QUATERMASS AND THE PIT

Part of Secret Movie Club's Top 1000. A ridiculous number we know. But there are easily 1000 must see movies in cinema. Probably many of thousands. But this number feels right to us.

One of the reasons one should watch all kinds of movies with no thought to snobbery is that some of the most genius cinema pops up in ghettoized genres like horror and B-movie science fiction.

Case in point, the excellent, terrifying Hammer horror sci-fi QUATERMASS & THE PIT.

Part of a strange series of movies that started as UK TV mini-series then were condensed into movies, QUATERMASS & THE PIT is the 3rd in the series.

Ancient ape-men skeletons are discovered in a London subway excavation. But then a strange seemingly impenetrable large smooth object is also discovered near the remains. Eccentric but incisive Professor Quatermass senses something extra-terrestrial which the British government feels is hysterical.

File this in the apocalypse genre of the uncanny that includes John Carpenter's THE THING, IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS and PRINCE OF DARKNESS (which feels the most influenced by PIT).

There are all sorts of deliciously odd developments. A Paleontologist played by the magnetic Queen of Hammer, Barbara Shelley, notes that the subway station is on the street Hobb's End and its original spelling "Hob's End" was an old English name for the Devil.

The discovery that the street has for centuries had reports of hideous dwarves and devils driving people to madness only makes you feel the ancient artifacts they are discovering are going to lead to ruin.

The movie has that funky wobbliness in that the scientists-represented by Quatermass, the Paleontologists, etc-are meant to represent reason, level headedness, empiricism. But they do stupid reckless things as much as anyone else in the movie.

Would you okay drilling into a strange object of unknown origin? Would you encourage people to return again and again to the object after you had discovered strange huge insect like creatures rotting in its hull? Would you call a mass press conference in the pit after you had witnessed weightlessness and insanity inducing harmonics?

At the same time, Quatermass develops some truly horrific theories about how an ancient extraterrestrial culture could have hybridized with earth evolved apes to create a lifeform-us-that was never meant to be.

It's funny when you see a Hammer movie that shares essentially the same heady philosophical ideas as 2001. Only here, the conclusions veer much more to horror and apocalypse than wonder and hope.

The harmonics and vibrations of the object drive people to mindless hive behavior and murder.

QUATERMASS takes its weird ass ideas seriously. That's what makes it great.

The balance of what is shown and what is only hinted at is pretty damn perfect in this movie. It neither ruins the spell by showing too much nor shows timidity in showing too little. What it shows is enough to make your imagination run wild with terrifying cosmic possibilities.

B-movies are a vast ocean of buried treasure. QUATERMASS & THE PIT proves that.

Craig Hammill is the founder/programmer of Secret Movie Club.