- Directors: Leslie Norman, Joseph Losey
- Writers: Jimmy Sangster
- Stars: Dean Jagger, Edward Chapman, Leo McKern
- Run Time: 1 Hour, 21 Minutes
- Buy now from Amazon: https://amzn.to/2GCF5zd
Synopsis
Soldiers are out practicing with their Geiger counters to find radioactive slugs for practice. The last soldier is out searching, and he finds some radiation that isn’t supposed to be there. The mud starts to boil, and they all hear thunder. The ground opens up and eats him.
Dr. Adam Royston is building a device (obviously made with an Erector Set) that moves Tritium samples around and may be able to neutralize it, while he should be working in the nuclear lab. His boss asks him to check this thing that the army has run into, and he heads right over. There’s no radiation at all in the field where it was before, but some of the soldiers have radiation burns. They bring out the big equipment to figure out what happened. All that’s left is a deep fissure.
Two young boys are playing in the nearby woods that night, and one boy, Willie, sees something horrible. He goes to the doctor with radiation burns. The other boy tells Royston where they went and where to go look. Royston checks out the old tower where the boy was injured, and he finds an old man cooking with a still. He finds the old man has a radiation bottle that should have been in Royston’s own lab, and it turns out his lab was broken into earlier that very evening. All the radiation from the Tritium bottle has vanished. The door and windows were barred, so how could anyone get in there? What happened to the radioactive bottle?
Inspector McGill from the police shows up to investigate the break-in. He wants to work with Royston to solve the mystery. Meanwhile, the little boy, Willie, dies. The radiation room in the hospital starts activating on its own, and the technician sees…it. It melts him like a wax figure. They soon find that someone has stolen all the radium from the machine. Something is stealing radiation sources. Royston suggests that the mysterious creature can assume any form it wants, and says that it came in through the air vent in liquid form.
One of the guards at the field where this all started is killed that night. The other guard shoots the unknown creature a bunch of times before he is killed as well. Could it be coming out of that fissure?
Royston believes an intelligent species from the center of the Earth has evolved alongside humanity, but since their world is collapsing from geologic pressure, they are being forced to the surface now. Since energy can only be fed with energy, the creatures look for radiation to eat.
Royston wants someone to go down into that fissure and look around. Peter, one of Royston’s assistants, goes way down deep and finds the skeleton of one of the soldiers that was on guard duty earlier. The Geiger counter suddenly goes crazy, and it comes after him. They pull him up, and he explains what he saw. The military fills in the hole with concrete. Problem solved?
No. Royston asks “How do you kill mud? That’s all this is, radioactive mud.” Royston is working on a beam that will neutralize radioactivity. Sure enough, it breaks out of the concrete with no effort. Royston and Peter are removing the nuclear core from their reactor, and the monster shows up after killing four people in a car. They work out the route on a map and know it’s coming; they’re expecting it.
It attacks the base, steals their cobalt, and escapes, but they all get a good look at it. They evacuate the area on the creature’s path back the fissure. This time, the creature takes a different path, which confuses everyone. They now believe it’s heading for a full nuclear power station, which will plunge the country into darkness.
Meanwhile, Royston has perfected his device to neutralize radiation, but while testing it, the sample explodes. They think it was simply the scanners being misaligned, and that probably won’t happen again. They bring a giant set of scanners to the fissure and wait for it. They lure it out of the hole and turn on the scanners. Will it work? Will it explode and kill everyone? Nope, it just dies.
Commentary
This was clearly written to take advantage of the Cold War’s fear of radiation, which was a common theme in the 50s. There’s not much else to fear here. There is some resemblance to “The Blob,” which came out the following year (in color, no less). The version we saw was extremely sharp, obviously a restored edition, but still black-and-white.
This was written to be the next Quatermass movie, but creator Nigel Kneale didn’t want some other writer using his character, so they quickly changed the name Bernard Quatermass to Alan Royston and went right on with their script; there were no real visible changes. It certainly had the same tone and mood as the other films, even though it’s completely unofficial as a Quatermass movie.