Found some comments on the Quatermass recreation at this BBC site. (Am I sounding obsessed?) This one, made ahead of the show, resonated with me:
Monkeyboy I'm enormously excited by the prospect of a FAIL SAFE-style restaging of the original scripts as written, but made anxious by the suggestion that the material will be 'adapted and updated' -- Quatermass is a thing very much of its time, and its science and social context are its very fabric. The patriarchal boffin, a London emerging from the shadow of war and standing on the threshold of a new era of technology... treat these core elements as 'up for grabs' and a major TV event becomes a minor exercise.
How right Monkeyboy was to be concerned. The fear that ran through the whole original production was fear of what might lie beyond our atmosphere – a fear that made sense when no human being had yet travelled there. It makes no sense when repositioned in the world of today, after 44 years of manned spaceflight. Yes, Quatermass became a minor exercise.
If anyone were ever insane enough to entrust me with directing any science-fiction classic, I wouldn't update it by one minute. The War of the Worlds, for example, would again be fought in the late Victorian Home Counties – just as Quatermass's rocket would again crash into the postwar London of bombsites and rationing.
---
I have to confess that when I first peered through 405 lines of black-and-white murk at The Quatermass Experiment, I completely failed to notice the patriarchal nature of Quatermass. But I was only an eight-year-old boy, it was the 1950s, and that other incredible monster, Andrea Dworkin, had not yet come and gone.
--- I love the lead review of The Quatermass Collection (the Prof on DVD) at findtutorials.com/shop_uk
These are (semi-)live, black and white British television productions, they are not to be marvelled at visually and they will never win any awards for editing. To be polite, the acting is sometimes as determined as the characters need to be, but in honesty it's all slightly too wooden. Never mind, as the real stars here are Nigel Kneale's screenplays and Rudolph Cartier's realisation.
… "Quatermass 2" is the crowning glory. Relentless, shocking, unnerving, this atypical "Invasion of the Body-Snatchers" forgoes the "who are you?" tedium of its siblings for violent revelation, death and apocalypse. The atmosphere in this production is tremendous: the horrors of Episode 3: "The Food" have never left me.
Nor me. "It's some kind of … corrosive acid … " – this said of the gunk drenching an unfortunate MP or civil servant whose agonized death we see in close-up. Quatermass and the Pit had the cleverest ideas, but Quatermass II was the most horrific of all the shows.
If you have seen, and are familiar with, the otherwise excellent Hammer films of the same names, buy this set and be pleasantly surprised at the incident and depth which the films unfortunately lack.
Altogether too kind to Hammer, I'm afraid. 8:50 PM
