The Quatermass Xperiment (1955)

Before there was Doctor Who, there was Professor Quatermass, the British scientist who battled the strangest of alien invasions in the 1953 BBC serial The Quatermass Experiment. The hit science fiction series, starring Reginald Tate as Quatermass, was blessed with an intelligent and suspenseful script by Nigel Kneale, and Hammer Films swooped in and purchased the rights before all the episodes had aired. It was one of the smartest moves the company ever made. Prior to making the film, Hammer was a reliable producer of dispensable B-pictures: detective thrillers, film noirs, comedies. Robert Lippert, the American producer behind countless B-Westerns as well as 1951’s Cesar Romero-plus-dinosaurs picture Lost Continent, had begun co-producing pictures for Hammer, which allowed American stars to be cast, and thus American distribution secured. Their adaptation of Nigel Kneale’s popular serial was part of this arrangement, and so an American, Brian Donlevy (Kiss of Death), was quickly slated for the starring role of Professor Quatermass. This would be the studio’s first picture to be branded with the  U.K.’s newly-created “X” rating, meaning that no one under the age of 16 could see the film. Studio head James Carreras and producer Anthony Hinds decided to embrace the rating. The title would be changed to The Quatermass Xperiment, with the giant-sized “X” dominating the posters. The tactic worked, and audiences flocked to the film’s opening.

A publicity still emphasizes the film's theme of scientists battling a confounding menace.

It’s widely known that Kneale hated the casting of Donlevy, who played the professor with a short temper, at times almost bullying the British scientists and police inspectors around him. Director Val Guest found the actor a commanding presence. Yes, Donlevy’s Quatermass is abrasive when first we meet him, but he probably has to be – taking charge of an accident site where an experimental rocketship (the “Quatermass 1”) has crashed nose-first into the earth. A crowd of onlookers swarm the grounds, and the police and firefighters only add to the chaos. In short order, Quatermass orchestrates a manner of opening the ship without threatening the lives of those inside. It’s an oddly gripping scene, in part because of Guest’s intelligent decision to shoot the film with the immediacy of a docudrama, and in part because of Donlevy. Yes, he is a foul-tempered American, but he subtly dials down his performance as the film continues, the stakes are raised, and the challenge grows more daunting. There’s only one survivor on the “Quatermass 1,” Victor Carroon (Richard Wordsworth), and since he seems unable to speak, there’s no explanation forthcoming for what happened on the journey, nor where the bodies of his fellow crew members went. Essentially, this is a science fiction mystery – something which was relatively new to the genre. Quatermass is our Sherlock Holmes, though he doesn’t tackle the problem alone: he teams with Police Inspector Lomax (Jack Warner) as they begin to piece together the events which occurred in outer space, and what is happening now to poor Victor.

Publicity still: Richard Wordsworth as the mute, and mutating, Victor Carroon.

Victor’s flesh begins to look sickly and grotesque. At the insistence of his wife Judith (Margia Dean), he’s transferred out of the government laboratory and into a hospital; Quatermass can hardly protest the decision, since they’re unable to diagnose his condition, and he appears to be decaying before their eyes. But once Victor is in the less-protected hospital ward, Judith hatches a plan to liberate her husband and take him home; this backfires when Victor, now absorbing the properties of a cactus which he has punched in his hospital room, murders Judith’s friend and escapes into the streets. This initiates the second act of the film, which recalls James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931) – the very property which would be the studio’s next big success. Victor (named after Frankenstein’s creator?) even has an encounter with a young girl by a river, though the girl escapes unharmed (not so her little doll, which receives a swift decapitation). When the astronaut stumbles into the city zoo after closing hours, the end result is animal slaughter – and further mutations, until Victor no longer resembles something human. At last, as Quatermass and Lomax realize that the entire planet could be threatened by the alien entity which has taken control of Victor’s form, they join the British army at Westminster Abbey for a final confrontation.

"The Quatermass Xperiment" was released in the U.S. as "The Creeping Unknown."

