Reign of Fire (2002)

All told, 2002 seems like the appropriate point where the strain of big studio Creature Features should come to an evolutionary dead end—Reign of Fire continued the trends of genre mixing and the infatuation with all the things CGI would let filmmakers put on screen, but scaled up to a world-demolishing scope that was in keeping with the increasingly bombastic blockbusters of the turn of the millennium. I’m sure the studio and screenwriters Gregg Chabot, Kevin Peterka, and Matt Greenberg (the latter having done uncredited rewrites on Mimic) thought that renewed interest in high fantasy thanks to movies like The Lord of the Rings would directly benefit their high concept of portraying fantasy-style dragons with a Sci-Fi approach to “realism”—instead, this turned out to be box office disappointment (although its $60 Million dollar budget was relatively modest in that era), and big studios stopped being so keen about putting that much money into monster movies. That leaves us with a mildly novel take on giant monsters and post-apocalyptic world building that oozes 2002 from every pore.

“The Awakening” (S21E5-6)

Having already written about a Tom Baker-led serial, we’re taking a big leap out of seventies Doctor Who and into the early-to-mid eighties, where the lead role was taken over by Peter Davison. The eighties ended up being a fairly tumultuous period for the series, following up on the tonal shifts that occurred after complaints of the show’s violent content led to pressure from producers, and where it seemed to gradually slide increasingly into irrelevance, with production problems, creative indecision, and hostility from the top brass at the BBC eventually leading to the show’s fifteen-year hiatus at the end of the decade. The biggest problems of the original run’s final years was still in the future while Davison was there, but you can definitely sense in these early eighties seasons that the show was a little more uneasy, experimenting with different ideas and tones to see what actually worked.

“The Awakening” hails from Davison’s final year, which in turn was following the series’ twentieth anniversary (an anniversary special where Davison teamed up with many, but not all, the previous Doctor actors aired two months before.) After spending an entire year spotlighting the series and its history, a story like this feels like a return to the “classic” mode—it is another plot about an alien presence invading modern England (in this case, specifically said to be 1984), and a plot with more than a hint of Quatermass and the Pit in it, in which our history turns out to be the product of said alien presence. That’s not a surprising direction to go, considering that Doctor Who had been pulling from Quatermass and the Pit (and the other Quatermass serials) pretty much from the beginning, and this one actually puts that story in a new and interesting context, which scales down the scope of its implications while keeping them equally grave.

Project Metalbeast (1995)

Werewolf stories are one of those things that often thrive on having established mythology/rules—the fun for audiences become not just in seeing the specific execution of those rules (i.e. more and more elaborate transformation sequences), but also seeing that mythology used as a parallel or an allegory (i.e. adolescence), and sometimes in seeing those rules subverted. Project Metalbeast is an attempt at subversion, taking the supernatural angle of the werewolf story and messily grafting it to a Science Fiction-Horror concept, all in the name of creating a new kind of monster for the direct-to-video gorehounds of the mid-nineties. There is novelty in exchanging the typical curse plotlines and uncontrollable transformation with science-gone-wrong medical trauma and Alien style bases-under-siege and conspiracy backstories, but the question is whether the movie realizes that novelty or is simply okay putting out the bare minimum of horror schlock.

Quatermass and the Pit

The original Quatermass Experiment TV serial in 1953 was followed up by two sequels that aired on the BBC throughout the 1950s, all of them written by series creator Nigel Kneale, and all of them eventually adapted into film by Hammer Film Productions (unlike the original, though, both sequel TV serials have been fully preserved, meaning I can actually provide a proper examination of them.) Quatermass and the Pit was the third serial (I’m sure we will eventually return to the second one, the aptly titled Quatermass II), originally airing in six parts from December 1958 to January 1959, near the tail end of the fifties Sci-Fi boom; studio disagreements kept the movie version, also written by Kneale and eventually directed by Roy Ward Baker, in limbo until 1967, when it was released in North America under the title Five Million Years to Earth. There was a different atmosphere for this kind of genre work in the late sixties (2001 would be released a year after this)—but while the time difference led to this being the only Quatermass movie in colour, the story remained intact.

As he did in the original Quatermass serial, Kneale uses the fantastical elements to posit some deeply unnerving questions about the universe we inhabit and the relationship we have with it—what makes us what we are, and can it be altered by forces beyond our control. The extraterrestrial body horror of Experiment is rendered less physical but all the more existential in The Pit, where our understanding of human history, both in cultural and evolutionary terms, is essentially unravelled. Rather than the encroaching aliens seen in the other Quatermass stories, the aliens here have already encroached—an invasion that took place in the distant past, its presence secretly looming over all mankind, until the day when it isn’t secret any more, and we are forced to confront what seems to be a monstrous part of our own nature.