Weirdhouse Cinema Rewind: Quatermass and the Pit

In this classic episode of Weirdhouse Cinema, Rob and Joe discuss the 1967 sci-fi horror film “Quatermass and the Pit” starring James Donald, Andrew Keir, Barbara Shelley and Julian Glover. (originally published 8/22/2025)

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, you welcome to Weird House Cinema. Rewind, we have
an episode here for you, Todavid. Originally published eight two,
twenty twenty five. It is quator Mass in the Pit
from nineteen sixty seven. This is a This is a classic.
This one is highly regarded, really a lot of fun,
some great actors in it, and a really mind bending plot.

(00:24):
So without further ado, let's dive right into the episode.

Speaker 2 (00:30):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 1 (00:41):
Hey you welcome to Weird House Cinema. This is Rob Lamb.

Speaker 3 (00:44):
And I am Joe McCormick. And today on Weird House
Cinema we're going to be talking about the nineteen sixty
seven British sci fi horror film quator Mass and the Pit,
starring Andrew Keer, Barbara Shelley, James Donald and Julian Glover.
And I'm going to say right at the top, as always,
we will get into some pretty granular detail about the plot.

(01:05):
We always do that in these episodes, and today's movie
in particular is one that has some great mysteries and
surprises throughout, So if you would like to watch it
without any spoilers, I think this is a good candidate
for that. You should pause here and check the movie
out first.

Speaker 1 (01:20):
Yeah. Absolutely, This is one that I was fortunate enough
to go into cold back when I think it was
in college. I think I caught it on American Movie Classics,
which also showed Hammer Horrors, I FI films.

Speaker 3 (01:32):
Yea y American.

Speaker 1 (01:34):
Yeah. I didn't know anything about it going into it
and was just, you know, thoroughly pleased with where the
movie took me.

Speaker 3 (01:41):
Just recently, we've had several listeners suggest that we cover
various quator Mass films. I think in the last Listener
Mail episode we had somebody saying that they wanted us
to do quator Mass too, and in true weird house fashion,
we were approaching them out of order. From what I
can tell, this is the third feature film in the
quater Mass series. It's a sequel to the quator Mass

(02:03):
Experiment from nineteen fifty five and quator Mass two from
fifty seven. Is that also your understanding, Rob?

Speaker 1 (02:11):
Correct? Though, though it's a little weird with the quater
Mass films because the quater Mass films were all remakes
of the original quator Mass TV program, So you had
fifty three's the quater Mass Experiment remade as the film
of the same name in fifty five, and then TV's
quator Mass two remade as a film in fifty seven.
And indeed quator Mass in the Pit was also a

(02:33):
tea And when I say TV, it's not quite a
TV show, more of like a limited TV mini series,
sort of a situation. Quat Mass in the Pit ran
on TV fifty eight through fifty nine and then was
remade as Today's nineteen sixty seven film and was.

Speaker 3 (02:48):
All of this originally written by Nigel Neil.

Speaker 1 (02:51):
Correct, Yes, he was the creator of the character. He
wrote all the screenplays for the TV series and then
the films that were adapted from them. Here there was
also a nineteen seventy nine quator Mass four part TV
series that was recut into the film The Quator Mass
Conclusion the same year. Much later on, in two thousand

(03:12):
and five, Jason Fleming starting a live TV remake of
the original series alongside David Tennant and Mark Gatis, though
I don't think Neil had anything to do with that
aside from just being credited as the creator, and you know,
they adapted it from his original screenplay.

Speaker 3 (03:28):
I've never seen that from the words you just said,
it sounds like a more serious version of Doctor Who. Energy.

Speaker 1 (03:37):
Yeah, that's one way to sort of look at quator
Mass here, and I'm to understand that the original quator
Mass TV shows had very much had Doctor Who production values.
The movie you we're watching here today is definitely a
step up from that, though also not quite on the
same level as like some of your bigger special effects
pictures of the time period. Those we'll discuss. I think

(03:57):
it does quite well in many respects, and in terms
of comparing it to Doctor Who. I mean, there's ultimately
a lot of shared DNA whenever you look at at
any kind of like British film or TV project, people
are going to have involvement with the Doctor Who franchise
over the many decades. Aside from that, I would say
there's not a lot to compare Doctor Who to quator

(04:18):
Mass because Doctor Who, of course, is a lot wilder
in its sci fi. It's more like out there in
time and space. Quator Mass is seems to be more
concerned with the immediate situation here on Earth and various
cosmic threats that emerge.

Speaker 3 (04:34):
Yes, that's right. I think Doctor Who is more fantastical
and more humorous. So, of course Doctor Who does go
to some dark places, but it generally has a lot
more silliness and humor levined throughout. Whereas the impression I
get about quator Mass, certainly from this film and from
what I know of the other ones though I haven't
seen them yet, is that it's more grounded, more serious,

(04:56):
a little bit more hard science fiction, though it does
go to some quite silly places in terms of like
what they thought you could do with technology in this
movie and stuff. I love the machine that you put
a helmet on your head and it projects your thoughts
on a TV screen.

Speaker 1 (05:10):
Yeah, Yeah, definitely definitely strong sci fi here, and is
I believe Joe Dante pointed out in a little extra
he did for the Screen Factory Blu Ray for this film,
this film has a lot in common with some of
It has a lot of the intellectual edge that you
find in various bits of sci fi literature, for example

(05:31):
Arthur C. Clark's Childhood's End and so forth, And these
of course are ideas that have been it ended up
being used multiple times over the decades in sci fi
film and sci fi storytelling, but earlier on they were
a lot more fresh.

Speaker 3 (05:45):
It really is that kind of science fiction that is
about ideas. Yes, I feel like you can really see
the influence of this movie on other horror films that
would come later now. And it's funny because, again with
the theme of seeing things out of order, I think
I saw more of the movies that were influenced by

(06:06):
this movie before I saw it itself. For example, I
can absolutely see a lot of quat Mass in the
Pit in John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness, that atmospheric feeling
of doom, something about the ancient past that is now
reaching out to us in threatening ways and sort of
suggesting that our understanding of what we are in our

(06:29):
place in the cosmos might be totally wrong. And also
this inventive braiding of scientific themes, like hard science themes
with themes of supernatural occultism. So like quator Mass in
the Pit is a movie that proposes alternative theories of
human origins. It has alien invasions, so that's the stuff

(06:49):
often of science fiction, but it's also got a common
explanation for the existence of telekinesis, haunted houses, and belief
in satan.

Speaker 1 (06:59):
That's right, yeah, yeah, And yet it does such a
fine job with all of this. It doesn't feel like
it's just grabbing things and throwing them at the wall
to see what sticks. It's a film that does an
absolutely fantastic job of laying out a believable procedural response
to an abnormal and increasingly otherworldly invent It's pretty straight laced,

(07:21):
its cerebral sci fi horror film with I think fantastic
shades of cosmic horror as you were alluding to. You know, ultimately,
the ideas that are discovered are you know, they're tantalizing,
but they completely turn the characters understanding of humanity's placing
the cosmosci its head.

Speaker 3 (07:39):
Should we listen to a little bit of trailer audio?

Speaker 1 (07:41):
Yeah, let's listen. I think this is going to be
from the UK trailer, but the US trailer was released
in the US as part of like a double feature
with the title five Million Years to Earth. That one
does have a fun beginning where it says, the scenes
you were about to see are more incredible than anything
today's science or fiction ever imagined. But well, let's let's
let's hear a little bit from the UK trip.

Speaker 4 (08:13):
Who are they running from?

Speaker 3 (08:16):
What have they seen?

Speaker 4 (08:19):
Whom do they fear. There are five million answers to
these questions, and every one of them is a shaker.
Terror five million years old spills into our time to
make two worlds collide. What is happening here and now
can affect the next five million years. They feel it,

(08:45):
they see it. The archaeologist who digs back into the
past to on earth more horror than the human mind
can compare quait a mess a scientist who come face
to face with five million years of terror. It's forever.
She's the one.

Speaker 3 (09:05):
You got here quick.

Speaker 4 (09:07):
She can see into the pit and knows that terrifying truth.
He can see into the pit, but he will not
believe what he sees. They kill me.

Speaker 3 (09:21):
What were.

Speaker 4 (09:24):
You saw?

Speaker 3 (09:24):
The creatures were alive, live.

Speaker 4 (09:29):
You descend into the pit of hell as you share
their horror. Listen, I'm advising you all to leave. That
may be great dangers.

Speaker 1 (09:43):
All right, Well, if you would like to watch quator
mass in the Pit aka five million years to Earth yourself,
This one is, as far as I can tell, currently
difficult or impossible to stream in the US, but is
available in the UK for streaming either way. The physical
Blu ray from Screen Factory is widely available and is
a terrific presentation of the film with loads of insightful extras. Joe,

(10:07):
I believe you own this disc and this is the
one that I rin in from Atlanta's own video drum.

Speaker 3 (10:12):
I've got the disc. Yeah, and it's packed with extra stuff.
I really wanted to get into a bunch of the
commentaries and docks and stuff before today, but ended up
not having time this week. Sometimes it just works out
like that. But yeah, it looks like it's just just
packed with great stuff.

Speaker 1 (10:26):
Yeah, I didn't have time to go through all of
it either. But there's a little bit with Joe Dante,
and there's a great interview view from several years back
with Julian Glover. He has a lot of cool little
insights about his experiences with the film and the various
people he worked with, including a story about how he
grew a mustache for this character. Yes, but the middle

(10:48):
part of his mustache was like too blonde and so
they kept having to diet to make it as dark
as the rest of the mustache. Huh. And then when
they were filming, he's sweat and the dye would like
drip down and dribble into his mouth and he didn't
like that. So like, over the course of a weekend,
he was like, I'm going to take care of this myself,
and he got like permanent dye and died the center

(11:11):
part of his mustache. But then it was way darker
than the rest of his mustache and made him look
like he had a Hitler mustache. Oh no, And so
they like he had to come in like on Monday
or whenever when the shoe was resuming and just had
to apologize to the hair and makeup people. Was like, sorry,
mess it all up, You're gonna have to fix me again.
So then they had to like lighten that part of
the mustache for the remainder of the shoot.

Speaker 3 (11:32):
Wow, that's got to be one of the worst self
grooming mishap stories I've ever heard. Accidental Hitler mustache.