Shorn of four minutes, the film was released in the United States as The Creeping Unknown. Hammer had such a hit that the studio seemed to refocus its efforts immediately upon this new science fiction-meets-horror goldmine. The follow-up, though not a sequel, was X the Unknown (1956), written by a young Jimmy Sangster, who would go on to become one of the studio’s most prolific screenwriters. Again, the “X” was displayed prominently in the title, like a boast. (One gathers that if the xylophone were a more fearsome instrument, Hammer would have commissioned a script on the subject.) In X the Unknown, the menace was a radioactive slime bubbling up from a fissure in the Earth’s crust; Leo McKern co-starred, though another American scientist, Dean Jagger, topped the bill. Quatermass 2 (1957 – released in the U.S. as Enemy from Space) reunited Val Guest, Brian Donlevy, and screenwriter Nigel Kneale for a true sequel to Hammer’s blockbuster; but after The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and the subsequent pursuit of straight horror over science fiction thrills, it would not be until 1968 that Professor Quatermass returned to the big screen. And that one would be a stunner: Quatermass and the Pit (in the U.S., Five Million Years to Earth), a nail-biting genre-blender that begins as Satanic horror and evolves gradually into high-concept science fiction (John Carpenter has frequently cited it as one of his favorite films). Andrew Keir would play the Professor with a very different temperament than Donlevy: his Quatermass was moody, cerebral, and brilliant. As a further bonus, he was actually British. Kneale was pleased.

Note: Icon Films in the U.K. has just released a string of Hammer films on budget DVDs: “The Dick Barton Trilogy” (three “Dick Barton” mysteries from the late 40’s and early 50’s), “The Quatermass Double Bill” (The Quatermass Xperiment/Quatermass 2), X the Unknown, The Abominable Snowman, and Captain Kronos Vampire Hunter. It appears that Icon has taken very little care with these releases. For this review I watched the Icon copy, and found it acceptable if not spectacular; however, X the Unknown is a complete botch, as a loud hum overwhelms the sound and dialogue for the entire length of the film. I had to fiddle with my receiver’s sound presets before I could find a mix that would at least reduce the hum a little bit. Reportedly, Captain Kronos is also too dark; I already have the Region 1 copy of this title so I can’t attest to the R2 version’s qualities or lack thereof. (I’ve yet to watch Icon’s DVDs of The Abominable Snowman and Quatermass II, though I will be doing so shortly. I hear The Abominable Snowman is fine, and I hope so, as it’s one of my favorite Hammers.) It’s a shame to see these classic films given such a shoddy treatment; one wishes that Criterion would consider releasing an Eclipse box set of Hammer’s science fiction titles so that at least we have some watchable transfers of the films back in print.

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She (1965)

Hammer Films had grown steadily since the box office breakthroughs of The Quatermass Xperiment (1955) and The Curse of Frankenstein (1957). Distributors knew that the British studio’s genre product was reliably classy and literate, but also sexy and violent; they certainly knew how to fill seats and please audiences. By the mid-60’s, Hammer producers Michael Carreras and Anthony Hinds were ready to swing for the fences: a Hollywood-style spectacle, with a bigger budget than the thrifty studio would typically allow. Hammer settled upon a known property, H. Rider Haggard’s popular adventure novel of 1887, She. As Marcus Hearn & Alan Barnes recount in The Hammer Story, it actually took a few years before the studio could enlist an American partner for what promised to be an expensive venture: MGM finally stepped up when Universal would not, and She was ultimately filmed for £323,778, far above the price tag for the typical Hammer programmer. It was shot in the studio’s anamorphic “Hammerscope,” capturing the wide desert landscapes of Israel (the film is set in Palestine, relocating the African setting of Haggard’s original). Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, the studio’s horror stars, both took supporting roles, but overshadowing their presence was Ursula Andress, Dr. No‘s Honey Ryder, in the starring role of the immortal Ayesha, “She Who Must Be Obeyed.” The posters proudly proclaimed her “The World’s Most Beautiful Woman!” above the three towering letters, S-H-E, built out of stone Ben Hur-style. Everything about this movie was going to be big, in the grand Cecil B. DeMille tradition.

Front and back of the Lancer paperback movie tie-in edition of H. Rider Haggard's novel.

