British sci-fi director dies at 94

Val Guest, the versatile British director and screenwriter best known for directing science-fiction classics The Quatermass Xperiment and The Day the Earth Caught Fire, has died. He was 94.

Guest died of prostate cancer on May 10 in a Palm Desert, California hospice, said his wife, actress Yolande Donlan.

He “brought a lot of intelligence to a genre that is often sorely in need of it,” said director Joe Dante, a longtime fan of his films. “Every single one of his pictures is thoughtful and well-done.”

After becoming a director in the 1940s, Guest made comedies, thrillers and musicals, but he was best known for his science-fiction works.

The Quatermass Xperiment was a 1955 science-fiction horror thriller with a semi-documentary feel about an experimental rocket ship that crashes in rural England with only one surviving crew member.

An invisible force gradually transforms him into a monstrous creature as he consumes plants, animals and humans.

In the 1961 film The Day the Earth Caught Fire, simultaneous nuclear explosions by the US and the Soviet Union knock the Earth off its axis and send it hurtling toward the sun.

The picture earned Guest and co-writer Wolf Mankowitz best screenplay awards from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts.

Guest also was one of the five credited directors on the 1967 James Bond spoof Casino Royale.

“He was a jack-of-all-trades,” Dante said. “But there are a lot of little gems in his output that, hopefully, will come to light now.”