Speaker 1 (11:39):
Yeah, yeah, I love little tidduts like that from that
you get in these extras. All right, well, let's get
into the connections on this one. We'll start at the
top with the director. It's Roy Ward Baker who lived
nineteen sixteen through twenty ten, British director who made a

(12:01):
number of films in his native UK as well as
in the US. These include nineteen fifty threes Inferno. That's
a three D film, nineteen fifty Eight's a Night to Remember,
that's a Titanic movie. And then he did several Hammer pictures,
and this is generally held to be the best picture
he did for Hammer.

Speaker 3 (12:19):
Oh have we not mentioned already that this is a
Hammer film?

Speaker 1 (12:23):
I can't remember if we said it on MIC or not,
but yes, this is definitely a Hammer picture. Though this
is I guess a good place to remind everyone that
we have lots of different sorts of Hammer pictures. They're
not all horror, and they're not all Gothic carr they're
not all vampire pictures, even though those are some of
the most famous and the most beloved Hammer pictures.

Speaker 3 (12:44):
I love a lot of Hammer movies. We've covered some
Hammer movies on Weird House before Love Seeing, you know,
Peter Cushing as van Helsing, Christopher Lee as Dracul, all
that sort of stuff. I love the sort of trashier
ones they started making in the seventies. That's good too,
I would say, I I think this might be, just
in a straightforward way, the best Hammer film I have seen.

Speaker 1 (13:06):
I mean, it's generally held to be the best one
he directed, that's for sure, and yeah, it could be,
and I think it's very reasonable to put it at
least in consideration for best Hammer picture. It's just so solid.
The other ones that Baker did. Let's see, we have
nineteen sixty nine's Moon zero two, which MST three K
fans know this one. It is a fun mod space adventure,

(13:28):
so it is not serious at all, but I highly
recommend that one. There's nineteen seventies The Vampire Lovers, as
well as Scars of Dracula from the same year. Then
we have seventy one's Doctor Jekyl and Sister Hide, as
well as the seventy four Hammer Shaw Brothers co production
The Legend of the Golden Vampires. He was a co
director on that. I've never seen this one. It's blong,

(13:51):
but on my list because I love Hammer films, I
love Shaw Brothers pictures. I'm to understand it's audacious but
also a clear clash of styles, so it's still on
the list. I could be nudged in the direction of
watching it, though.

Speaker 3 (14:04):
I think I have put that one on years ago
while I was cooking, and it didn't really pay a
lot of attention to it, but it looked wild.

Speaker 1 (14:12):
It's just a wild idea, and sometimes wild ideas don't
necessarily come together. I mean, it's audacious to think that
you would take these two distinct styles of filmmaking and
merge them together into something that fans of either would like.
But I don't know it has its following. He also
did some gothic horror films for Amicus. He did Asylum
from seventy two and The Vault of Horror from seventy three,

(14:34):
and he was active as a director into the early nineties.
All right, coming back around to the writer here, Nigel
Neil has original story slash screenplay credit here. He lived
nineteen twenty two through two thousand and six. Creator of
the Professor Bernard quator Mass franchise, with writing credits on
all of the original films and TV shows. The original

(14:54):
quator Mass series was his breakthrough, and he made a
career writing mostly thrillers, horror and sci fi pictures and
TV projects. His other credits include nineteen sixties The Entertainer,
sixty four's First Men in the Moon, and sixty six
is the Witches. He was an influence on such filmmakers
and authors as Stephen King, John Carpenter, and Dan O'Bannon.
In fact, Neil wrote an early draft of the Halloween

(15:15):
three season of the Witch script. Yeah, so I think
some of his ideas remain there, but he ends up uncredited.
And he also wrote the novel versions of the quator
Mass adventures.

Speaker 3 (15:25):
You listed some authors and filmmakers who are known fans
of Neil, but from what I understand, he is more
generally kind of a horror writers writer. A lot of
like sci fi and horror writers and people who worked
in TV in the movies really look up for him
look up to him.

Speaker 1 (15:41):
Yeah, yeah, especially folks who came up. I've seen a
lot of people that came up, like through the BBC
system back in the day, really admired his work. So
somehow the actor playing quator Mass here doesn't have top billing,
which I mean, there are always reasons for that sort
of thing, but I'm going to start with the playing
quator Mass because I feel like he's your title care

(16:03):
He's literally your title character. We got to start with him. Yes,
So here, quator Mass is played by Andrew Ker, who
I believe you mentioned already. He lived nineteen twenty six
through nineteen ninety seven. So this is, yeah, our chief protagonist,
our problem solver. He is a UK aerospace scientist.

Speaker 3 (16:21):
Though like a lot of scientist protagonists in movies of
this sort, he seems to have expertise outside of his domain,
and like he's not just he doesn't just know about rockets.
He seems to know a lot about I don't know,
paleontology and the paranormal and everything, like all kinds of stuff.

Speaker 1 (16:38):
Yeah, But at the same time, they don't portray him
as like a polymath who has you know, complete expertise
in everything. So he does seek out experts. That's true
for instance, because he's like, oh, my Latin is terrible,
so I need somebody to translate this Latin. You know,
I'm not an anthropologist or a paleontologist, so I defer
to you.

Speaker 3 (16:57):
That sort of thing.

Speaker 1 (16:58):
So Kire was an actor of age, screen and TV,
with British film and TV credits going back to around
nineteen fifty. I believe his credits include A Night to Remember,
which we already mentioned, nineteen sixty three's Cleopatra, and much
later in his career, nineteen ninety five's Rob Roy, alongside
numerous Hammer pictures. This is the only time he played

(17:18):
quator Mass, but his other Hammer credits are Pirates of
Blood River from sixty two, Dracula Prince of Darkness from
sixty six, The Viking Queen sixty seven, Zeppelin from seventy one,
and Blood from the Mummy's Tomb in seventy one.

Speaker 3 (17:32):
I think Kier is quite good in this role. We
mentioned that quator Mass is a more serious character than
say the doctor in The Doctor Who. It's a he
doesn't really get a lot of room to play in
the movie. He's you know, I think he only cracks
like one or two jokes the entire film. It's a

(17:53):
very serious, straightforward, down the middle roll. And so I
think that's the kind of thing that's hard to do
because he doesn't get to be all that expressive except
in certain expressions of like outrage and indignance when he's
faced with the fools, you know, the militaristic fools and
the government who are trying to throttle his you know,
peaceful advancement of science for his career. So like, I

(18:17):
guess he does get a bit there, but I don't know,
it's it's not a role where there's a lot of
room to play, and yet he does quite well with it.

Speaker 1 (18:26):
Yeah, you're right. He doesn't get any moments of real
whimsy or humor. Or. When they do occur, they're very slight.
They're not the driving force of the character.

Speaker 3 (18:35):
Yeah, all right.

Speaker 1 (18:36):
Now, the top build actor was actually James Donald playing
the character doctor Ronnie. Ronnie is our cutting edge paleontologist
who is you know, he's all about the fossils, but
he's also all about like strapping things to people's heads
and so they can read their brain waves and see
their thoughts.

Speaker 3 (18:53):
Yeah, yeah, I've got thoughts about that. James Donald as
Ronnie is he's a little bit Roddy Dowell and a
little bit Michael Palin.

Speaker 1 (19:02):
Yeah I can see that.

Speaker 3 (19:03):
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (19:04):
So he lived nineteen seventeen through nineteen ninety three. I
was a Scottish actor. He was considered something of an
actor's actor at the time. According to the Julian Glover interview,
like g Glover just really really loved his word. He
loved all of the actress he was working with in
this and had very nice things to say about them,
but James Donald in particular. So his credits include roles

(19:28):
in such films as fifty seven's The Bridge over the
River Kwai, fifty eights The Vikings, and nineteen sixty three
is The Great Escape. His other credits include sixty five's
King Rat and nineteen seventy eight's The Big Sleep. After
The Big Sleep, he apparently left acting do in large
part to worsening asthma conditions that he was dealing with,

(19:48):
and ended up devoting the rest of his time to
wine making. So you know, kudos to him the Maynard Path,
I guess.

Speaker 3 (19:58):
So.

Speaker 1 (19:58):
Now, the next character we have is doctor Roney's assistant.
This is Barbara Judd, played by Barbara Shelley. She lived
nineteen thirty two through twenty twenty one English model turned
actress who became something of a horror movie staple for
roles in such films as fifty eighth, Blood of the Vampire,
nineteen sixties, Village of the Damned, sixty four is the Gorgon,

(20:19):
sixty six is Dracula, Prince of Darkness, as well as
Rasputin The Mad Monk, and she was also a prolific
British TV actress.

Speaker 3 (20:26):
She's also quite good in this same thing. I would
say about the other characters we've talked about so far.
It's a very straightforward, down the middle kind of performance.
So it's a serious role, but she does well. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (20:38):
Yeah, it definitely gets to kick into high year during
the third act.

Speaker 3 (20:41):
Yes.

Speaker 1 (20:42):
Now, the film's human antagonist for the most part is
Colonel Breen, and he is played here by Julian Glover
born nineteen thirty five and as of this recording, still living,
perhaps the only surviving cast member and also still active
at age ninety.

Speaker 3 (20:58):
We were just talking off Mike before where we started
recording about whether Julian Glover has ever played a good guy.

Speaker 1 (21:05):
I mean, I don't remember a role that he had
that we could classify as a good guy. But I'm
he's been active for so long I know he did.
I mean, inevitably he played some good guys and some
at least good to neutral to good supporting characters.

Speaker 3 (21:21):
He plays a lot of kind of friendly bad guys, amiable,
hospitable villains.

Speaker 1 (21:27):
Yeah, like even in this like he is. I don't know,
the D and D spectrum of alignment doesn't always certainly
doesn't always apply to real life, and not even always
always does it apply to fiction. Like this is a
character who kind of has a tunnel vision about things.
He sees the world in a particular light, and he
is completely unable and unwilling to budge when new evidence

(21:52):
would seem to alter his worldview.

Speaker 3 (21:54):
Yeah, very lawful, neutral.

Speaker 1 (21:57):
Yeah, but I mean he I think he believe he's
doing good. But it'll be interesting to discuss his art
because I mean, he has some pretty logical counter arguments
for most of the picture.

Speaker 3 (22:09):
You know, we might get into this more later, but
I was thinking about how when he has a competing
theory to explain the find in the tunnel, competing with
quater Mass' explanation. In reality, if we were to find
something of this kind, his theory would probably be the
much better one. But yeah, just we know quater Mass
is right because you know it's a movie.