At least, that’s what the film’s overheated promotion would lead you to believe. In reality, the film is nothing like the spectacle of either Ben Hur (1959) or Cleopatra (1963). No mammoth sets, and the extras don’t number in the thousands. Beyond the casting of a (temporary) A-lister, and some welcome location footage, there isn’t much about She that’s radically beyond Hammer’s typical output. It’s still pulpy as hell, and the film’s central set – Ayesha’s throne room – isn’t nearly as impressive as it ought to be. It is, in fact, a little claustrophobic, particularly when packed with extras dressed as Roman centurions and African natives. But perhaps you need a small room if you want your extras to look like a cast of thousands.

Job (Bernard Cribbins), Leo (John Richardson), and Holly (Peter Cushing): three men looking for adventure in Palestine.

In the Hammer tradition, the details of the source novel are lightly tossed in a mixer for one minute before serving. Much of the first half of Haggard’s book is discarded, or at least greatly altered. Gone are a compelling first couple of chapters in which Ludwig Horace Holly (who, according to the book’s description, should look a little more Oliver Platt than Peter Cushing) receives the dying wishes of his handsome friend, Vincey: to care for his son, Leo, and raise him as his own, until he turns twenty-five, at which point they should together open a sealed casket and follow the instructions of what they find within, which will guide Leo Vincey to his destiny. Those materials, when opened, reveal Leo’s heritage: his ancestor is the Egyptian Kallikrates, who was murdered by his jealous wife, but it is said that the wife later attained the secret of immortality, and still awaits the return of her deceased husband, to make amends and live in ecstasy for eternity. Through the generations the descent of Kallikrates have tried in vain to find her, though Leo’s late father believed he had gathered enough clues: that she rules over a tribe in East Africa, almost inaccessible to explorers. Leo enthusiastically embarks upon the voyage, and Holly, overcome with curiosity, follows, along with their comic-relief valet Job. In the film, we meet our three protagonists, war veterans, in a club in Palestine drinking liquor while being entertained by some very scantily-clad belly-dancers. They’re not pursuing any ancestral destiny; they just want to look at pretty girls. Here Leo (John Richardson) meets the beautiful Ustane (Rosenda Monteros), who delivers word to her mistress, Ayesha (Andress); and though it takes almost half the novel before we finally meet the title character, who’s sequestered in a lost city within a forbidding mountain range, in David T. Chantler’s expeditious screenplay she comes to Leo immediately. Hammer just couldn’t wait to get their beautiful starlet on the big screen.

Ayesha (Ursula Andress) visits Leo to see if he is truly her husband reincarnated.

Now, I have major problems with this plot rejiggering. Much of the pleasure of Haggard’s novel comes in the thrill of discovering unexplored lands; Ayesha, with her seductive beauty (so powerful, in the book, that a man cannot look at her directly without falling desperately in love – so she covers herself in gauze like a mummy), is the reward at the end of the journey. Chantler’s screenplay moves Ayesha’s kingdom so that you only need to go south from Palestine, trudging through a desert for a few days before arriving; so simple is the journey that Ayesha makes it herself. This greatly devalues the peril of the quest. Further, when she greets Leo, she kisses him, and then tells him that if he’s truly Kallikrates reborn, he’ll come visit – so toodles for now. Keep in mind that this is a woman who has been waiting thousands of years for her lover to come back. She keeps his preserved corpse in her palace, so she can never forget his face. Leo Vincey looks exactly like Kallikrates. By rights she ought to tie him to a bed right then and there, and have her way with his studly self all through the weekend. But Andress, who delivers her lines without much conviction, merely departs with her servant Billali (Lee) at her side: come see me tomorrow, if you want; you might need camels.

Leo and Holly stop at an oasis on the road to Ayesha's lost city.

