On DVD: "Quatermass 2"

Hammer's reissue program continues with a sequel that changes the rules of its game somewhat. In 1955's The Quatermass Xperiment, the eponymous scientist (Brian Donlevy) was an at best ambiguous figure, a pushy American on Brit soil running headlong into Jack Warner's jovial Inspector Lomax in his frantic mission to retrieve his crashlanded technology and the data it had recorded. Perhaps mindful of the audience for these films in the US - where the sequel was released as Enemy from Space - 1957's Quatermass 2 reframes its protagonist as rather closer to a crusading hero, first trying to pin down the source and consequences of the meteorites raining down on his neck of the woods, which leave the locals - and poor old Bryan Forbes, as one of Quatermass's underlings - with nasty contact burns; then investigating what's really going on at a top-secret, heavily fortified Government facility that claims to be producing synthetic foodstuffs. Reinvesting the original's profits resulted in a notably bigger picture, though there have been losses: the transatlantic back-and-forth between Quatermass and Lomax, for one. (With Warner newly locked into his career-defining role as TV's Dixon of Dock Green, the character of Lomax is reduced to a helpful cameo, played by lookalike John Longden; there's at least one familiar face, however, in a pre-Carry On Sid James, cast as the sottish journo enlisted to bring Quatermass's findings to wider attention.) Yet returning director Val Guest's eye for an evocative sci-fi location has, if anything, only improved. The sequel gets a lot of atmospheric mileage out of a few days' shooting around the recently redesigned new town of Hemel Hempstead; a Shell refinery in Essex stands in for the Government slop factory, and yields at least one still-horrifying image, seemingly inspired by the photos of Hiroshima victims. In a further sign of how rapidly Hammer was becoming part of the national fabric, there's even a brief panorama of Parliament Square as it was in the late 1950s, though Nigel Kneale's script remains suspicious about those in positions of power and sceptical indeed about the capacity of the general public to act in their own best interests. It gets into wobblier B-movie territory upon unleashing a monster that's part Godzilla-like kaiju, part The Blob, and it ends inconclusively with a shameless plea for further sequels ("what worries me is how final this can be"), but for the most part Q2 holds up as thoughtful, involving homegrown SF - and much of what's on its mind is more pertinent to 2025 than most of this year's big summer sequels.

Quatermass 2 is now available in a limited edition 4K Collector's Boxset through Hammer Films, and is available to stream via Prime Video.