Five Million Years to Earth

Five Million Years to Earth (aka Quatermass and the Pit) (Roy Ward Baker, 1968) London is all a-natter about the recent discovery hitting the news—the discovery of the skeletons of "underground ape-men" during construction of the Hobb's End section of the London Underground. Paleontologist Dr. Romey (James Donald) and his assistant Barbara Judd (Barbara Shelley) have been called in to study and document the find and Romey speculates that the remains have been there for five million years.

It causes enough of a stir that the British Army is monitoring. They've been busy, informing Dr. Bernard Quatermass (Andrew Keir) of the British Experimental Rocket Group that they'll be joining his enterprise with the intention of employing military uses for the doctor's research, something that raises Quatermass' blood pressure considerably. But, when the excavators (particularly one played by Bee Duffel) uncover a metal object in the dig, Quatermass' new military overseer Col. Breen (Good Lord, it's Julian Glover!) invites the good doctor along to have a gander.

The military thinks its unexploded ordinance, but it's like no bomb they've ever seen: for one, the metal isn't magnetic, and it resists any attempts to cut through it with an acetylene torch—the damned thing doesn't even warm up. And the soldiers who've touched it for any length of time develop frost-bite symptoms. The substance is harder than diamonds, so it didn't come from the Nazis ("you ask von Braun" says Quatermass).

Original construction on the tube was in 1927, and about that time, Hobb's End was abuzz with rumors of spooks and spirits with sightings of a frightening type— "the figure was small like a hideous dwarf." There are scratch-marks on the walls of the abandoned tenement, and a local bobby gets the sweating yips inside the ruins. Appropriately, the place used to be spelled "Hob's End"—"Hob" being another name for the devil. It seems whenever someone digs in the area, "something" gets disturbed...and not in a good way.

That accelerates when attempts to get inside a sealed chamber of the metal "bomb" are attempted using a Borazon drill. It is unsuccessful, but the screeching caused in the process has an unnerving effect on the operator, Quatermass, Breen and Romey. Still, it does have a subsequent effect. The chamber begins to open, and inside is a honey-combed chamber with large insectoid creatures, long dead, that begin to disintegrate with their first contact with the air. Romey and Quatermass extract what they can and take the samples back to examine.

The upshot of all this is that those creatures came from Mars five million years ago in a colonization effort and finding only primitive hominids, used their technology to advance the race on the path to what would, at some point, become homo sapiens. How this is all determined is rather muddled in the explanation, as is a crucial sub-plot involving Romey's development of a gizmo that can tap into the ancient human psyche—wrestling with our alligator brains, as it were. A plan is made to use the device to record the readings when a subject is near the "bomb," and it creates a recording of hordes of hopping creatures in a marching pattern that, despite the primitive special effects, looks pretty darn good from reading brain-waves.

It seems the Martian locusts still have the power to influence us, and when the scientists' continued attempts to figure out what it is they're trying to figure out, disaster strikes in the form of a power cable hitting the bomb and sending out blasts of psychic energy that turn people crazy and start ripping up the infrastructure. Lord, we're turning into Martians! This must have seemed entirely uncivil, not to mention not posh in the England of the 1960's. And it's only through grim determination, self-sacrifice, and a conveniently placed crane, that everyone survives enough to take on the clean-up involved.

It isn't that it's bad. It's quite good in its ideas and the acting is professional, and even convincing, in even its dicier places. Having seen the original BBC teleplay, the film version was certainly compromised by the shorter story time and Hammer Studios' reluctance to put on the "what it all means to us" coda that sobers things up considerably, and the higher budget, for some reason, just distances the thing a couple steps from believability.

But, the ideas are there—that we're all just the product of some tinkering from another source, and that the dead can still have a powerful effect on the living—and are just creepy enough to raise the goosebumps and cause one to turn on the lamp (just in case). And the "common-folk" type of writing that seems to have leeched right out of movies in favor of bland archetypes.

It's one of those movies that would be a marvelous starting point for a remake, with some good ideas to germinate and just a bit more time to clean up the exposition. It always seems a better idea than to (as is the financial trend) to update past hits only to see them fall short.