seen anybody play it as well as Wordsworth does here. The man practically radiates tortured agony in every scene, you can see him desperately struggling against what's happened to him - and failing, inch by inch. He almost never speaks a word, but it's a tremendous performance nonetheless.
Gotta say, Brian Donlevy's Quatermass is kind of an ass. I'm not sure what they were going for with him, but this Quatermass is relentlessly nasty or at least insensitive to pretty much everybody he talks to for at least the first half hour. I think the idea was that he's the one man who 'gets it', surrounded by idiots who don't. But honestly it just makes him come across as a jerk. Especially in comparison to the good old British copper, who is eminently reasonable to everyone and comes across as a really nice guy.
The monster does fall into the realm of 'good for the time'. Love the conception, but it is let down a little by the limits of the special effects.
That's a pretty minor downside to a film that has a huge amount of upside, though. This is well worth seeing. I wouldn't mind seeing a remake, either!
Quatermass 2
Not as good a movie. Quatermass continues to be an asshole to all around him. Apparently the director of these two movies, Val Guest, absolutely hated Brian Donlevy in the role, in large part because Donlevy was a serious alcoholic. Guest has claimed that Donlevy was barely functional on set, though others have said this is a huge exaggeration.
Anyway, pesky aliens are attacking Earth and possessing Humans to control them (a feature of all the Quatermass work). The aliens come down in little projectiles which burst open when handled, letting an alien infect your body. It's a good movie, and there's some genuinely effective stuff, but it's just a bit lacking compared to the previous one. Ho hum.
Quatermass and the Pit
Some years on and a new Quatermass arrives on our screens. This one is in colour. It concerns the discovery of a strange object underground during tunnelling operations, and the implication that the ship, which is millions of years old, may have been on a mission to create Humanity by hybridisation between ape creatures on Earth and Martians. It's spends a lot of time on the mystery of what the object could be, and gives it various weird qualities - it's impossible to cut or drill through, it's almost frictionless and nothing will stick to it, it's not cold and yet touching it with bare skin causes frostbite, etc. It's also tied in to various supernatural phenomena. It's all good stuff, and almost as good as the original movie.
It! The Terror From Beyond Space!
The 50s B movie that may have somewhat inspired Alien! In truth there are some similarities, but they are pretty general.
The first rocket ship to Mars was destroyed and all but one of the crew killed. The survivor claims a monster killed them, but he's convicted of murder in his absence (!) and another rocket dispatched to return him to Earth to be put in front of a firing squad. But of course the monster is real, and stows away on their ship.
The setup is actually kind of clever, because as a rocket the ship is a series of small vertically stacked decks. With the monster near the bottom, the crew are gradually forced to retreat upwards every time it busts through into the next level. So you get this sense of increasing claustrophobia as their options are gradually reduced along with the space they have to work in - and in the end, you get a sense of impending doom when they're on the top deck with nowhere else to go.
The creature itself is pretty effective - it's more or less unkillable - bullets, electricity, grenades, gas bombs, bazookas, even radiation, do nothing at all to it.
Which is one of the amusing aspects of all this, incidentally - this rocket is armed like it was going to Mars to start a war!
On the up side - the crew do reasonably intelligent things throughout, the threat of the monster is pretty intense and it's an all-around solid slice of entertainment. On the down, the monster is reasonably effective but the monster suit is pretty bad - apparently the actor wasn't available for a fitting, so it was fitted to somebody else. The result was that the actor's chin sticks out of the bottom of it's face. So they painted his chin to look like a tongue and hoped for the best.
There's a bit of sexism on display - the only two female characters do the dishes. But then maybe it was just their turn that day. And we never do find out what happened to the infected crewmember. But all in all, it's a nice little B Movie and well worth seeing.
The Abominable Snowman
Peter Cushing! Need I say more?
Okay, I'll say more. Cushing is a scientist and expert high altitude climber who is working in the Himalayas. An American team turns up - having stowed all sorts of supplies at high altitude the year before, they are now back to mount a search for the titular beast. Their intention is actually to capture one. Cushing agrees to help them, and they all trek off into the wilds.
It's a good movie, both interesting and exciting. It's also a bit more philosophical than most movies of the type, with Cushing wondering about man's relationship to nature and the world. Definitely worth checking out.
The Beast Must Die
A rich businessman invites a varied group of people to his remote country estate - and reveals that he thinks one of them is a werewolf. He intends to hunt and kill the beast as the ultimate sport, and has tricked out his estate with hidden sensors to assist him.
A silly movie, but one I have a bit of a soft spot for. It does at least put a new spin on the werewolf story by making the beast the hunted rather than the hunter - at least in theory. In practice the wolf puts up a good fight! The characters are a varied bunch, and there's some fun verbal jousting between them as they try to work out who's the wolf - much of the film comes across as very Agatha Christie in that respect. All in all a fun little B movie.
And I love that at the climax of the movie they stop the film for a "Werewolf Break" in which the audience can use the clues provided by the movie to make a prediction of who the Werewolf is. They literally put a clock up on the screen, a narration recaps the main characters, and asks you to make your guess. It's a ridiculously silly gimmick but it makes me laugh every time