Luckily, once you’re past this rather unbelievable plot point, She notably improves. The journey through the desert evokes Lawrence of Arabia (1962) – director Robert Day (The Green Man) even steals one of that film’s most famous shots: a mysterious figure appearing gradually in the distance, like a mirage drifting slowly into the tangible. But Day has the class to superimpose a cheesecake image of Andress with her arms seductively outstretched; ostensibly, Leo’s hallucination, but also the director reminding us, “Don’t worry, there’s more Ursula Andress to come! The world’s most beautiful woman, don’t you know!” It should be said, however, that in one scene Day uses the same technique to achieve some genuinely poetic cinema: Leo sees the vision of Ayesha in the waters of an oasis; he reaches out and touches the water longingly, but only causes the image to depart. The director pans up, up, past rippling water lit almost electrically white, to find the reflection of palm trees swaying in the breeze. This is what pulp fantasy ought to look like. Composer James Bernard also rises to the occasion – though, as any Hammer fan knows, he was seldom a slouch. His ethereal main theme, “Ayesha – She Who Must Be Obeyed,” and the martial “Desert Quest,” are spellbinding in the classic Hollywood style. Bernard was always writing his scores to the budgets that Hammer couldn’t afford: he blessed their films (despite names like Taste the Blood of Dracula and Frankenstein Created Woman) with lush, romantic themes; he was the studio’s Bernard Hermann, its Erich Wolfgang Korngold.

Ustane (Rosenda Monteros) tries to protect Job and Holly from the Amahagger tribesmen.

Action arrives in the form of some camel-riding Bedouins who engage in a gunfight with Leo, Holly, and Job. A word about Job: the understated Bernard Cribbins is excellent in the role, and an improvement upon the source material; unlike Haggard’s character, Cribbins can handle himself in a fight, and he has a witty rapport with Richardson and Cushing that stands as a highlight of the film. After the shootout, our heroes find themselves without camels, and stumble through the desert on foot while their water supply dwindles. Ustane, who fell in love with Leo as soon as she set eyes on him back in the city, rescues the adventurers from the perils of the desert. She tends to their wounds, and guides them to the mountain kingdom of Ayesha, where they encounter the Amahagger, a tribe of Africans who worship their white queen (in case you had any doubt that this story was written in the 19th century). The tribesmen tie Leo to a post to sacrifice him, which is delayed by a dance number as elaborately choreographed as those in Hammer’s Slave Girls (1967). (I get the feeling that Michael Carreras loved this stuff.) Billali arrives to rescue them, and allows the lovestruck Ustane to accompany Leo into the city itself – a decision which has consequences. When Ayesha realizes that she has a rival, she has Ustane placed in a cage over a smoldering lava pit which happens to be in the center of her throne room. (Steven Spielberg and George Lucas later borrowed this idea for Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.) This follows a few days of smooching and heavy petting with Leo, so Leo is in straits when Ayesha asks him to choose between them. Who will he let perish? I would have picked Ustane in a heartbeat; Leo, alas, goes for the icy blonde.

A publicity still depicts Leo confronting Ayesha over the life of Ustane, while Billali (Christopher Lee) looks on.

H. Rider Haggard focused his novel on the power of physical beauty: Holly, who narrates, cannot help but fall in love with Ayesha, nor can he help feeling jealous when he sees Leo receiving her affections. His great intellect and chaste nature crumble when confronted with her seductive power. But it’s Ayesha’s vanity which is her undoing; having received eternal life from a pillar of flame that cycles through the bowels of the earth, she steps into it a second time – which reverses its initial effect. She becomes a withered corpse, in such a horrifying transformation that Job dies of fright (again, he was a milquetoast in Rider’s hands); Leo and Holly, who were about to be seduced into stepping into the flame, have second thoughts after Ayesha perishes. Hammer’s adaptation once more fiddles with Haggard’s text, but not to the film’s detriment. Leo steps into the flame while holding Ayesha’s hand; after she perishes, it’s too late for him to change his mind. He’s an immortal. While Bernard’s music rises, Holly abandons the tunic-clad Leo in the mystic chamber; he will wait centuries, as Ayesha did, for her to be reborn. It has its own poetry, which isn’t actually that far removed from Haggard’s intentions; since at the end of his book, Leo and Holly know they can never fall in love with another woman, and so begin a vain quest to find her reincarnated form. Both versions of She end unconsummated; the characters as empty as preserved corpses.

Ayesha's youth is stolen back by the magical flame.

