X the Unknown

X the Unknown is an excellent sci fi movie from Hammer. It was made a year after The Quatermass Experiment.

Drilling at a remote location in the Scottish Highlands attracts a strange force from below. It turns out to be a blob like creature that feeds on radiation, which gets bigger as a result. After several people are killed by it including a young boy, a scientist finds a way to kill it and succeeds at the end.

This films stars American actor Dean Jagger and is joined by several familiar British stars: Leo McKern (The Day The Earth Caught Fire), Anthony Newly (Killers of Kilimanjaro), a young Frazer Hines (Dr Who, Emmerdale) and Hammer regular Michael Ripper (Curse of the Werewolf, The Mummy).

The movie has a very creepy score and location photography, a lot of which was shot at night.

This movie is a must if you are a fan of 1950's science fiction and Hammer.

Rating: 4 stars out of 5.

X: The Unknown from Hammer Films was intended to be a sequel to the film, The Quatermass Xperiment. Objections from the writer Nigel Kneale meant that the plot of the film was reworked.

The original director was slated to be the noted American blacklisted Joseph Losey who started shooting the film but due to illness had to be replaced by Leslie Norman (Father of film critic Barry Norman.)

This is an unpretentious film dealing with issues with nuclear radiation very much in vogue in the 1950s in horror and sci-fi films. The films also predates The Blob by a few years which was more campy.

Soldiers in Scotland discover a bottomless crack in the ground with a mysterious source of radiation activity. An explosion kills a few of the soldiers from radiation burns. Soon several more people die of radiation burns.

American actor Dean Jagger plays Dr Royston from an Atomic Laboratory who hypothesized that a form of life from prehistory trapped in the crust of the Earth, tries to reach the surface every 50 years depending on the alignment of the sun and tidal waves in order to find food from radioactive sources.

As the entity, a glowing blob feeds on radiation its mass increases as it tries to make its way to nuclear plants to find more radiation.

The film has a mix of good special effects especially with people melting and some ropey ones as the blob moves taking over the town or with fire explosions that look like a match going off. A lot of the horror is off camera but the film maintain its thrills.

The acting from Dean Jagger and Leo McKern is straightforward. It has a fair amount of thrills such as a little girl being left behind in a church as the blob approaches or at the climax when a jeep gets stuck in the mud.

A really neat Sci-Fi/Horror item about a superheated blob creature that haunts the Scottish moors. Believably acted by a cast of veterans, and loaded with terrific suspense. Hammer Films once again demonstrates what can be done with a small budget and lots of imagination. Watch for this one!

Back in the days when "Prince Valiant" still covered most of a page in the Sunday funnies, I first saw this wonderfully creepy SF sleeper. From the opening scenes of a stretch of the Scottish moors opening up under a British soldier's feet, I was hooked. I was very lucky that my parents didn't send me to bed then(although they did right in the middle of "From Hell It Came", but that's another story); I was resolved to catch it again just to get that creepy feeling! The ominous P.O.V. shots of the "X" monster shambling through the barren woods at night, the outrageous "melting" death by hard radiation of the medical tech in the X-ray room, Dean Jagger as Dr. Royston, describing his new invention that can (theoretically) speed up decay of radioactive materials without causing flare-ups(!) simply by leeching away its' energy, and the film's creepy, near-ambiguous ending ("We did destroy it...didn't we?") showed just what you could--and can!--still do with a small budget and respect for the material.

Often overlooked even by those who enjoy the sci-fi films of the fifties, "X The Unknown" is one of those sleepers that real afficionados will watch over and over. Starring Dean Jagger, the cast also features a very young Anthony Newly as a British Army corporal.

There's not much that professional critics would find either amusing or compelling about this film, but when considered in its place as a landmark movie both for the sci-fi genre and for Hammer films, it shines somewhat brighter.

As has aready been mentioned, this film occupies a prominent role among those that feature a "blob" monster. The special effects, incidentally, are not bad for the year (1956), and the concept of a radioactive blob is perhaps even more interesting than one that merely gobbles up people.

I understand that this was one of the early films produced by Hammer, as a step toward making more sci-fi entries. I'm glad they took the chance. This film and those that followed it enriched the genre for all fans of 1950's and 1960's sci-fi films.