Message-ID: <491@ahuta.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 22-Feb-85 11:37:58 EST
Article-I.D.: ahuta.491
Posted: Fri Feb 22 11:37:58 1985
Date-Received: Tue, 26-Feb-85 06:33:07 EST
Organization: AT&T Information Systems Labs, Holmdel NJ
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Xref: watmath net.movies:5775 net.sf-lovers:6377

Somebody on the net asked me to give a synopsis of this film, which I
have called the best science fiction film I have ever seen.  Some of
the parts of the film are a bit crypt, but are clearer in the play
which was shown at Seacon and is available in paperback.  Here goes:

FIVE MILLION YEARS TO EARTH (Brit. QUATERMASS AND THE PIT)
Hammer films 1968, Dir. by Roy Ward Baker. Scr by Nigel Kneale based on
his tv-play "Quatermass and the Pit."  Cast: Andrew Kier (Bernard
Quatermass), James Donald (Dr. Matthew Roney), Barbara Shelley (Barbara
Judd).

London Transit is digging a subway tunnel at Hobbs End.  They find
fossils of man's early ancestors.  Dr. Matthew Roney is called in to
investigate the fossils and in the process finds a large craft buried
in the ground near the five million year old fossils.  Thinking that
what was found might be a German V-weapon, they call in Col. Breen, a
former expert on enemy missiles and now in the process of taking over
Quatermass's rocket group.  Quatermass, driven by curiosity, goes with
Breen to the site of the excavations and realizes that if the fossils
are 5 million years old, so is the craft.  Hobbs end has been known
from time immemorial, it turns out, for weird supernatural events,
particularly when the earth has been disturbed.

The army, with much trouble, is able to bore a hole into the inner
chamber found in the craft, and inside they find insect-like
inhabitants.  Quatermass theorizes that they are from Mars and that
they had altered the apes whose fossils were found into evolving toward
intelligent humans.  A driller hired by the army to open the craft is
removing his equipment when he seems possessed by some force.  He runs
mindlessly through the streets causing telekinetic destruction and
takes refuge in a churchyard.  Quatermass is called in by the vicar and
hears the driller babbling about seeing scenes of another world.  His
description seems to be of a race purge of mutants.  Quatermass
theorizes that the telekinetic powers and the hatred of anyone
different were invested in us by the aliens and were always with us
more or less dormant.  The craft has the power to reawaken them in us.

Quatermass together with Roney rig up a device to record his mental
images and Quatermass tries to repeat the drillers actions so the ship
will have the same effect on him.  Instead the craft takes over Roney's
assistant and Quatermass records her mental images.  The minister of
defense, angered by Quatermass earlier telling the press that the craft
might have been of alien design, calls Quatermass in on the carpet. 
He shows them the pictures he has recorded from the assistant's mind of
a mutant hunt.  They are unconvinced, believing Breen's explanation
that the craft is German.  The minister opens the craft site to the
press.

The night that the press is running a tv show from the craft site, a
man setting up lighting in the craft slips and somehow reactivates the
craft fully.  The vast majority of London is taken over to become
mindless telekinetics bent on wiping out anything that might be a
variation in the human genetic strain.  Quatermass himself become part
of the hunt.  Roney is among the very few who are immune to the mental
control exerted by the capsule.  Seeing Quatermass in the crowd he
pulls him out and with a great deal of effort, gets Quatermass's mind
working again.  The capsule which has now turned London into
effectively a alien colony.  Exerting this effort it is turning its
own mass into energy.  The broadcast energy forms a column with the
capsule changes into the satan-like shape of a alien.  Roney realizes
that the nature of the energy column is electrical.  He reasons that
the legends of the Devil's enemy being iron had a basis in fact.  These
alien images that used to be interpretted as ghosts and demons are
electrical and people holding iron swords grounded them out.

Roney sees a large crane by the capsule site, and his assistant being
carried by the crowd.  He sends Quatermass to grab the assistant and
also to get him out of the way.  He climbs the crane and swings it into
the column of energy, electricuting himself but grounding out the
column.  The instant the column is grounded, the alien mental control
ends and things start returning to normal.