Speaker 1 (22:28):
But yeah, we know we're watching a science fiction film,
and therefore quator Mass's sci fi explanation is the one
we realize is the correct one. But Breen's argument would
make more sense in our real world. So Glover was
only thirty two years old at the time, and, according
to Glover, probably much too young to actually play this character,
but he didn't mind being cast. But English actor here

(22:52):
of stage, screen and TV with credits going back into
the fifties. He acted opposite Christopher Lee the same year,
sixty seven in Theater of Death. He was a staple
of British TV and film for years, but many at
least internationally, really took notice of him in nineteen eighty
when he played General Veers and the Empire Strikes Back,
one of, if not the only, high ranking Imperial officer

(23:14):
to ever survive the events of the Star Wars films.

Speaker 3 (23:17):
He I believe, commands the assault on the rebel base
on Hawth and he does a good job.

Speaker 1 (23:22):
Yeah, he does like a good job. Seems successful. And
I didn't do a deep dive into the labyrinth of
Star Wars lore on this one, but it's my understanding
that he survived. He definitely survives the movie, does not
experience an on screen death in another film, and may
have just survived in general. So I don't know. Super

(23:43):
Star Wars fans can write in with additional insight, but
for the most part, like he came in, did his
job and left.

Speaker 3 (23:49):
Wonder what he does after the collapse of the Empire.
He's like, well enough of that, then goes home.

Speaker 1 (23:55):
Yeah, maybe he retires, Maybe he takes up with the
New Republic. Maybe he's like, hey, you know, I'm just
doing my job and they're like, okay, fine, you know,
we have we'll we'll.

Speaker 3 (24:06):
Hire you on.

Speaker 1 (24:06):
I don't know at any rate, Julian Glover, let's see,
went on to play a Bond villain and eighty one's
For Your Eyes Only. This is not when I have
strong memories of.

Speaker 3 (24:17):
Oh yeah, that's right. I don't remember exactly what his
plot is, but For Your Eyes Only, I think was
an attempt to just sort of pull Bond back down
to Earth after the movies and the villain's plots had
all gotten really big, like every time the villain's plot
had become to you know, they're going to take over
the entire world or you know, or just like just

(24:38):
it got kind of oversized. And so For Your Eyes
Only was a very small, contained spy and crime thriller,
and so I think his aims were on those were
more on that level. I think maybe it's like he
got control of some kind of cryptographic device and was
going to sell it to the Soviets or something like that.

Speaker 1 (25:00):
Yeah. I don't remember this one all that well. I
may I mainly remember that it had had topol in it,
and it also had Michael gothardt who we've talked about
on the show before. Yeah, but I kind of forget
Julian Glover's role in it though he I believe he
is the main villain.

Speaker 3 (25:13):
Yeah, he's got a there's a final showdown at his hideout,
which is like up on top of this big mesa.

Speaker 1 (25:19):
Yeah, yeah, I remember that. I remember the mesa. They
go up in a basket, right, yeah. Oh, and then
he played the villain Walter Donovan in nineteen eighty nine's
Indiana Jones in the Last Crusade, And this is another
major role that a lot of people are going to
recognize Julian Glover from.

Speaker 3 (25:33):
Oh yeah, he has a fan he's he's great as
the villain in that. But he also has a great
turbo rot.

Speaker 1 (25:39):
Yes he does. So he's remained quite active for decades
that He voiced aragg who I believes a spider in
two thousand and two's Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.
He appeared in two thousand and four'st Troy, and he
played grand Master Piecel on Game of Thrones. He also
appeared on the Crown all Right, So those are main actors.
I'm not gonna there's an extended This is one of

(26:01):
those films that, again, it gets very procedural, so a
lot of government employees are called in to rule on this,
that or another matter concerning the event. I'm not going
to list all of them. We may come back to
a few as we proceed, but I do want to
mention the character Sladen, played by Duncan Lamont who lived

(26:23):
nineteen eighteen through nineteen seventy eight. Quator Mass in the
Pit again is not a funny movie. It doesn't have
a lot of whimsy in it. This character is probably
the closest we get to a comic relief character. He's
our working class guy who's brought in to work a
high power drill.

Speaker 3 (26:40):
Yeah, he's got a funny little short monologue about how
he enjoys buying insurance. Yes makes him feel good.

Speaker 1 (26:47):
Yeah yeah, So this is probably the most smart when
ducing character in the picture. He was a British film
and TV character actor who also appeared on TV's The
quator Mass Experiment. Different character though, obviously. Oh and then
we have a character who serves under Colonel Breen who's
a little more a little less rigid in his thinking.

(27:09):
This is Captain Potter. He's played by Brian Marshall of
nineteen thirty eight through twenty nineteen, British actor who also
appeared in seventy seven's The Spy Who Loved Me, nineteen
eighty's The Long Good Friday and eighty nine is the Punisher.
And then I do want to touch on the score here,
because the score is by Tristram Carey, who lived nineteen
twenty five through two thousand and eight English Australian composer

(27:32):
and electronic pioneer. Though much of the main score here
is not recognizably electronic, it's more traditional. But where Carrie
apparently really got to shine was the electronic underground vibration
noises and some of the other sci fi sounds in
the picture. He created these with his electronic expertise, and

(27:53):
they're I think they're quite impressive.

Speaker 3 (27:55):
There are many scenes of a sound being generated which
is symbol of a kind of field of that is
created by an object in the movie that affects character's minds,
and when we hear the sound, we know something horrible
is happening. And yeah, it's good sound work.

Speaker 1 (28:12):
Yeah, and I think it was kind of advanced for
the time. I was reading that. Like one of the
one of the individuals who critiqued it when it came out,
they complained about the electronic noises. They're like, these noises
are too disturbing. But so I love the sci fi
sound design here, and we'll get into the visual effects
as we go. But I think if the visual effects

(28:34):
do fall short at all, the sound design is also
there to help sort of elevate what's going on. And
I don't want to undercut the traditional score of the
picture either, because it is effective, moody, and I think
particularly poignant during the end credits.

Speaker 3 (28:50):
Yeah, yeah, I agree, And.

Speaker 1 (28:52):
We'll come back to that, of course when we get
into the plot. But anyway, Carrie's other scores include nineteen
fifty five's The Lady Killers, seventy one's Blood from the
Mummy's Tomb, in some episodes of TV's Doctor.

Speaker 3 (29:01):
Who Are you ready to talk about the plot? Let's
do it, Rob. I've got a picture of the title
screen for you to look at here, and I got
to say, this does not look like a science fiction
film based on the title screen has a much more

(29:24):
either gothic horror or maybe even kind of gross Italian
horror look to it. This could this could have Paul
Nashy in it.

Speaker 1 (29:32):
Yeah, yeah, just a big old red skull there. And yeah,
you can of course say the more skulls are science, right,
but no, it definitely reads more horror here.

Speaker 3 (29:41):
That's true if you think about physics and chemistry, any
object you show could be science. Yeah. So we open
on an empty, dreary, rain soaked city street in London
in what appears to be the early morning hours. Now
I couldn't tell immediately if this was a real location
in London or if it was just an extremely good set.

(30:04):
It has verisimilitude, but it also has that claustrophobic, boxed
in feeling of a street built on a sound stage.
But maybe some streets in London are just like that,
you know, some streets in reality are. Last year I
was in Chicago and I remember noticing there were some
streets I was on in Chicago that had that street

(30:25):
on a sound stage feeling.

Speaker 4 (30:28):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (30:28):
Yeah, Anyway, a bobby and a police helmet is out
wandering the road and he's the only human being in sight,
so it's very lonely out he crosses the street passes
a storefront and there's a white cat pacing at the threshold.
He stops for a moment next to the cat, and
then he moves on along the sidewalk to the illuminated

(30:49):
entrance to an underground station, and the awning over the
gate tells us that this is the stop for Hobb's End.
Intense music builds here, so we cut inside to see
a sign explaining that the hobs End station is currently
closed because of construction work in the tunnel. I think
they're trying to connect two existing lines it with an extension,

(31:11):
and deep below we hear jackhammer's rattling and machines echoing
through the tunnels and the halls, and then we cut
down to join the construction crew. They're busy digging to
extend the shaft. I must say, something looks seriously wrong
with the earth they are digging through. It is not
dry soil, but it's like a wet, pale, chocolate goop

(31:32):
kind of mud slime.

Speaker 1 (31:34):
Oh, you're just saying this because we just watched Willi
Wanka on The Chocolate Factor. It just looks That's the
only reason it looks like chocolate here.

Speaker 3 (31:41):
But didn't it look a little too goofy.

Speaker 1 (31:45):
Yeah, I mean it looks a little They describe it
as being mostly clay later on, and I guess it
does have that feel, But yeah, I never I know.
This is one of those situations where, yeah, put to
the test, I never completely believe this was like actual
raw mud from underneath London, but I was very easily
able to suspend disbelief here.

Speaker 3 (32:06):
So the workers are shoveling the mud and clay onto
a conveyor belt, which takes it away to be removed
in little mining carts. But suddenly one of them notices
something in one of the clods on the belt. It
is what appears to be a human skull music sting,
or at least it looks like a human skull, but
the cranium is shaped a little bit odd. It's it's

(32:29):
kind of big, except it's not the whole skull. It's
just the front half of the skull, like just the face.
And we get some great you know British character you
know performances here, like hey, look at these dead eyes.
Get a load of the nashers, and then he tosses
the muddy skull straight into this other guy's arms. The
guy gets mud all of his all over his sweater,

(32:50):
so the workers keep digging, and then they uncover a
full skeleton, again with a weird skull, so the discovery
is immediately a sensation, and we cut to the next
day where there are local newspapers running with the headline
underground ape Men. By the time we arrived back at
the dig site, it has been taken over by scientists
who are continuing to excavate in an attempt to understand

(33:12):
what the find means. These scientists include the paleontologist doctor
Matthew Ronie again that's James Donald and his assistant Barbara
Judd played by Barbara Shelley. Ronie is talking to a
group of reporters about how they've uncovered six skeletons already
and about how the authorities will soon want to resume
excavation to complete the underground line, but his team has

(33:36):
to be given more time to do a proper scientific survey.
This could be one of the most significant finds in
the history of paleontology, and he believes it is evidence
that humans like us walk to the planet as early
as five million years ago, much earlier than the consensus
idea on the emergence of anatomically modern humans, though I
guess these would be somewhat different because they got the

(33:57):
giant skulls. And even this conversation kind of begins a
theme that will continue throughout the film, which is scientists
struggling against authorities and other governmental demands. Like he's saying, like,
this is really important. We have to preserve this site
so that we can excavate it properly, make sure everything
is documented well, but he knows the authorities are just

(34:20):
going to want to get the jackhammers back in there
and keep extending the line as fast as they can.
So he's trying to enlist the help of the press
to make the public sympathize with how important of a
discovery this is, so that they can have the time
they need. Ronie also here unveils a reconstruction he has
put together of the so called ape man. It looks

(34:41):
like an old man with a sad face. He's got
kind of a protruding chin and an underbite and a
huge cranium. I'm not sure why these ape men had
a brain the size of a Thanksgiving turkey, but they did.
Oh well, maybe we'll find out. Ronnie does caution this
is speculative, but.

