• Included with the Quatermass Movies.
• Of all of the horror and science fiction movies that I saw in my teenaged years, the movie that really grabbed me was called Five Million Years to Earth (1967).

Martin Winfree
December 15, 2018
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Shared with Public

Of all of the horror and science fiction movies that I saw in my teenaged years, the movie that really grabbed me was called Five Million Years to Earth (1967). This is a different movie from 20 Million Miles to Earth (1957), a Ray Harryhausen, stop-motion animation showcase. I was only going to mention that film in passing; but I noticed a poster for 20 Million Miles to Earth online, and the spaceship could be a twin of the one in The Quatermass Xperiment. The British title of the film is Quatermass and the Pit.

In this movie, an ancient spacecraft having a series of unusual effects on people around it was discovered and later unearthed during an extension of the subway system called the London Underground. (In the original television series, the spaceship was discovered while digging the foundation for a large apartment building). But first, strange fossils of ape men with an abnormally enlarged cranium were uncovered. Bernard Quatermass, a paleontologist named Andrew Roney, and his assistant Barbara Judd begin investigating and find that the area has been notorious for strange happenings, dating back even to Roman times. The neighborhood where the excavation was occurring (and also the name of the nearest subway stop) is Hobbs End. But this area was originally called Hobs End, with “hob” – as in hobgoblin – being a nickname for the devil.

A hidden cavity within the spacecraft is finally opened and is found to contain several very large insect beings. Quatermass, Roney and Judd eventually conclude that the ape men, though undoubtedly not extraterrestrial, had been artificially altered, presumably by the insect beings – as a way of colonizing the Earth by proxy. Needless to say, the powers that be had a more “rational” explanation; and they continued fiddling around until the spacecraft ultimately unleashed its diabolical powers.