QUATERMASS

(vt The Quatermass Conclusion)

   UK tv serial (1979). Euston Films/ITV. Prod Ted Childs. Dir Piers Haggard, starring John Mills, Simon MacCorkindale, Rebecca Saire. Written Nigel KNEALE. 4 60min episodes. Colour.

   Version for film release (but receiving general release only on videotape) titled The Quatermass Conclusion, 102 mins.This fourth and weakest of the Quatermass tv serials (see below for details of the others) was written in the late 1960s for BBC TV, rejected as too expensive, and finally made for commercial tv a decade later. The delay rendered out-of-date the sequences about hippie adolescents lured to neolithic sites to be harvested by aliens. The other part of the plot, dealing with near-future breakdown of law and order in a London becoming a wasteland, is stronger; but the two halves never properly meld, and Q lacks the narrative thrust of its predecessors. John Mills's Quatermass is rather old and sad, and, though there is much to enjoy, there is a faintly querulous, elderly air about the whole production. The cut version, though planned from the beginning, is semi-incoherent. Kneale's obsessive, 30-year repetition of the science-meets-superstition theme is altogetherjollier in his screenplay for HALLOWEEN III: SEASON OF THE WITCH (1983), also featuring a stone circle.

   PN