Speaker 1 (34:59):
He put a lot of into it. Like this, this
guy is really an overachiever.

Speaker 3 (35:04):
I don't know.

Speaker 1 (35:04):
It's like you have the like, how long have you
been working down here? Like a few days? Yeah, and
he already has this complete model there to show to
the press.

Speaker 3 (35:13):
It's yeah, but it fits the character, like this guy
is on it, but he's dedicated to his work. Yeah.
While Ronnie is in the middle of showing off his
chin geezer, one of the other researchers working on the
dig here uncovers what appears to be a pipe. So
she's digging in the wall and like hits something that
looks like metal, but the pipe is not marked on

(35:34):
any of their maps from the city. By the way.
This other researcher, the one who finds the pipe, is
Missus Dobson played by b Duffel, whom I knew I
recognized from something the moment we saw her here, couldn't
figure out what it was. Eventually I realized it was
from Maddy Python in The Holy Grail, where she is
the old woman that Arthur and Betevir try to ask

(35:56):
for directions on where to buy a shrubbery, and she
says like no, woh, I won't tell you no shrubberies,
and they torture her by saying knee to her.

Speaker 1 (36:04):
Yes, I remember this good connection here, nice, nice, nice connection.

Speaker 3 (36:09):
Anyway, the paleontologists are all quite puzzled, so they've got
the schem addicts of all the infrastructure that's supposed to
be buried around them. There's nothing marked in the wall aheads,
supposed to be just earth, nothing there, and yet they
seem to have hit metal, So what could it be.
The next thought is, uh, oh, it's a bomb. And
I liked this development because this felt real. This is

(36:31):
postwar London and it would not at all have been
unreasonable to think that this could be unexploded ordnance dropped
during the Blitz. In fact, even in the twenty first
century in more recent years, like diggers and builders in
the UK still sometimes find unexploded bombs left over from
World War II. So the bombs drop, they're huge. When

(36:53):
they hit, they bury themselves deeply, and then something like
ten percent of bombs don't explode when they're supposed to
do so. Occasionally you will just find like, oh, a
bomb hit here and ended up buried, and nobody ever
figured out it was there and it never blew up.

Speaker 4 (37:08):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (37:08):
So this is another nice procedural plot beat in the picture.

Speaker 4 (37:12):
You know.

Speaker 1 (37:12):
It just this makes total sense that they would they
would find whatever this is and think, well, okay, the
most likely scenario is this is an unexploded bomb. Let's
call it the right people to deal with this.

Speaker 3 (37:23):
Yeah, so a bomb disposal squad is called in. Ronny
again is extremely irritated. His goal is the preservation of
the dig site so it can be of maximal value
to science. And he watches all the men coming in
with their equipment, the bomb disposal squad, and he mutters bitterly,
and that's right, tear it all up. And you can sympathize,

(37:44):
like when the first guy gets to the wall with
the with you know, with the piece of metal in it,
he just kind of yanks a bone out of the
mud and tosses it aside.

Speaker 1 (37:53):
Yeah, but I mean, but at the same time, these
guys are here to make sure that the whole block
doesn't blow up.

Speaker 3 (37:58):
Yeah. So the bomb disposal texts speculate that it might
They look at it, they think what could it be?
They say it might be a satan And I was like,
what that's weird. I had to look it up, but
that is real. There was a type of German bomb
that was nicknamed a Satan. It's like the SC eighteen
hundred bomb.

Speaker 1 (38:18):
Yep, yep. I looked this up as well, so it's
and yeah, they really did nickname it the Satan, which
ties in nicely with some some places that this story
is going to eventually go.

Speaker 3 (38:28):
But eventually the bomb squad realizes something is not right.
They've got a little magnetic microphone that they use to
you know, put it on the capsule and listen inside,
and it doesn't even stick to it. It's like the
object is not even made of metal, so what is it? Well,
they decide to dig it out some more and get
a better idea of what they're dealing with. The phrase

(38:49):
they say is let the dog see the rabbit.

Speaker 1 (38:52):
Okay.

Speaker 3 (38:54):
In the next scene, we will meet a couple of
other major characters, Professor Bernard quator Mass played by Andrew
Kis and Colonel Breen played by Julian Glover. Quator Mass
here is a serious, thoughtful, scholarly man in a tweed
suit and bow tie, wearing a dark beard accented with gray.
When we first meet him. He's seated in a red

(39:15):
armchair and having a tense discussion with his superiors in
the government, Colonel Breen. Again, this Julian Glover is a trim,
well groomed, I would say, super silliest man in a
brown military uniform. Again, he's got that great brown mustache
that apparently I didn't know when I watched, but apparently
Julian Glover really had to manage the color on. And

(39:38):
Breen has a tendency to roll his eyes and turn
his nose up. It's like he is above all this.

Speaker 1 (39:45):
Yeah, and as we're quickly going to see there is
there's a real clash of visions here between these two.

Speaker 3 (39:51):
Yes. So we enter the scene in the middle of
a conflict. Essentially, what I gather is that Professor quater
Mass has long been in command of a government project
for developing rockets. Essentially, I think he's supposed to be
in charge of the British space program, and the rockets
he's developing are for the purpose of the peaceful colonization

(40:13):
of the Moon. But the government official in the scene
tells him that, due to a change of policy, his
project is now being taken out of civilian control and
handed over to the military, so that instead of building
peaceful moon bases for the purpose of scientific research, the
plan will now be to build launch pads on the

(40:33):
Moon so that the UK and its allies will be
able to, in breenswords quote police the Earth with ballistic missiles,
and he says, if we don't do it first, the
other side will. Quator Mass hates this. He expresses open
outrage and disgust. He feels this is a betrayal, it's

(40:53):
turning his peaceful work into a weapon. It's a perversion.
And you know, he's of the opinion that the desire
to possess the ultimate weapon is sort of the inevitable
desire of weak and fearful minds. Meanwhile, Breen regards quater
Mass with this detached, humorous pity. He's just kind of

(41:14):
scoffing at his idealism. When quat Mass at one point says,
you mean the installations on the moon will be military,
Breen seems a little surprised by the question. He says,
of course, and he kind of laughs a bit. It's
like someone with quator Mass's views seems so quaint to
him that it's ridiculous.

Speaker 1 (41:33):
Yeah, and at this point in the film, it is
like really clear that they are both very much in
their own worlds and they just, i mean, they really
can't even conceive of the mindset in worldview of the
other individual. Like to Breen, of course, all of this
is of military concern, Like ultimately everything is we can't
just ignore, you know, the military balance of the world

(41:55):
around us. And then quator Mass is just like pure
like future and ideal, you know, let's move out humanity,
moving beyond Earth and colonizing other worlds, and and he
thinks that like that any kind of like military objective
is just blasphemous, you know. And so ultimately, like you
you kind of get the idea or at least idea

(42:15):
that there's a balance in between these two characters, but
they're there. They really neither one has room for the
other's viewpoint.

Speaker 3 (42:24):
My read on it is that the author's intention is
to depict that there is a somewhat legitimate balance of
concerns here, but it definitely comes down more on the
side of quator Mass's point of view.

Speaker 1 (42:36):
Oh yes, absolutely, I mean, I guess maybe it'll vary
a little bit at this point, depending on what sort
of viewer you are, but I feel like the intended
viewer for the most part is going to be siding
with quater Mass.

Speaker 3 (42:48):
Yeah, so, quator Mass says to Brien, We're on the
edge of a new dimension of discovery. It's a great
chance to leave our vices behind war first of all,
not to go out there dragging our hatred in our
frontiers along with us. Well put, I think, But Breen
says he is shocked and disturbed to hear such naive

(43:09):
views coming from someone in quator Mass's important position of leadership.
Quator Mass says, Brain has lost his humanity, It has
withered away while he's been locked up in his ivory fortress.
But then it gets worse from here. Cop movie fans
are about to recognize that the familiar archetypal scene. The
chief says, meet your new partner, you know, because the

(43:32):
government official here tells quator Mass that Brain will be
joining him in command of the rocket group, and then
he leaves the two of them alone.

Speaker 1 (43:39):
Uh oh, yeah, but I will, said Breen does. He's like,
I'm sure if we have let's go have lunch at
my club. You know, we'll smooth all.

Speaker 3 (43:47):
Of this over.

Speaker 1 (43:47):
So you know it's at least Brain is like, seems
to be leaving the door open that they can come
to some sort of understanding, which makes him seem like
less of a pure antagonist at this point in the picture.

Speaker 3 (43:58):
Yeah, that's right. Quator Mass is fuming, but Breen tries
to sort of extend his hand and he's like, yeah,
come have dinner at my club and we'll talk it through.
We'll figure out what we can do. But suddenly they're interrupted.
Instead of going to dinner at the club, a subordinate
delivers a note to Breen. It seems they cannot go
to supper because something requires his attention in the underground first,

(44:21):
and it seems quat Mass will be along for the ride.
So here our antagonistic duo arrive at the dig site
at Hobb's end, and they start to examine the buried object,
which is slowly being uncovered by the military men. It
no longer looks like a pipe. It is some kind
of large, smooth, trailer sized capsule of an unfamiliar material.

(44:45):
And though Brain and quator Mass dislike each other, we
can quickly see their complementary sets of expertise when they're
trying to identify what sort of rocket it could be.
They're just sort of bouncing ideas off each other, like
these men boase no rockets, and they're talking shop.

Speaker 1 (45:00):
One of the.

