Quatermass and the Pit (1967)
I ran a poll over on Bluesky and the poll was:
- Prisoners of the Ghostlands
- Quatermass and the Pit
- Flash Gordon
- The Block Island Sound
and Quatermass won, by a very narrow margin.
I’d completely forgotten that this was actually in colour, but then my nan only had a black and white telly, and we used to watch these on a night at her house.
Tense and completely of its time, a discovered ‘bomb’ during an extension to the London Underground turns out to be so much more.
Lots of themes run through this, science vs military being the main one but one of the other favourites of mine is that killing each other was one the traits developed by the Martians as part of the development of their proxy inhabitors.
Quatermass himself was so rugged and authoritative, but still a man of science and reason who could see rational explanations for evil, but not enough to be entirely uncorrupted.
A film full of physical effects, all of them quite low budget and I did love the bits where you could see the strings pulling everything during the more frantic episodes in the pit.
I had also forgotten that ending, and how abrupt it was.
Another great night of cinema from the 60s.
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