#Hooptober9

💀 NUMBER TWENTY SEVEN 💀
💀 SIX COUNTRIES (UK) 💀

"Quatermass And The Pit" (1967)
* dir: Roy Ward Baker
* Science Fiction / Horror / "Ancient Aliens" For Sophisticated Gentleman
[ ★★★★½ / ★★★★★ ]

You ever consume a piece of media for the first time only to discover that it's actually the urtext to damn near every single thing that you already love?

Well...

*gestures wildly at the screen*

Absolutely obsessed with the way this moves seamlessly from "this is fascinating, surprisingly heady stuff" in the first half to "hysterical nightmare of apocalyptic dread" in the second, steadily creeping its way to an absolute fever pitch of wild special effects and even wilder thematic ideas. Andrew Keir as the titular Professor Quatermass makes for an exceedingly compelling lead, singularly focused and stern but never cold or unsympathetic, and he's surrounded by a cast of equally strong British character actors who never play down to the more b-movie elements of the plot. Which goes a long way towards turning what might otherwise be viewed as silly nonsense into something significantly more professional and eerie and believably lived-in.

Nigel Kneale's screenplay is phenomenal as well. Not only packed to the gills with thought-provoking science fiction occultism and visceral genre thrills, but also operating as a surprisingly bleak discourse on both the tenuous nature of the human condition and the idiotic single-minded selfishness of those in positions of authority. But also there's a bunch of little insectoid creatures in a millenia old spacecraft and one dude gets his face melted like he just opened the goddamn Ark Of The Covenant. Ahh. Equal parts cerebral and absurd, aka my kind of motion picture.

Roy Ward Baker also showed up in my Hooptober list for last year, by sheer coincidence, and also in the exact same category with his 1972 Amicus horror anthology "Asylum" (which is great)...so I guess that means I need to officially dive into the man's larger filmography as a whole, because I've been quite impressed with the work of his that I've seen so far.

Wonderful. Just wonderful.