Speaker 3 (45:00):
Workers suddenly announces they have struck another skull in the mud,
and doctor Roney is here. He's called over to investigate,
and he pulls it out of the earth, ecstatic. It's
the best one yet, and it seems the skull confirms
all of his suspicions about the huge brained prehistoric commonids.
But quator Mass is the only one who seems to
notice something curious about this find. The skull was buried

(45:23):
essentially inside the cavity of the capsule. If the object
were a bomb, how did the fossil skull get inside
it without breaking m Maybe this object is not a
bomb worth considering. Some more clues start coming in. Breen
receives a report from Civil Defense. There is apparently no

(45:46):
record of high explosive falling on this part of the city,
only incendiary bombs which burned some unoccupied houses above during
the war. Why were the houses unoccupied, well, Breen says,
at first they were evacuated. Now naturally, but there's an
old police officer from the neighborhood, who tells Quator Mass, actually,
that's not right. Those houses were not evacuated. They were

(46:08):
all abandoned long before the war. He says, people just
wouldn't live there. Quote some kind of scare, superstition, A
lot of nonsense, I dare say. At this point, I
was already like ooh, I like the different flavors that
are being combined here.

Speaker 1 (46:24):
Yeah. Yeah, because we have men of science and military
at work, and then we have obvious sci fi elements,
but then this kind of ghostly element as well that's
presenting itself.

Speaker 3 (46:43):
So while the others stay below, Quator Mass and the
old policeman walk up to the surface, accompanied by the
paleontology assistant Barbara Judd. Again, that's Barbara Shelley. She's been
they say, she's been cooped up in the tunnel for
a long time and she's got to go up to
get some fresh air. Though if it's London in the sixties,
I'm not sure how good the air at the surface
would be either. In fact, I think characters comment on

(47:04):
this a couple of times in the movie, like the
bad air quality in the city. Anyway, the policeman takes
the two of them across the street to have a
look at the abandoned houses that were fire bombed in
the war. They are apparently still abandoned and they're in disrepair.
So he opens the door and lets them inside. The
policeman says, nobody has lived in these houses for probably

(47:26):
forty years now. Inside they are skeletal, they're stripped of
wire and piping, with weird scratches and marks on many
of the walls. There's this eerie energy in here. And
the policeman explains that when he was a child in
the neighborhood, he knew a kid who lived in one
of these houses, but things got so bad the family

(47:46):
had to clear out. And equator Masses like, what what
do you mean things got so bad? And already the
cop is acting kind of sheepish. He's like, uh, noises, bumps,
even things being seen. Quator Mass says, you mean ghosts,
and the policeman is embarrassed, like it seems he does
not want to say anything more. Again, it's like, oh,

(48:08):
you know, just the usual nonsense. He seems to be
under a kind of stress, like his expression is tight
and they're sweat dripping down his temple and as they're talking.
The door through which they entered begins to creak shut
under its own weight, and then behind the door are
revealed more of these scratch marks on the walls, almost
like the raking of huge cat claws, and so quator

(48:31):
Mass asks what are those marks? What could have made them?
And the policeman is increasingly under stress, his breathing is short.
He says, kids playing around, probably, and then he bolts outside,
followed by quator Mass and Misjudd. So something's happening to him.
The policeman, he kind of wipes sweat from his face
with a handkerchief and he chokes out an embarrassed apology

(48:54):
to the other two. He's like, sorry about that, serma
must have been a bit warm in there, and then
just hurries away. Very strange.

Speaker 1 (49:01):
Yeah, it's a nice little sequence and a nice character.
I didn't clock who this this character actor was, but
you get this great feeling of, you know, the overall
plot here concerned something buried that is being unearthed, uh,
and the ramifications of that, and then we get kind
of the small version of that here encapsulated with this

(49:22):
with the unearthing of the past, the more recent past,
and some of these some of the traumas and memories
associated with it.

Speaker 4 (49:30):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (49:31):
Yeah. But also I thought it's interesting in this scene
that it's like the police officer both wants to tell
them about it and doesn't want to tell them. It's
like it's like he wants to share this somehow, but
he's also embarrassed and almost like maybe there's some kind
of like his you know, his his control bolt like
the Droids and Star Wars, is like preventing him.

Speaker 1 (49:53):
Yeah, or like, you know, he's doing the the good thing,
you know, the lawful thing, and and sharing what he
knew with these these other investigators, but maybe wasn't prepared
for how traumatic it was to actually let some of
those memories back out again and in a space like this.

Speaker 3 (50:09):
Yeah. So, quator Mass and Breen reunite, and it turns
out they have both independently decided they would like to
stay here and investigate this buried missile a bit more
before returning to their work with the Rocket group. So
Breen says his men should have the entire object excavated
by the following day. After Breen leaves, there is this
great little moment between quator Mass and Barbara Judd. They

(50:32):
stand on the street looking at the sign for Hobbs Lane.
There's a new sign right next to the old sign.
The old sign is etched into the stone facade of
a building. The current name for the street is Hobbes
with two bees. Quator Mass says, like the cricketer, I
guess that's Jack Hobbs, And the old name was Hobbs
Lane with one bee. Miss Judd points out that this

(50:55):
version of the word hobb was an old word that
meant devil.

Speaker 1 (50:59):
Oh, like hob goblin.

Speaker 3 (51:00):
Gotcha hm. Then we get a very hammer music sting there.
All right. So the next scene is one of I
would say, one of the most unintentionally funny things in
the movie, because we get some brain scanning machinery. Quator
Mass goes to visit Rone at his lab in the
Natural History Museum and Ronnie is doing these weird experiments,

(51:22):
I would say, especially weird experiments for a paleontologist to
be doing. Yeah, he's got a guy hooked up to
a helmet with a bajillion little wires coming out of it,
and that's hooked up, they say, to a computer and
a big machine that is hooting softly, and Ronie explains
that they are sensing the brain waves of this volunteer
named mister Johnson, because this is what they say, because

(51:46):
his skull shape just happens to be very similar to
the skull of a fossil hominid from the quote second
ice age.

Speaker 1 (51:57):
Yeah, I think he has tenure at this point. That's
why I was able to to do these added consciousness experiments.

Speaker 3 (52:04):
Yeah. So they say that somehow by scanning mister Johnson's
brain with this machine while he's like solving a puzzle,
because his skull is shaped like the skull of this
ancient human or human ancestor, they will be able to
know what this ice age hominid was quote able to

(52:25):
think and do. I don't know about that. But quator
Mass is like, ah, yes, the Roney analysis. I think
it's like he's already familiar with this technique from the literature.

Speaker 1 (52:36):
This guy definitely publishes, Like you get the sense that
he's already submitted a paper about the hobs End excavation.
You know, that's just how on the ball this guy is.

Speaker 3 (52:46):
Rony hopes next to be able to apply this test
to the giant skulls he found in the tube. But
then I was thinking that's what he says. But I
was wondering, Wait, does that mean he's going to have
to find a living person with a head shaped like that?

Speaker 1 (53:01):
Yeah, this part of this is a little shaky. It's
going to be important later on, but like some of
the science here is a little shaky.

Speaker 3 (53:07):
So quator Mass has a sensitive question for Ronnie about
the creatures to whom the skeletons belonged. He kind of
pulls him aside and he says, were they of this earth?
Roney says, sorry to disappoint, but yes they were. They're
clearly part of the pattern of human evolution, except for
the giant skulls. Otherwise they fit perfectly in with the

(53:28):
human ancestor fossil record. These are humans of Earth, but
just with big skulls. So the questions are really piling up.
Before heading back to the excavation, Quator Mass bumps into
Miss Judd and she has been doing some library research.
She found some old newspapers about Hobbs Lane from the
nineteen twenties and it's all stories of hauntings. There's something

(53:52):
called the Hobbs Lane spook, which is a specter that
walks through bedroom walls, described by some people as a
small humanoid reacher with hideous features, and quator Mass it
first tries to wave this off. He's like, wow, you know,
we're scientists. We can't waste our time with stuff like this. Meanwhile,
back at the station, Colonel Breen and his men have

(54:12):
uncovered the whole object, which does not resemble a rocket
or bomb at all. Instead, I would say it looks
like a huge, shiny, metallic orc boot.

Speaker 1 (54:23):
Yeah. Yeah, And I have to say I think he
did a great job with the I mean, I'm gonna
go ahead and call it what we are all. I
think aware that it's going to be the spaceship here
the artifact, because it does convincingly look like some sort
of a metallic object that's maybe not made of any
kind of conventional earth metal. Its shape, you know, defies

(54:45):
our expectations of human technology. So I think it looks
really good.

Speaker 3 (54:50):
Yeah, I like the design. We were also talking about
this off mic before we started. But I would say,
in general, well, I think quator Mass in the Pit
is quite AMBITI just in terms of sci fi storytelling.
I would not say it's generally very ambitious in terms
of visual spectacle, but most of the stuff in it
looks pretty good. I would say, with a few exceptions

(55:13):
that you know that we're about to get to some
alien bodies that I think are not the most spectacular
thing I've ever seen. But the alien ship looks pretty good.
And we'll see a cool projection kind of energy projection
object at the end of the movie that looks pretty
cool too.

Speaker 1 (55:27):
That one looks really good as well. It's just the
alien bodies which we're about to get to. These are
the less convincing elements. But this is one of those
pictures when everything else is working. You know, you can
you can easily suspend disbelief, and you know it ultimately
elevates the effect.

Speaker 3 (55:46):
Yeah. Anyway, so they say that the object to the ship,
as we've revealed now, displays bizarre properties. Of course they
don't know it's a ship yet, but whatever this object is,
the material it's made of, they say, is harder than diamond.
The soul try to cut it with a blow torch,
and not only does the torch not cut through after
having the flame on it for five minutes, it doesn't

(56:07):
even get warm. The soldiers also find that they have
to wear gloves because those of them that have touched
the object with bare hands end up with some kind
of tissue damage. They say it resembles mild frostbite. This,
of course, is even though the object does not feel
cold to the touch. They say. Most of the interior
cavity is empty except for one spot that seems to

(56:30):
taper off into a sealed compartment, and Colonel Breen has
turned his attention to the sealed compartment because he thinks
it may still contain a warhead. Now here's a weird development.
Quator Mass goes inside to look at this compartment wall
and he finds a pattern of markings that, after he
wipes away the clay, he says, are well, we see them.

(56:54):
They're like an etching of these interlocked circles. And he
says they form quote a pentacle, one of the Kabbalistic
signs of ancient magic. Huh again, weird clashing of themes.
That's not usually what you find on a spaceship. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (57:09):
Yeah, So we have this like this weird triangle we
keep reinforcing, connecting paleontology to to occultism to science fiction.

