UNKNOWN WORLD (1951)

UNKNOWN WORLD (1951)

Tagline: Drilling into the forbidding depths of the earth!

(Sci-Fi, Adventure, Dig Dug) [G]

Note – This movie did not originally have an MPAA rating, but I am pretty sure it would have been a G. 

Morley, you're wrong! This isn't peace! This is a resting place for the living dead! I don't believe it's the end of the world! I don't believe it's the end of mankind!

Okay, so this one has kind of a crazy plot. Essentially a bunch of smarty-pants scientists are worried about nuclear war, so they promptly borrow some money to build a giant drilling machine, to quite literally bury their heads in the sand. Hoping to find a peaceful hollow earth environment, will they get what they bargained for? 

First off, I thought it was kind of funny when Godzilla fans were railing against the “Hollow-Earth” theory that got brought up in GODZILLA VS KONG. In fact, the whole idea of a hollow earth has been brought up in several movies dating way back and this one is no exception. 

The main actor in this movie is actually Victor Kilian who plays Dr. Jeremiah Morley. He went uncredited because he was probably a freakin communist, but who really knows. Just judging by the acting though, he was pretty solid in this. We also get solid performances out of Bruce Kellogg who plays Wright Thompson and Marilyn Nash who plays Dr. Joan Linsey. Dr. Joan ends up being the most rational person in this entire movie. Nash actually attended the University of Arizona before getting into acting, where she only took on 4 acting roles. I wasn’t as crazy about Jim Bannon’s role as Andy Ostergaard in this, but he also showed up in PHANTOM FROM SPACE which is awesome. Otto Waldis was just okay as Dr. Max A. Bauer. Waldis is most famous for his role in ATTACK OF THE 50 FOOT WOMAN. 

Performances aside, this movie is just a ton of digging with a few pretty cool visuals at the end, but no creatures, no giant lizards, no Martians that have been hiding out for decades waiting for someone dumb enough to try and take over the center of the earth…none of that. Because of this, we end up with a movie that feels like it’s just trying to make some bizarre statement about the advantages of being an unstable paranoid scientist in case the world goes to pieces. 

I wish I liked this thing more than I did, but it’s essentially an hour of paranoia that I just couldn’t really get behind. I will say that the dialog works, the score is solid and the cinematography is good, all that keeps this interesting, but the payoff is lackluster as is the odd and abrupt ending. It was interesting because of the indicated promises of something we never quite get. So that thud at the conclusion is just really hard to digest. 

This one is a 3 out of 7 at best. The production value boosted it up to a 3, otherwise this lands in the 2 out of 7 range. 

GRAPHICS ARE THE PROPERTY OF LIPPERT PICTURES AND ARE USED FOR REVIEW PURPOSES ONLY. 

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