THE QUATERMASS XPERIMENT (a.k.a. THE CREEPING UNKNOWN) DVD...

Why would a DVD be released in 2014 when blu ray is by far superior?

 

Erm which will sell more and the cheapest to produce? Probably DVD for low demand stuff like this. It will sell in the hundreds after all.

DVD will play on anything too.

Are the film elements in such a state that it's worth the bother?

 

a DVD/BR combo release would work well...
I am aware

 

The original TV serial from the 50s really, really freaked me out as a young child because we lived a couple of hundred yards from a subway station (Kelvinbridge, in Glasgow) and my imagination went into overdrive as to what may be lurking down there. I loved watching it of course, terrifying though it was. This was the third serial, I don't remember seeing either of the previous two.

 

This is coming out on U.S. Blu-ray later this year if I recall correctly.

I highly recommend the UK region B Blu-ray of "Quatermass and the Pit". Top notch transfer. Two large alien thumbs up.

 

Blu ray is set for release in US on 12/02/2014!!!!

 

Quatermass and the Pit is laughably bad, which what might make it good now, in the same sense as Plan 9 from Outer Space or Attack of the Killer Tomatoes. It's a pity because it was quite intriguing in the first maybe third of the film, with the discovery and excavation etc, but then the woo and pseudoscience set in which completely knackers it!

 

I maintain that it's still a compelling idea. It's very much a product of its time, yes, but it was limited by budget and technology as much as anything. I remember seeing it as a kid and being suitably creeped out by it.

 

I never saw a subway in my life when I was a kid, because I grew up in Florida, but I saw The Quatermass Experiment in the early 1960s and it scared the crap of me in America. So that uneasy feeling and the very creepy mood the filmmakers established still worked on this side of the pond.

Naw, it's a terrific little film. I don't expect a lot from it since it's a 50-year-old low budget B&W B-movie, but in that context, it's fantastic and very entertaining. I don't expect Silence of the Lambs from a movie this small and done under those circumstances.

 

I saw it as a kid too, but had a dim recollection of it. All I remembered was the excavation scene and not much else, which is why I decided to check it out again.

I kept rolling my eyes - not at the crummy sfx which I was totally okay with giving a pass, for the reasons you mention, but at the dialogue and the (il)logic of it all (made all the more egregious by having a scientific figure at the heart of it). Sorry, it's a stinker IMO.

 

Respectfully disagree. Moreover, I think it's one of the best colour Hammer films, along with Dracula, The Anniversary, The Devil Rides Out and Hound of the Baskervilles - though Vampire Lovers has its points of interest...

 

If you've lost all sense of child-like wonder and become boringly adult, then the Quartermass films will likely seem a tad silly now. But if you've managed to salvage some of that joy of being a kid watching sci-fi movies for the first time, then I think they are still very entertaining movies.

 

I really enjoy this movie and think its level of science/pseudoscience isn't any worse than what was in Doctor Who at the time (I mention this because of your Tom Baker avatar). In fact, a friend of mine once described this film as the equivalent of a really good Doctor Who episode, which I thought was spot-on.

 

I would never hold up Doctor Who, past or present, as a bastion of scientific accuracy or logic. In fact, I've often railed against it.

Sorry, I don't do child-like wonder. But I do adult-like wonder. It looks to me like that the people defending this movie invariably do so with copious qualifications and sentimentality. I can understand this and in fact it's the reason why I often revisit long forgotten titles from the past, such as this one. However, a lot of them just don't stack up anymore.

 

I love Hammer Films, I've watched almost every movie they released from the 50s to the 70s, many of them multiple times. A lot of them still hold up as far as I'm concerned. As long as they still entertain me, they still have worth.

 

I used to like the vampire/werewolf flicks, mainly due to the abundance of scantly clad maidens in sheer nighties running through the woods...

 

I do so without sentimentality. I don't think one needs child like wonder either. Nothing wrong with not liking it but as a sci-fi narrative it is IMO quite fantastic.

 

" though Vampire Lovers has its points of interest"
Excellent word play sir and a wonderful way to start off the month of October.
Hats off to you.

 

http://www.dvdcompare.net/comparisons/film.php?fid=10603

 

Totally disagree. It's my favourite of Hammer's Quatermass films.

 

Blu ray pre release price is now down to $16.99 at Amazon. I'm in!

 

I can summon up a little child-like wonder on occasion, but it takes more effort over time. There's certainly things I loved as a kid that are almost impossible to watch today, but once in awhile I can see a spark of something and go, "ah, I see why I loved this so much as a kid." Man from U.N.C.L.E. is like that -- today, it's a pretty hokey show, but I loved it 45 years ago. I can apply the "child-like filter" and get into it to a point, but it's hard to sustain for long periods of time.

 

That's just nostalgia. The real test would be seeing something like Man from U.N.C.L.E. today for the first time ever, and being able to enjoy it as if you might have when you were a kid. That's what a child-like filter would mean to a 'seasoned' adult. Assuming you've never seen it before, would you enjoy seeing Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory today? I sure wouldn't (and I didn't as a kid either!).

 

Willie Wonka? The Gene Wilder version? Love it.

 

Not possible. Too much life experience.

I think Willy Wonka had moments, but I had already read the book before the movie came out, so I had a good idea of what to expect.

In the case of Creeping Unknown, I can only judge it by how I felt about it as a little kid, and I thought it was a strange, atmospheric, cheap, but somehow effective film for its time. Not necessarily a huge classic, but a decent film that told an interesting story and went in unexpected directions. I think I preferred Quatermass & The Pit, which was another very odd film, but it was fairly striking for its time.

This Wikipedia entry on the film has some interesting critical comments, and I think they're in the right direction:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Quatermass_Xperiment