The film was a box office success, and received largely positive notices. A sequel was produced, albeit belatedly, called The Vengeance of She (1968), for which John Richardson returned, though not Ursula Andress, who was quick to put the film behind her. As with the original She, the marketing campaign for the sequel centered upon its glamorous female star, in this case a Hammer “discovery,” Olinka Berova of Czechoslovakia. The languidly-paced follow-up takes its time getting its heroine back to the lost city, where she learns she’s the reincarnation of Ayesha. Though not without some interesting moments, it’s a peculiar little film, and about on par with another Hammer fantasy, The Lost Continent, produced the same year: both films seem strangely unfocused, as though it’s not exactly clear what is at stake or why the audience should care. Haggard actually did write a sequel, Ayesha: The Return of She, which takes place in Tibet to bolster its reincarnation theme; The Vengeance of She is unrelated. Today, the 1965 She is mostly of interest to fans of either Hammer or Ursula Andress; if you’re in either camp, the film is entertaining. It can’t, alas, touch the beauty and splendor of the 1935 adaptation produced by Merian C. Cooper of King Kong fame, scored by Max Steiner, and starring Randolph Scott as Leo, Nigel Bruce as Holly, and Broadway star Helen Gahagan as Ayesha – her only film role. This She, much more faithful to Haggard’s book, at times achieves the look of a Maxfield Parrish painting. (A DVD was released by Kino a few years ago.) But Hammer’s She suggested a new direction for the studio, one which would prove fruitful: they called it “Hammer Glamour.” After She they pursued Raquel Welch, and once they dressed her in a fur bikini opposite some stop-motion dinosaurs (courtesy Ray Harryhausen), they’d have another hit on their hands: One Million Years B.C. (1966). For a little while, at least, the studio seemed to have perfected a formula all their own.

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Manos: The Hands of Fate (1966)

Like almost everyone else, I first saw Manos: The Hands of Fate (1966) on Comedy Central’s Mystery Science Theater 3000, probably on one of its reruns. My strongest memory of that first viewing was of women in diaphanous gowns and giant white underwear wrestling to get the attention of their pasty-faced cult leader, The Master (Tom Neyman). Even with the witty riffs of Joel Hodgson and the ‘Bots, you get a queasy feeling watching Manos. It might be the light-jazz soundtrack, or the out-of-focus visuals, or the shaking camera, but there’s a too-many-Quaaludes sensation to the film that’s hard to shake. At first, the film is unintentionally hysterical. After a while, you want to crawl up the wall – anything to escape its deadly pull. I’ve never much liked awarded titles such as “the worst movie ever made.” I’ve made the worst movie ever made, when I was in high school, with a camera rented out from the A/V department; or maybe you did. Narrow the standards to anything that’s seen a theatrical release, and you could still fill warehouses with unwatchable films, far worse than Gigli or Catwoman. But then you’re in the middle of Manos: The Hands of Fate – lost, adrift – and damn if this doesn’t feel like the worst. It’s just so punishing, so thoroughly incompetent, so greatly misguided…so intent on your absolute destruction.

John Reynolds as Torgo

The writer, director, producer, and star was Hal Warren of El Paso, Texas, and it’s often cited that he was a fertilizer salesman, because the irony should be obvious. Warren made Manos to win a bet with Stirling Silliphant (writer of In the Heat of the Night); although I doubt that the bet was “Make the worst film ever made.” If it were, I hope Silliphant paid up. It was shot on 16mm, and, as Joel observes in MST3K, “Every frame looks like someone’s last known photograph.” Warren plays Michael, a patriarch who, with wife Margaret (Diane Mahree) and daughter Debbie (Jackey Neyman), sets out on a vacation trip but somehow ends up in a cul-de-sac and a single-story, dire-looking hotel laden with strange artifacts, run by limping, Panama-hat wearing, nervous-tic-aggrieved, giant-kneed manservant Torgo (John Reynolds). He speaks incessantly of the “Master,” who’s dead, or away, or always watching – or all of these things. He also begins groping Margaret’s hair the instant Michael is out of the room. She looks horrified, and strikes a pose, but is, for some reason, unable to escape the frame. She, too, is eternally trapped in the hellish quagmire that is Manos: The Hands of Fate.

Torgo demonstrates his affection for Margaret (Diane Mahree) by clutching at her hair.

