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The whooshing flash from above at the onset is a memory of the Blitz and an intimation of the Cold War, to say nothing of the launching of Hammer menace into staid British spaces. "Every experiment is a gamble, the unknown is always a risk," snaps the eponymous scientist (Brian Donlevy) as he contemplates a rocket sticking out of the ground, the smoldering remains of his outer space mission. The solitary surviving astronaut (Richard Wordsworth) returns with icy skin, mutating bone structure, a single sentence on grimacing lips: "Help me." The victim of interplanetary contagion rampaging across London, the swollen hand that absorbs pricks from a smashed cactus and is brought down onto the skulls of orderlies and chemists. "That's no way to talk about a public hero." A crucial intermediary between Frankenstein and The Incredible Melting Man, visualized by Val Guest with a surface dryness gradually invaded by slime and surrealism. The Scotland Yard inspector (Jack Warner) deems himself "a plain, simple Bible man," then watches grainy footage explaining how the crew of cosmic travelers turned to literal jelly. Seen through a glass pane in an observation chamber, the patient rises from bed and lunges at his dozing wife (Margia Dean) in a moment borrowed by Carpenter in The Fog. The most striking sequence unfolds in a zoo at night, where a dolly-in on the peeper in the bushes gives way to a prowling POV as the caged beasts grow alarmed. "What main shape do we search for now?" It all builds to a blobby behemoth at Westminster Abbey in front of BBC cameras, Quatermass is already off to his next project. Hooper in Lifeforce culminates the hallucinatory strand of thought. With David King-Wood, Maurice Kaufman, Harold Lang, Lionel Jeffries, Toke Townley, Thora Hird, Gordon Jackson, and Jane Asher. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |