In the early 1950s, there could hardly have been a bigger and more delirious pop culture phenomenon in Britain than The Quatermass Experiment, Nigel Kneale’s wildly popular science-fiction drama serial for BBC television, which spawned its own spoof version on The Goon Show (“The Scarlet Capsule”) and paved the way for Doctor Who. It was also turned into this brash standalone feature from 1955 from Hammer; it was the company’s first real hit, and an unusual example of the high-minded BBC feeding content to this garish movie outfit. Hammer of course was in time to discover that its vocation was not really for futurist twilight-zone sci-fi but for the atavistic world of vampires and mythic beasts.
This forthright and watchable picture, with its terrific cast of veteran players such as Jack Warner, Thora Hird and the totemic Sam Kydd, is entirely happy in its own B-movie skin, with the “X” in “Xperiment” gleefully signalling its identity as a pulp shocker; though it is also recognisably part of the English science-fiction tradition of John Wyndham, a world of strange doings in the innocent English shires with the frowning authorities – uniformed coppers, men from the ministry and white-coated medics – withholding the facts from the excitable public for their own good.
