X THE UNKNOWN (1956)

X THE UNKNOWN (1956)

Tagline: It rises from 2000 miles below the earth to melt everything in its path!

(Sci-Fi, Horror, Mud Wrestling) [PG]

Note: This movie was never given an MPAA rating, but if it came out today, it likely would have drawn a PG rating due to a couple of gory scenes. 

It's a particle of mud, but by virtue of its atomic structure, it emits radiation. That's all it is. Just mud. How do you kill mud?

In this one, the British are doing radiation drills on the grounds of a Scottish facility. One day the ground opens up and two of the soldiers on hand are burned really badly by what is thought to be radiation. It doesn’t take long before we’ve got a nameless horror creeping around in the night that is growing bigger and bigger, feeds on energy, and is made of mud. 

First off, this movie was originally supposed to be the second installment in the QUATERMASS series, but they couldn’t get the rights to the Quatermass name and decided to name the main character Dr. Adam Royston. The other thing that hit me right off the bat is that Dean Jagger crushed the lead role and is far more likable than Brian Donlevy was in THE QUATERMASS XPERIMENT. Jagger’s other big sci-fi flick was 1980’s ALLIGATOR. 

This was a low-budget movie, but they did a pretty fantastic job (for the era) with some of the effects for the “unknown-attack” scenes and when we finally see this mud menace. I don’t recognize any of the rest of the names, but the acting is really good throughout. What is pretty funny is hearing Dr. Adam Royston’s regurgitation of the lie of evolution, but that stuff was pretty common back in the 1950s. What was also kind of funny in an otherwise very serious film was the way the soldiers in the first and second attacks approached things. They were almost giddy to be doing practices regarding radiation and guarding radiation. Ah, the good old days, when you could just get one of those happy-go-lucky radiation gigs. We also get a scene where a soldier tells another soldier he is going to kick his head in if he doesn’t get “it down here”. I mean, the intensity of it all. I love how the first solution to killing something you have never encountered before is to kill it with fire. I mean, I wonder why they didn’t just build a time machine, go to 1989, consult the Ghostbusters and try “love and kindness” killing this thing? 

Having pointed out some of the more comical things, this movie is actually meant to be very serious and in that regard, it nails the effort to do so. We get a few gnarly moments and even a kid's death. Unless of course, you are paying attention to this freakin score. The violin is so heavy in some parts you can’t even hear the dialog. It’s extremely painful on the ears. 

Overall this movie gets a lot of credit for being the best of the “creeping blob” films, but it’s really just okay. It lacks any real depth and the characters are very one-dimensional, almost as if the writer had an idea for some pretty good dialog, but didn’t think that it was necessary to show any meaningful interaction, romance, conflict, or any of that on a level we’d care about. Because of that, this movie ends up falling strangely flat even as well acted as it is. 

I have to give this one a 3 out of 7 just for lacking substance. Even in the 50s, your sci-fi had to have some characters you actually could relate to. This movie doesn’t bother with that. When you compare this to THE QUATERMASS XPERIMENT, X THE UNKNOWN can’t keep up. 

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