Scientist – 1000 Films Blog

Watched: March 19 2021

Director: Roy Ward Baker

Starring: Andrew Keir, James Donald, Barbara Shelley, Julian Glover

Year: 1967

Runtime: 1h 37min

Hobbs End: a lone bobby is walking along the wet London street, making this the most British opening scene ever. Then: Ape men! Buried in the underground! This is gonna be goooood.

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Along with the five million year old ape man remains, there’s some sort of a device found buried in the mud. And, since this is the cold war, the military jumps right on that in case it’s some sort of a bomb or missile. Or even better – something they can use to put Britain on the nuclear superpower-map along with the USA and Soviet. But doctor Roney (Donald), Barbara Judd (Shelley) and professor Quatermass (Keir) have other ideas.

“Sure, it could be the skull of an unfortunate German pilot left here to rot since the war. But what if, and bear with me here, it’s the only earthly remains of a humanoid ape race who secretly ruled the world five million years ago and who were controlled by extraterrestrial insects..? I believe that theory has just as much merit. “

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Quatermass is right. Naturally. The device is a martian space ship, piloted by large bugs who kidnapped apes from earth, did some selctive breeding, then returned them to earth to repopulate our planet with these martian-earthling-combo-creatures who are probably our ancestors. Yup. That would have been our first guess too.

Oh. Well, I’ll be damned… They were right all along.

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Further research shows that the fictional Hobbs End has been plagued by evil spirits and scary supernatural phenomena for centuries, specifically deformed ghosts walking through walls and strange aural disturbances. Can the extraterrestrial find and the spooky apparitions be related somehow?

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We love us some Hammer horror! Sure, Quatermass is from the same tradition as the original Doctor Who – the era when the educated, privileged, white, middle aged man was the only possible voice of reason… But despite that, we really enjoy the Quatermass movies, even though this one also tends to perpetuate the stereotype of women feeling and men thinking.

“Thank Jesus we had this emotional lady hanging around. Our logical man brains were way too rational to pick up the hive memory of our collective past and solve the mystery.”

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Does Quatermass and the Pit make sense? Not quite. But it is a great ride. There are clearly fake insect monsters, very cool poltergeist activity, panic on the streets of London, and extreme Britishness. It had humanity pegged too. We quote: “‘If we found out the world was doomed, say by climatic changes, what would we do?’ ‘Nothing. We’d just go on squabbling about it as usual.'” Yeah… Things haven’t changed much since 1967.

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What we learned: Satan’s just an oversized bug.

Next time: Robbery (1967)

Watched: February 19 2018

Director: Kurt Neumann

Starring: David Hedison, Patricia Owens, Vincent Price, Herbert Marshall, Torben Meyer

Year: 1958

Runtime: 1h 34min

So, first of all, we must apologize (once again) for the sporadicness (is that a word..? We’ll say it is.) of the posts lately. We’ve both been very busy with moving, redecorating, and having paying day jobs. Hopefully, the worst is now behind us, and we can get back to more regular updates. On the bright side, we bring you a real treat for Easter! The Fly!

fly

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Somewhere in Canada (the French part), Gaston (Meyer) is having a bad day. He thought he would just have another uneventful day janitoring, but instead he stumbles across the mutilated, crushed body of scientist André Delambre (Hedison) and witnesses Mrs Hélène Delambre (Owens) fleeing the crime scene. Probably not the day he was expecting.

fly2 — No one runs like Gaston, no one gasps like Gaston, no one finds mutilated dead guys like Gaston…

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Hélène contacts her brother-in-law François (Price) and while there’s no doubt she killed her husband, she is rich and respected enough to be interrogated by the police in her own bedroom. After a few days of bedrest, with a strange new obsession with flies, she confides in her brother-in-law and recounts the events leading up to her husband’s fatal encounter with the hydraulic press.

fly3 — “You’re not going to believe this, but in actual fact it was just like killing a fly! Though a bit more technically complicated. That press isn’t easy to operate.”

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André, a scientist, had been testing out his new invention, a “disintegrator-integrator” with various results (including one that turns their cat into a disembodied meowing phantom). Not content with just transporting things and animals, he decided to test it on himself, as all slightly megalomaniac scientists are prone to do.

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As every moviegoer/reader could have predicted, things went very, very wrong, and André’s DNA got mixed up with that of a housefly. Everything pretty much went downhill from there.

Hélène was not a fan of her husband’s new look

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The Fly from 1958 has a very different approach than Cronenberg’s 1986 version, but we love them both. The title even feels like it might refer to different things in the two versions. This has more of a murder-mystery feel, and there’s less focus on the transformation, although that is still very much present.

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We loved the flies buzzing around, the murder-mystery approach, and Vincent Price in all his glory. It’s a lovely, creepy horror film, and a must-see for every fan of the genre. Or of flies. We don’t judge.

fly7 — Or even fans of very thick spiderwebs. As we said – we don’t judge your fetish. You do you!

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What we learned: Don’t kill flies without checking thoroughly first.

Next time: Touch of Evil (1958)

1000 Films Blog

Tag: Scientist

#294 Quatermass and the Pit

#165 The Fly