Speaker 3 (57:20):
Shortly after this, one of the soldiers, a guy named West,
is inside the cavities I think. They say he's hosing
out mud or something, and out of nowhere, he just
starts to scream in terror. The others go inside to
check on him, and he's like collapsed in the corner.
He says he saw someone. He says, there was a
frightening little figure coming toward him and it walked straight

(57:42):
through the wall. They get him out of the ship
and they're, you know, they're giving they're medicinally giving him whiskey.
It's another one of those movies. What was the other
one like that we watched recently where everybody seemed to
believe that liquor had medicinal value.

Speaker 1 (57:55):
Oh goodness, I feel like there have been several like
that over the years where crawling eye. Crawling eye was
definitely one.

Speaker 3 (58:00):
Yes. So he's sucking on the flask and Miss Judd
comes up to him and says, was it like a small,
hideous dwarf? And he says, well, you know, by god,
that's exactly what it was like. How did you know? Well,
at this point, quator Mass is starting to become convinced
that Miss Judd was onto something with her library research,
so they head back to the archives and sure enough,

(58:22):
the history of hauntings at Hobbs Lane goes back much
further than the nineteen twenties. They find pamphlets from the
eighteenth century about ghosts and bizarre sightings in the locale
and some like. There's a story that somebody is digging
a well and they hear such grievous sounds that the
man loses his mind with fear. There's another story that

(58:46):
a local resident espied a strange goblin. And from here
they move back in time. They go on to the
archives of Westminster Abbey, where there's like a curator there
who tells them, who's like reading from this giant Latin manuscript,
who says, quote, in the winter of the year thirteen

(59:06):
forty one, the religious of that region did strive against
an outbreak of evil. At Hobbs Lane, imps and demons
did appear. Foul noises sent by the devil did sorely
affect the charcoal burners that had lately come there. So
we've got a collection now of these times when hauntings
are reported in this place. Charcoal burners in the fourteenth century,

(59:29):
when they were felling great trees, in the eighteenth century,
when people were digging a well in the nineteen twenties
when the underground station was being built and now, and
in all cases, quator Mass notes, it's when the ground
was being disturbed. So the next big development is that
Breen hires a mechanic with a Borazon drill to cut

(59:50):
through the sealed compartment so they can see what's inside.
This is the guy Slatin I think we mentioned earlier
who's got some he's got some comedic dialogue. At one point,
when setting his drill up, he's telling a story about
how he once like drilled through six inches of solid
steel armor plating just like that, And then he says, oh,
it was legal. A bloke got shut in a strong room,

(01:00:12):
but I got him out. It was a secret job
like this one. And then Colonel Breen says, then I'm
glad you don't talk about it, and they ah. He's
also like the guy who talks about being insured. You know,
it's good to be insured. It cheers you up, he says.
So he tries to drill, but the Borizon drill fails.
And more than that, quator Mass and Breen are in

(01:00:33):
the ship when he's trying to drill, and it seems
to rattle the whole place, like some weird possession comes
over them, and it's like Claxon's going off inside their heads.
And afterwards, Colonel Breen goes outside the ship and vomits,
and he's trying to play it off. He's just like,
just some sort of freak vibration must have been but

(01:00:54):
I don't know, it seems like it was more than that.

Speaker 1 (01:00:56):
Yeah, yeah, and this is of course what we get
the excellent sound effects and sound design here, these electronic
vibration noises, So the film, yeah, the film does a
great job with this.

Speaker 3 (01:01:07):
Weirdly, after this, they check back and a hole has
formed in the wall, in the wall of the sealed compartment,
though it was not drilled by the drill. Instead, it
looks almost melted from the inside. Then, as Rony Breen
and Quator Mass stare at the compartment wall, there is
a great moment of almost a kind of psychedelic animated

(01:01:30):
image that forms. I didn't know what was going on
for a second here, Like there's a crystalline pink dot
on a black background, with these thin borders of fire
creeping over the surface of the black and then pink
cracks appear all over the blackness, like shattering glass that
they sort of spread out into a spider web shape,

(01:01:50):
and then finally, finally the black wall crumbles, revealing what's within,
which is a pink and purple wall of prismatic material
with several recesses, and inside the recesses there are giant bugs,
weird insectoid creatures kind of like huge demonic grasshoppers with

(01:02:11):
green compound eyes, gaping toothy mouths, and devil horns.

Speaker 1 (01:02:16):
Yeah. Wow, this sequence is quite a ride, because already
the spaceship set is really cool, and then yeah, we
get this psychedelic animation sequence of that wall breaking open,
and then and then the interior set is also really neat.
But the bugs, which they're going to shortly, very shortly
be hauling out, these are less convincing. I mean, they're

(01:02:39):
very neat in their details. I like the design. I
like the ideas bound up in these creatures. You know
that they're horned tripod insect or you know, at least
arthropod creatures, but they just look a little bit to
paper mache here.

Speaker 3 (01:02:56):
Yeah, yeah, you mentioned tripod. They do have three legs
each and that all time that ties in, interestingly, I
think to War of the world's pre existing alien invasion literature.
But that also the characters point out to some classic
imagery of the devil, like you would find in medieval
manuscripts that show Satan with three legs.

Speaker 1 (01:03:16):
Yeah, and I don't want to harp too much on
the design here, because again I was able to I
thought easily suspendous belief here and overlook the appearance. And
they don't look near as bad as they could have.
It's not so distracting that it throws you out of
the picture. They don't look actively goofy oh.

Speaker 3 (01:03:34):
Yeah. I mean when I was saying earlier about the
movie not being super ambitious in terms of visual spectacle,
I didn't mean, like what's in it looks bad. I
just meant that it has other concerns. It's not trying
to show you a lot of amazing looking things.

Speaker 1 (01:03:49):
Yeah, Like all the ideas bound up in these aliens
are amazing. It's just that visually they're just a few
steps below other visual elements in the picture.

Speaker 3 (01:03:58):
Yeah. Anyway, when they find these bodies, Breen expresses alarm,
but quator Mass assures him that the creatures are dead,
long dead. Roney immediately starts making arrangements to study these
things scientifically. It has to be done fast because they've
been sealed away for millions of years, and now that
they have come into contact with the Earth's atmosphere, they

(01:04:20):
are rapidly decomposing. And we almost get to see that
happening in real time. Ronney and quator Mass are very
keen to study and understand these creatures. They start to
bring the bodies out of the ship themselves, like they're
reaching in themselves and just pulling them out, trying to
put them down. Notably, while they're doing that, Breen shows
just evident disgust.

Speaker 1 (01:04:42):
Yeah, and the disgust is great here because obviously these
things are gross. They're talking about how they smell like
dead fish and so forth. But also like very clearly
this is a sudden roadblock to the logical militaristic expressway
that been traveling on this whole time. Like this, these

(01:05:03):
are like clearly aliens. Dude, It's going to be much
harder to really advance this whole unexploded bomb theory.

Speaker 3 (01:05:11):
Now, yeah, they both invalidate his theory, like they disagree
with his interpretation of what this site was. But also
I think it's supposed to comment again on one of
the themes of this movie, which is the clash between
the scientific temperament and the militaristic temperament. You know, where
the scientist sees something that is new and wants to

(01:05:33):
understand it, and the you know, the military temperament, at
least is presented in this film, see something new and
doesn't want to take the time to understand it, just
wants to destroy it.

Speaker 1 (01:05:43):
Yeah. Yeah, or at the very least figure out where
it fits into the pre existing military dynamics.

Speaker 3 (01:05:49):
Yeah. There's a funny part where when they're bringing these
alien bodies out there already like dripping as if it's
like melting ice cream, and one of the soldiers gets
this alien goop dripping on him while he's laying out
a sandbag underneath it. There was almost a little bit
of it reminded me of earlier this week in our
Core episodes where we're talking about Alfred Russell Wallace in
his room covered in ants, where it's like he would

(01:06:11):
find a specimen and he's like where to put it?
Where will it go?

Speaker 1 (01:06:15):
Yeah, because this thing's dripping everywhere. And I do like
the urgency they end up showing because They're like, this thing,
these things are rotting, We've got to preserve it quickly.
And so they're working really quickly to get things preserved
in liquids and in bottles and so forth. Get some
specimen jars go in and so forth.

Speaker 3 (01:06:31):
Yeah, so the paleontology team, they're trying to preserve the specimens.
But the specimens are really breaking down quickly. We see
a lot of them leaking green juice and thoracic sludge,
legs just crumbling off in people's hands. Ronny and quator

(01:06:54):
Mass discuss where these creatures come from, but also they
talk about this is an interesting little moment and kind
of understated even, but they talk about why these creatures
look so familiar. Quator Mass says, isn't it odd how
similar they look to gargoyles and devils that have appeared
in human art for millennia. It's almost as if we

(01:07:16):
knew these creatures before the discovery, as if from our dreams.

Speaker 1 (01:07:21):
Yeah, and where we begin to creep into some of
those cosmic horror ideas, where this thing that we found
is not only it's not just something entirely new, it's
something that perhaps explains other things about our entire existence.

Speaker 3 (01:07:36):
Yeah. Yeah. The thing that's more frightening than the unknown
is the thing that you didn't know that you did know.

Speaker 1 (01:07:42):
Yeah, Like what if we have been dreaming of these
things throughout human history? How and why?

Speaker 3 (01:07:50):
Yeah, So they do some scientific analysis, and the scientists
figure out that these insectoid bodies were built for a
world with low gravity and thin atmosphere. Immediately, quator Mass
is like, sounds like Mars. Yeah, he's got Mars on
the brain, and they start to sort of turn this
over in their minds. Mars is dead now, but perhaps

(01:08:13):
millions of years ago, could it have been full of life.
There's a little exchange between quator Mass and Ronnie where
quator Mass says the will to survive it's an odd phenomenon, Ronie.
If we found out Earth was doomed, say by climatic changes,
what would we do about it? Ronnie says nothing, just
go on squabbling as usual, And then quator Mass says, yes,

(01:08:37):
but if we weren't men.

Speaker 1 (01:08:40):
Yeah, this is pretty great because it is darkly humorous,
but it also gets to the point like, yeah, what
would non human entities that had an entirely different worldview
and entirely different social structure. How might they have responded
to some sort of coming apocalypse?

Speaker 3 (01:08:58):
Yeah, And quator Mass here builds in the assumption that
maybe other aliens wouldn't have been as fractious and emotional
and unable to focus on the common task at hand
as we are.

Speaker 1 (01:09:12):
Yeah, especially if we're dealing with something that you know,
for all intents and purposes, might be some sort of
use social insect.

