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• Included with the Quatermass Movies.
• Among the horror and science fiction movies I saw when I was a kid, the best of the best was a movie having the prosaic title of Quatermass 2.

Martin Winfree
December 15, 2018
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Shared with Public

I watched dozens if not hundreds of horror and science fiction movies when I was a kid, often with my sister Alison W. Pickrell. Probably around the time I was graduating from high school, I tried to recall which ones had really stuck with me, and the film that came to mind as the best of the best was a movie having the prosaic title of Quatermass 2. (There is supposedly an alternative title of this film also, but I don’t know that I have ever seen it – Enemy from Space). This one too started as a serial on British television and was released in 1957, also by Hammer, as their third horror film. (The second Hammer horror film, X – The Unknown was originally intended to be a Quatermass film as well, and it is also a topnotch movie; but Nigel Kneale would not allow his character to be used in that production).

You might remember seeing numerous horror and science fiction movies over the years where alien beings take over humans in some way, and then use them as puppets or slaves for various purposes. Quatermass 2 was the first movie to feature that plot point; and it has never, ever been more effectively undertaken. The alien spawn lived in gigantic domes on a top-secret government installation since they could not live in Earth’s atmosphere. Supposedly, the installation was being used to make food, but the “food” was highly toxic to humans and was really for the aliens.

Bernard Quatermass became part of a fact-finding mission to investigate the facility. At one point, the investigative team was trapped in a control room and began feeding oxygen into the domes. One of the team members was tricked into leaving the control room after the “people” over the intercom promised him that he would be set free. He was killed of course, and Quatermass realized that the oxygen pipe had been sealed: “They’ve blocked the pipe with human pulp!” You never see these kinds of concepts or that kind of dialogue in American horror or science fiction films; due to the relentlessly Pollyanna influence from Hollywood, movies from this country always seem to pull their punches.

Many years later, I was the “MAI” appraiser in the San Francisco office of PKF Consulting; and my counterpart in the Los Angeles office was a man named Jeff Lugosi. And yes, you are right: He turned out to be the grandson of the legendary Bela Lugosi, who played the title character in the original film (and also on stage, I’ve heard), Dracula (1931). He took me to his grandfather’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and told me many other stories about him, including what happened to the original cape that he wore while making the movie.

I might have first met Jeff Lugosi while I was appraising the landmark hotel called the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. It is back to its glory days now, but when I valued it (in the early 1990’s), it was a bit rundown but absolutely dripping in history. The location is almost directly across the street from Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, an even greater landmark Hollywood property; as Wikipedia described it: “Among the theatre’s most distinctive features are the concrete blocks set in the forecourt, which bear the signatures, footprints, and handprints of popular motion picture personalities from the 1920s to the present day.”

The ballroom in the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel is where the first Academy Awards ceremony was held in 1929; considering what happened there, it is a tiny room, and I really wonder how they were able to fit the reported audience of 270 into that space. The long-running series of celebrity profiles called This Is Your Life (hosted by Ralph Edwards) was made at the hotel; there was a display placard about that. Marilyn Monroe shot a famous television commercial at the swimming pool and lived in the hotel for a time in what is now called the Marilyn Monroe Suite. The striking and oversized Gable-Lombard Penthouse had regularly been the temporary home of the married couple, Clark Gable and Carole Lombard. As if that weren’t enough, the adjoining building that was also part of the appraisal had housed the original Arthur Murray Dance Studio.

One time I was talking with Jeff Lugosi, and he mentioned that his other grandfather, Brian Donlevy was also an actor and had been nominated for an Academy Award, etc. I started thinking about it, and I realized that Brian Donlevy had starred as Professor Bernard Quatermass in Quatermass 2 (and also in The Quatermass Xperiment – I don’t remember ever seeing that movie as a child). I told him that and probably made a complete fool of myself about how much I loved that movie. I loaned him my copy of the videotape so that he could see the movie; he didn’t really get it, but I wonder if there was ever anyone else who completely geeked out over his other grandfather!