Quatermass and the Pit  (1967)

Also known as Five Million Years to Earth, this Hammer effort marked the third film featuring the brilliant and irascible Professor Quatermass, played in this incarnation by Andrew Kier.  While working on an extension of the London Underground, the crew comes upon fossil evidence of humanoid creatures.  Anthropologist James Donald is brought in (with attractive assistant Barbara Shelley) and subsequent diggings unearth a space vessel with an impenetrable surface.  To everyone’s surprise, the spaceship begins to emit sonic vibrations, resulting in mass violence among the London inhabitants.  An intelligent film with well-articulated concepts about man’s origins and our compulsion to destroy our own kind, although one could argue that it gets too heady for its own good.  Despite some of the effects being less than stellar (the extra-terrestrial creatures look like big plastic grasshopper toys), this handicap is masked relatively well by displaying them on fuzzy television monitors.  The sturdy and capable acting by the three leads conveys sharp intelligence and determination, with the scenes of mass panic and destruction appropriately disturbing.  Based on Nigel Kneale’s 1958 British miniseries by the same name.