Speaker 3 (01:09:18):
Yeah. Anyway, so Quatermass, Judd, and Roney decide that they
should communicate directly to the press, so they release photos
and details to journalists, and the papers go wild with
reports about the find. And we learn in the following
scene about Quatermass's interpretation of what's going on here. This

(01:09:38):
is what Quatermas thinks, five million years ago there was
life on Mars. Quote suppose that at that time there
were living beings on Mars with techniques that let them
visit the Earth at a time when the most highly
evolved creatures here, our own ancestors, were only a type
of Pliocene ape. His theory goes on, but at the

(01:10:00):
same time, Mars was dying, so its natural environment had
been degraded to the point where Mars would soon no
longer be able to support life. So quat Mass says
that the Martians quote may have wanted to found another
colony when their own world was doomed, but couldn't endure

(01:10:21):
our atmosphere, so they experimented. And the idea here is
that the Martians took hominids from prehistoric Earth back to
Mars and changed them, altered them, quator Mass says, quote,
altered by selective breeding, atomic surgery methods we can't guess,

(01:10:42):
and with new faculties instilled in them high intelligence, perhaps
something else. So quater Mass is saying that in this way,
the Martians could in effect colonize Earth by proxy. They
could not physically themselves survive the condition on Earth, couldn't
survive our atmosphere, our gravity and all that, but they

(01:11:04):
could take naturally Earth adapted life forms, remake those life
forms in their own image mentally at least, and then
seed them back on Earth. Fascinating idea. Quat Mass says,
if I'm right, we've come on a single instance, probably
an accident, a landing that went wrong and they all died.

(01:11:25):
The Thames Valley was a swamp then, and so that's
his explanation. But in the scene where he explains this,
we learned the fact that quater Mass and Rony went
public with this idea before briefing quater Mass's superiors in
the government proves mighty displeasing to those superiors. There's like
a scene where he's being grilled by the Minister of

(01:11:47):
Defense and the Minister of Defense says, you realize what
you were implying that we owe our human condition here
to the intervention of insects, and quat Mass says, I
suppose I am yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:11:59):
I mean you can understand that the government would would
be a little concerned with how the public might react
to this. Like again, this is like a cosmic horror
revelation that that there's nothing really anything noble about humanity
is only because we were kind of the like a
plan B for a dying race on Mars. They could

(01:12:19):
realize they couldn't just move to Mars, but they could
create something that was maybe a distant echo of themselves here.

Speaker 3 (01:12:27):
Yes, exactly. It's it's an intelligent design theory of human origins,
but not with a supernatural creator, with a Martian creator
that was trying to essentially to make an alien animal
into something like a copy of themselves.

Speaker 1 (01:12:42):
Yeah, yeah, which, and it's such an interesting concept explored
here because it's not I mean, we can not everything
is completely explained. I want to be clear, and there
are various interpretations you could get in and maybe lean
more in this direction. But it's not like they were
creating these eight things as far as we know right
to then like transfer their own minds into them.

Speaker 3 (01:13:03):
It was, I mean maybe, but it's not clear.

Speaker 1 (01:13:07):
It's not clear. So so it's possible that that's what
they were doing. But on the other hand, it's entirely
possible that it was like, well, life is ending, we're doomed.
Let's create some sort of life and that will be
our legacy on another world. And maybe not even in
the most benevolent way. I mean, if it is benevolent,
it's a very distant benevolence, Like life is pretty cool.

(01:13:27):
Let's make sure there's still life somewhere in the solar system.
It might be just like, well, you know, this is
this is going to be like our living tombstone for
our own civilization.

Speaker 3 (01:13:37):
Yeah, the kind of the exact form that sort of
mental memorial stone takes in us will get more complicated
as the film goes on. So the government officials are
especially annoyed with quator Mass because Colonel Breen has actually
a quite different interpretation of this find, one that the

(01:13:58):
government at this point brain says, no, no, no, no, no,
this is all a lot of nonsense. This craft is
quite indeed a Nazi rocket left over from the war.
His idea is, after Germany started to lose, they switched
tactics and they attempted a propaganda operation to sow confusion

(01:14:21):
and fear among the British public and to take their
focus off of winning the war. So they sent an
experimental rocket packed with weird, fake alien bodies and altered
human skeletons. Except the only thing that went wrong is
instead of discovering it when they were supposed to right
after it landed, the British did not discover it until

(01:14:43):
now they were supposed to stumble on it immediately. The
purpose was to cause exactly the kind of public fervor
and media feeding frenzy that quator Mass has in fact
caused with his statements to the press. And I gotta say,
I mean, I love this narrative, but quator Mass, you
are here doing the thing that so many scientists in

(01:15:05):
reality hate when one of them has a wildly speculative
interpretation of something, and instead of taking it to their
peers and colleagues for discussion and criticism, you know, considering
questions like does this really fit the evidence? Is it plausible?
Are there more likely explanations? Instead of that, they just
run straight to the popular media, essentially trying to bypass

(01:15:29):
the comment from people who have the relevant background knowledge
to explore the questions I just mentioned. But okay, you
know it's a movie. Quat Mass is obviously right. I
did just want to flag example number one million, that
what the heroic scientists protagonist does in a sci fi
movie is very often revolting crank behavior in real life.

Speaker 1 (01:15:49):
Plus, I want to highlight here that you know, Breen
is clearly you know again as a character with tunnel
vision and is and is in this point you manipulating
things and it's essentially to begin a cover up. But
at the same time, his counter hypothesis, this is what
we alluded to earlier in the episode, is the one
that would be more likely in real life, Like this

(01:16:11):
is the one that if you were presented with these
two possibilities Breens on the surface would make more sense
because it requires fewer speculative leaps.

Speaker 3 (01:16:20):
Yeah, that's right. It requires many fewer assumptions of things
not currently in evidence. So the main one being that
there was a Nazi rocket program that had some kind
of technology that has since not become known to the
British right.

Speaker 1 (01:16:34):
And I think it is worth noting though that clearly,
if this idea is pushed forward eventually, if they're allowed to,
there would be voices that would say, well, there's no
record of this type of ship ever, this type of
rocket ever being built by the Germans. All likewise, you
might have some lab results come in and say, well,

(01:16:55):
there's no way that these creatures were essentially Fiji mermaids,
like their tissue doesn't at anything that we have here
on Earth and so forth. So I'm not sure that
the Nazi propaganda attack explanation would hold water in the
long term, but you can easily see how if it's
pushed and other voices are suppressed, this could be.

Speaker 3 (01:17:17):
The cover up. Yeah, that's right. I mean, if you
assume this situation where to actually happen, as pretty much
as soon as you got to go, you know, like
a full biological workup of these alien remains, people would
figure out this is real biological materials, you know, Yeah,
this is not like a paper machet or something, even
though it looks like paper mache. Yeah. But in the meantime,

(01:17:38):
let's see to prove Breen's Nazi propaganda theory is correct,
the Defense Minister plans to hold a public press conference
where the ship is going to be revealed in full
to the public. I forget why they think this will
vindicate Breen. I don't know.

Speaker 1 (01:17:54):
Well, when we see bits of it later, they're even
like saying, well, we're in touch with like the West
German government and they're about to provide us with some
evidence to back up what we're telling you. So they
seem to have some they have some steps planned here.
And it's interesting too to think about this film and
the way it utilizes the press, you know, the scientists here,

(01:18:15):
of course, the heroes. The press seems a little more
neutral and is there to potentially be manipulated by either side.

Speaker 3 (01:18:22):
Yes, I mean throughout the movie you see different actors
essentially the two main camps in the movie, the scientists
and the military people both trying to use the press
to their advantage. Yeah, they are trying to one up
the other camp on their appeals to the press, so
they can get the press on their side, so they
can get the public on their side.

Speaker 1 (01:18:43):
Yeah, and the press is just hungry. Yeah, they just
got to put out papers.

Speaker 3 (01:18:46):
So there are some developments after this. During some additional
work in the tunnel, the ship once again begins to
vibrate like the time it did when it you know,
made Colonel breenpuke and the drill operator Sladin, seems to
become possessed. He like something comes over him. His eyes

(01:19:08):
go glassy, and he runs out into the street, seeming
along the way to randomly blast and levitate objects with
his mind. He turns into sort of carry like he's
a zombie carry on the loose, until he finally collapses
in a churchyard and is taken in by a priest.
Quator Mass and Judd follow him. After this, they come

(01:19:29):
to collect him and Sladin explains how while he was
in his possessed state, he had visions he saw insect
like creatures with devil horns against a brown sky leaping
in the air, up and up and up, and he
had a feeling that damnation was upon him and he
had to escape this place, whatever it was. Of course,

(01:19:51):
you know, in describing his environment, quator Mass is clearly
like he's talking about Mars. He had visions of Mars.
So it's like it's almost like vision from this alien
planet have been they're being transmitted now through the ship
somehow into us, and these visions are of a dying
planet and a panicking race of creatures that are at

(01:20:13):
their end and trying to get out anyway. After this incident,
quator Mass has an idea. He thinks he can prove
what the ship really is by using, coming back to it,
the Roney analysis, the helmet, the machine that the paleontologists
used to read minds with a helmet connected to a
bunch of wires. So what they're going to do looks

(01:20:37):
like this. They're going to put quator Mass himself inside
the alien ship and they're going to try to get
it to transmit images of the Martian Apocalypse to him
while he's wearing the helmet, so that his thoughts will
be sent to a TV screen where they will be
recorded for later playback. Huh yeah, yeah, just stick with us.

(01:20:58):
They try this, but the ship, for whatever reason, decides
to transmit to Barber Judd instead of quater Mass, and
the images it sends into her mind's eye are horrifying.
She is shaken, and quator Mass records them and then
takes these images to playback for this group of government
high command. They show horrible violence on the surface of Mars.

(01:21:21):
This is one element where when we actually see the footage,
you can't really see all that much and it doesn't
look all that great. I kind of wish it could
have been more visually appealing here, but yeah, it is
implied at least that what they see does look horrifying.
It's Martians killing Martians, and Q interprets what is being

(01:21:41):
shown here as a ritualistic mass murder where Martians believed
that they had to purge their society of mutations. The
government dudes are just like, nah.

Speaker 1 (01:21:53):
Whatever, Yeah, they don't see the threat yet.

