Horror Extreme Movie Catalog

This 1958 BBC production (3 hours long!) is available NTSC format DVD from Sinister Cinema for $17. The transfer quality is excellent. Please contact Sinister Cinema.

This is it, the original TV serial later adapted into 1967's "Five Million Years to Earth". You may have seen that movie, and you may know the story: construction crews in London uncover fossil human beings, five million years old, and a mysterious large object about as old. Col. Breen, the newly authorized military head of British Rocketry, believes the object is an unexploded German bomb from the war. Prof. Bernard Quatermass, a civilian spaceflight visionary, has a more exotic theory of the object and the mysterious hominid fossils found nearby. Joining Quatermass is Romney, an anthropologist who nurses Quatermass's theories of the object and constructs a fantastic device with which to prove it. With Romney, Quatermass links the fossils, the object and century's worth of phenomenon in that area of present-day London to dark theories of race memory and genetic conditioning.

This 6-part story appeared on British TV a decade before the feature film - it's rough alright but in many ways not only matches the later film, but surpasses it. The script makes allowances for the fact that memories of WWII were more recent, and the burgeoning fears of the cold war were more fresh. It's darker, edgier and taps a colder vein of our own race memories. Working through 6 parts, the serial has more leg-room with which to build its chills. The visuals are quite striking: the "object" is larger and more enigmatic than the one in the movie, and the serial's crowning moment is the "Wild Hunt", a look back through 5 million years of evolution to the origins of the object and its creators - which clearly outstrips the menace of the movie.

The serial also outdoes the flick with its characters - Quatermass has more range here, as does Breen, who alternates between being helpful and helpless. The real star of the show is Cec Lindford as Romney - the helpful assistant in the movie, his Romney is a combination of scientist and showman, the PT Barnum of Paleontology. In short, even if you've seen "Five Million Years to Earth", you must still get this video because it is indeed different.