During the course of their long night at the hotel, young Debbie’s pet dog is killed, and while wandering into the darkness, she acquires a substitute in the form of a hell-hound belonging to the Master. The Master may be omniscient, but he’s not watching after his dog at the moment because he’s slumbering on a stone slab behind the hotel with his many wives standing statue-like around him. Torgo pays him a visit and tells the unconscious Master that he won’t give Margaret to him; he wants her for himself. Then he unnecessarily berates the wives. “You, you’re his first wife. He doesn’t want you anymore, and now I don’t want you!” He finishes this speech by groping her hair and burying his face in her stomach. Yes, Torgo has a psychological complex all his own.

Margaret (Diane Mahree) and Michael (Hal Warren) shrink from Torgo.

Shortly, however, the Master awakens, and after a prayer to the idol he worships (“Manos will be done!”) he shouts, “Arise, my wives, and hear the words of Manos!” Hal Warren immediately cuts to a shot of the wives all gathered in a circle, as though conducting a Tupperware party, gossiping loudly, while the Master sits on his altar, looking bored and miserable. And to think: Torgo wants a cut of this. Some infighting over who really deserves the Master leads to the famed female wrestling scene, all set to that improvisational jazz score, and some tuneless piano playing which sounds like a hammer slamming into your skull. When Torgo confronts the Master over possession of Margaret, he’s punished by having the Manos-staff (a staff with a hand at the end) waved in front of his face multiple times. Subdued by this spell, Torgo is taken to the altar and tied to it, where he’s tortured, I guess: the Master’s wives lean over him and make massaging gestures with their hands. Finally, Torgo is forced to partake in a ritual which leaves him with a flaming stump for a hand. He and his giant knees run off into the night. Michael and his family, meanwhile, are brainwashed by the cult; even poor Debbie becomes one of the Master’s wives, while Michael takes Torgo’s place, speaking in the same stiff monotone to anyone willing to check into the hotel. This was the twist ending; I have spoiled it for you. Though Manos: The Hands of Fate didn’t play very many theaters, the poster nonetheless proclaimed, “NO ONE SEATED THE LAST 10 MINUTES. We defy you to guess the ending…AND ASK YOU NOT TO DIVULGE IT!”

Female wrestling before The Master.

The film was roundly mocked by Texas audiences, despite its boasts of being an El Paso original. Torgo actor John Reynolds, who wore a painful contraption to resemble goat legs (he was supposed to be a satyr), committed suicide before he could witness such a disastrous reception; reportedly he was heavily medicated during the filming of Manos due to the enormous pain caused by said contraption. The revival in interest caused by MST3K‘s screening made his character a cult figure of sorts. After all, the man has his own theme music – albeit a theme that plays only when he walks, giant knees to the fore. In the episode, head writer Mike Nelson parodies Reynolds’ performance, and would play Torgo a few more times before MST3K ended its ten-season run; Torgo has gone on to become a kind of pop culture icon, synonymous with bad movies and their unintended pleasures. Stage musicals have been performed based on the film; a puppet show adaptation was staged earlier this year in Seattle. In the age of the Internet Movie Database, Manos: The Hands of Fate has eclipsed Ed Wood’s films as the “worst ever made” (it currently sits at #3 on the “Bottom 100”; the #1 spot belongs – for all I know, deservedly – to Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2). Manos has earned all the notoriety it’s received: the turgid pace (the first half hour seems to consist of a single driving scene), the redundant dialogue, the circular narrative (a couple making out in a convertible apparently does so for days), the contextually inappropriate, relentlessly dreary jazz songs (“don’t forget/the silly way we met”), the night-for-night shooting which renders much of the action incoherent…it all just wears on you. It reminds of the power that cinema wields; in this case, it’s an evil power.

The Master threatens Torgo with death.

The new special edition DVD from Shout! Factory offers the MST3K episode on the first disc and the uncut version of the film (full-frame and not looking too great) on the second. Extras are lavish for such a non-charmer: a retrospective from MST3K‘s Joel Hodgson, Trace Beaulieu, Frank Conniff, and Mary Jo Pehl; the MST Hour wraps hosted by Mike Nelson; the amusing half-hour documentary “Hotel Torgo,” and more. Although Manos has made several appearances on DVD in the last decade or so, this is probably the version you’ll want to own. (A warning: you may need alcohol.) A sequel is currently being filmed, but whatever appeal Manos has is purely accidental, and certainly unique. Accept no substitutes.

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