Speaker 3 (01:21:58):
Anyway, we're starting to collect even more strange pieces that
there's something more sinister going on with the Martian society,
with what its culture means, with what it's trying to
sort of deliver down to us as its ancestors. It
seems to include not just sort of you know, uplifting us,

(01:22:19):
like giving us higher intelligence, but also maybe implanting kind
of little sleeper cell agents in our brain that can
be awakened by the beacon of this ship, in which
we have visions of Mars. We are possessed by images
of these kind of you know, purge like activities, and

(01:22:39):
that it also awakens latent powers beyond just regular human intelligence,
stuff that is apparently there in human beings but is
not normally accessible unless we're being activated by the signal
from the ship, and those powers include things like telekinesis. Yeah. Yeah, anyway,

(01:22:59):
so we get to the climax and there is a
crowd gathered for the unveiling of the ship. But uh oh,
there's a problem. While they're getting things ready and the
crowd is assembled, they've got this big electrical generator that
they're running a wire through the ship for some reason,
and it I think a wire makes contact and it
starts inadvertently feeding power into the ship, and something changes.

(01:23:25):
The ship has had little blips now and then, but
now that it's getting a strong power source, the ship
comes fully online and it is activated now and it's
doing something way more than it was before. The ship
powers up and the assembled crowd panics and seemingly starts
to go mad, running out of the tunnel into the

(01:23:46):
streets above.

Speaker 1 (01:23:47):
Yeah, and this is where it really becomes really becomes essential.
Something that again we've already begun to learn is that
some people are affected and some people are not, and
some people are turned into psychic space zombies, others are not.

Speaker 3 (01:23:59):
Most people are affected, it seems there are a few exceptions.
So most people are affected, and they turn into this
panicking crowd that's running around with you know, glazed eyes,
just staring wildly ahead. We don't know exactly what the
intentions of the possessed crowd members are yet, we'll learn
in a moment. First of all, we see that when
the ship activates, Breen is seemingly hypnotized. He's lured to

(01:24:23):
it as if by a magnet. He like walks up
to it and then just sort of kneels down in
front of it, where he will be cooked alive by
the energy radiating off of the ship. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:24:34):
Yeah, Like we just we cut to another scene and
eventually we cut back to him and he's just been
microwave there and then he just tumbles on into the pit.

Speaker 3 (01:24:50):
So what happens to the crowds. The crowds, we witness
them seemingly turn into these groups of psychic manic hunters,
prowling the streets, finding random other humans and unleashing telekinetic
bombardments of broken concrete and rubble against their former neighbors

(01:25:15):
and friends. And they're standing there just kind of stock still,
staring at them and launching with their minds all of
these bombardments on them. What why is that happening? And
then then there's also a direct confrontation between quator Mass
and Ronie. Quator Mass has been seized up in the crowds,
he's one of them. He's running around. Ronnie grabs hold

(01:25:36):
of quater Mass and pulls him into like into a
cafe off of the street. And at first quator Mass
tries to kill Ronie. He's like, you know, he's reaching
as if to strangle him, but somehow he is able
to fight off the mind control and he snaps out
of it.

Speaker 1 (01:25:52):
He gets him a whiskey.

Speaker 3 (01:25:54):
Oh yeah, that's right, Yeah, they do have some medicinal whiskey. Strangely,
Roney seems completely unaffected. This is what you were alluding to.
He doesn't understand why everyone else seems to have gone mad,
and they discuss things. Rob let me know if you
had the same understanding that I did. It seems that
what they land on is that while we are all

(01:26:16):
humans are descended from the Martian altered apes of Earth,
perhaps some of us have since then mutated so that
the few that have mutated no longer possess the Martian
mind control gene, leaving those few mutants outside the psychic

(01:26:36):
influence of the Beacon Ship. And Rony just happens to
be one of those mutants. Those mutants are the people
who the crowds of psychic thralls in the streets are
now hunting to destroy with these telekinetic bombardments. And that
would be consistent with quator Mass's earlier interpretation of the

(01:26:56):
visions of Mars as like the Martians hunting each other
mutants within their own hives.

Speaker 1 (01:27:02):
M Yeah, So the idea here would be this is
something that was an important value to the Martians that
was instilled into their operation here on Earth again and
seemingly with perhaps not nefarious intentions, because the idea, I
guess is, Hey, we're going to establish this population that

(01:27:22):
we have created to some degree in our image, and
we don't want it to get too corrupted over time.
It's going to need we need to have this bush
sort of self prune over the ensuing millennia.

Speaker 3 (01:27:35):
Right, so when the ship gets enough power applied to it,
it can turn into this beacon and activate the crowds
to attack their mutant cohort. Now, one thing I think
is worth noting is that quator Mass is our protagonist here.
But quator Mass, while he's he does have some mental
fortitude and is able in moments to kind of fight

(01:27:56):
off the influence of the ship, he is overall still
susceptible to it. He's not one of the mutants who's
immune to it. He's like he's potentially part of the
attacking crowd. Yeah. Yeah. But after this, there's another development,
which is that an image rises over the skyline of
the city. There appears a gigantic, monstrous projection, a white,

(01:28:21):
glowing tower of energy in the shape of one of
these insectoid martian devils. And together quator Mass and Roni,
they behold this projection and they figure out what it means,
and they come up with a plan. I love this is.
I think this is like such a weird out of nowhere,

(01:28:41):
almost beautiful weaving of science themes and demon lore. I
can't remember which one of them suggested. I think maybe
it's Quator Mass who says that the demonic forces of
the world were always said to be vulnerable to cold iron.
What if that's because the devil was a projection of
electrical energy and it could be discharged to the ground

(01:29:04):
by contact with iron.

Speaker 1 (01:29:06):
Yeah. I love this as well, because it just it
fits nicely. It's wild, but it fits nicely, snugly between
sci fi and demonic lore.

Speaker 3 (01:29:17):
Yeah, amazing. So that's what they come up with, and
they put a plan in place where Rony is going
to climb up on a crane, it's big iron crane
and knock it into the towering devil figure. And the
plan works. It does indeed discharge. After the energy is dissipated,
the madness suddenly subsides and, like the crowd, seemingly revert

(01:29:40):
to normal, and we get to see our remaining two protagonists,
Quator Mass and Barber Judd. They're just left reeling in
the street, catching their breath and trying to make sense
of all that has happened it to them, And I
think we can infer trying to make sense of what
they are. They're like, what what kind of creature am I?

Speaker 1 (01:30:01):
Actually, yeah, this is such a great and admittedly downbeat
way to close out the picture. I mean, the threat
has been defeated, but the knowledge is still there, and
they're having and not only like I think for these
two characters, like two different levels. Like they were they
were just at each other's throats, you know, and and
having to fight, and now they're out there shaken out

(01:30:24):
of that, and then they're also having to you know,
just roll with all of these revelations that are in
play now. But yeah, they're they're they're next. They're near
each other and the credits are rolling, but it's still
like live footage, you know, it's not a freeze frame.
But they can't quite look at each other either, you know,
they're just kind of both staring off to the side,

(01:30:45):
staring at the ground, staring into the middle distance. And
the music is quite quite haunting and downbeat.

Speaker 3 (01:30:51):
Here. It's an ending that actually very much reminds me
of the tone once again of John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness,
because it's like the idiot incursion of evil has been defeated,
but you just don't know where that leaves us, Like
how vulnerable are we still presumably given the all that's

(01:31:13):
been established in the story, Like there could be another
ship somewhere that maybe that activates us and we turn
into these raging telekinetic assassin mobs again.

Speaker 1 (01:31:23):
Yeah, yeah, there's so many unanswered questions. So it's it's
quite a haunting ending, and indeed just a tremendous picture,
especially especially the early goings of its as the mystery
is beginning to build. But just the pacing and the
energy of the entire picture is great, Like it's just
a fun ride and you never find yourself bored because

(01:31:46):
it keeps this a picture that keeps transforming itself as well.
Each revelation brings an additional complications and brings us to
this amazing climax that you really couldn't predict if you
didn't know anything about the picture when we first venture
into the scenario.

Speaker 3 (01:32:02):
I was just trying to think, wait a minute, Between
quator Mass and Breen, whose vision is vindicated in the
end by what they discover, I guess I would say
neither one, because quator Mass has what you know. Breen
describes as this naive view of just like peaceful cooperation.

(01:32:23):
He thinks that quator Mass is not cognizant enough of threats.
So I think you could argue in the end that
that was true initially, Like there was indeed a real
threat here, but the threat was not an external enemy
like this. The threat is something in ourselves that can

(01:32:46):
be activated to turn us into something we don't want
to be.

Speaker 1 (01:32:51):
Yeah. Yeah, it's rather thought provoking really, so, yeah, you
can really see why this picture was so influential. You know,
it really really turned people heads, presented some ideas that
you know, we're present in science fiction and literature, but
maybe had not been explored really on this level that
much in an actual cinema. So it's in to do

(01:33:13):
so too in a way that also has plenty of
horror colors to the palette as well. You know you're
mentioning the John Carpenter influence. We should also have mentioned that, like,
there are a couple of other overt references to this.
In the Mouth of Madness features hobbs End as a location,
the hobbs End Horror and so forth as a direct

(01:33:36):
nod to this film. And you could make a case
too for John Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars, because that's essentially
what we're dealing with here, Ghosts of Mars, brilliant.

Speaker 3 (01:33:45):
Well, I can't say anything after that, all right, Yeah,
that does it for me.

Speaker 1 (01:33:52):
Yeah, this is a fun one. This was really this
was really nice to re explore this picture, which again
you know, had a strong effect on me when I
first saw it many many years ago and still absolutely
holds up. This is this is great science fiction. So
I encourage everyone to seek it out if it all
interests you, although hopefully if you've made it this far
through our discussion of the plot, I hope you've already

(01:34:14):
seen it. So as always write in concerning your thoughts
about quator Mass in the Pit, as well as you know,
suggestions for episodes you'd like to see in the future,
because one of the reasons we finally got around to
doing this particular film is because listeners kept writing in
about it. So it doesn't always make it happen, but
it can certainly proud us in the right direction. Just

(01:34:36):
a reminder that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily
a science and culture podcast with core episodes on two
season Thursdays, but on Fridays we set aside most serious
concerns to just talk about a weird film here on
Weird House Cinema. If you would like to follow us
on social well, we're on all the normal social media accounts,
but we're also on Letterbox as weird House, and that's
a great place to check out a list of all

(01:34:57):
the movies we've covered over the years, and sometimes a
peek ahead it was coming up next.

Speaker 3 (01:35:01):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com.

Speaker 2 (01:35:21):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.