The Quatermass Xperiment

The first big international success for Britain's Hammer films. Guest does a good job at imaginatively masking this film's tiny budget and Wordsworth is effective as the silent, doomed astronaut. Look for Jane Asher (later a Paul McCartney girlfriend, and Vincent Price's co-star in _The Masque of the Red Death_) as the little girl Wordsworth encounters at the shipyard.

A little slow paced but delightfully eerie with good suspense.

"The Quatermass Xperiment" stands out as a 1950s sci-fi flick that swaps the conventional atomic monster trope for a creature born from the perils of space exploration. The film portrays local law enforcement and the spacecraft's inventor wielding an improbably broad influence and exhibiting a surprising lack of urgency, which is quite astonishing. While the narrative is well-crafted, the passage of time has rendered its once thrilling elements into something more amusingly quaint.