The first manned ship into space crash lands back in England. Project head, Professor Quatermass, goes out to the site and takes command. The ship is entered and only one of the original three astronauts is still on board. He can't be questioned because he's in such rough shape.
The astronaut is finally sent to a hospital but his condition worsens. His wife hires a guy to break him out. This is a good part. Watch as the guy removes his overcoat and is standing in the pouring rain. He's wearing a hospital uniform and gets totally drenched. Then he steps inside a door and is as dry as the Sahara Desert. Great stuff. Anyway, this guy gets him out of the room and into an elevator where the astronaut murders him with this great big weird hand that he just grew. When the body is found, they is discover it has been sucked dry of all fluids. The astronaut finds his way out of the hospital and into his wife's car. But she freaks out when she sees his great big weird hand and he splits.
The astronaut wanders in to a drugstore and sucks the pharnacist's body dry of fluids. He then knocks the head off a nerdy little girl's doll but doesn't harm her. Now this guy is really getting nasty, I don't mind if he murders a few people, but busting up a kid's doll is stepping over the line. He now eats up a few animals at the local zoo. Although we don't get to see the astronaut for a little while we are led to believe that he is mutating into some huge hideous monster.
We now flash over to Westminster Abbey where some kind of a television show is being broadcast live. The creature shows up and bumps off one of the crew. When we see it in close up, it looks very much like an octopus with a bad case of acne. It is hanging off a scaffold and is about to reproduce a bunch of baby thing-a-ma-jigs just like itself. Some cables are hooked up to the scaffolding and all the electrical power in London, that's right, every single volt in the London power grid, is diverted through the cables and into the beast, frying it immediately. A bit of overkill, but what the hell, it is a B flick.
This was the first of three Quatermass films, personally, I liked the second in the series. This one's got enough suspense but is a little short on action. The monster is a disappointment when we finally see it, it's just sort of a blob thing sitting there. Professor Quatermass, played by Brian Donlevy, continuously barks out orders and is so full of himself that he gets to be a bit of a drag. But overall it's not a bad flick.
