Encounter with the Unknown

Oh wow! I saw this back in the '70s when I was eight year old and the story with the hole in ground scared me for at least a year after seeing it. I never knew its name and pretty much considered it lost but after some time searching the internet roughly 40 years year later I stumbled across people who knew the name. Thankfully it's available on YouTube so I could watch it! The show is actually terrible -- the acting laughable at times. But I was too happy to be able to watch it again to care, I thought it was lost forever! Also, I was pleasantly surprised to discover Rod Serling as the narrator as I later became a huge Twilight Zone fan. I gave it 3/10 (like I said, it's terrible) but for me it's fun nostalgia to watch on Halloween.

Encounter with the Unknown (1972)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

Rod Serling narrates three tales that deal with the unknown. The first story has three friends playing a prank on a nerdy guy, which ends up getting him killed. At the funeral the dead boy's mother tells the three something that leads to their fate. In the second story, a farm boy and his father discover a mysterious opening in the woods. In the final story, a man is driving across a bridge when he spots a young woman and picks her up. She requests to go to her father's house.

I'm going to avoid spoiling anything in regards to the three stories. With that said, ENCOUNTER WITH THE UNKNOWN is a film that is obviously working with a very low-budget. The film reminded me a lot of THE LEGEND OF BOGGY CREEK and it works in the same way that one did. Both films pretty much had no budgets but this worked to their advantage because it created a real atmosphere. This film here has some rather interesting moments but also some very bad ones.

As far as the three stories go, there's no question that the second one is the best. I thought this one here managed to have the best atmosphere and it's easy to see how this story could scare a lot of the young kids who watched it at the drive-in back in 1972. The first story is without question the weakest because it's incredibly easy to figure out what's going to happen. The third and final story is predictable but I thought it played out in an interesting way.

I'd argue that the "closing speech" made at the end of the three stories wasn't needed and in fact the film would have been much better without it. The performances are mixed throughout the three stories but Serling's narration is quite good throughout. Overall, ENCOUNTER WITH THE UNKNOWN isn't the perfect movie but there's enough here to make it worth watching.

After so many years of being a horror fanatic, I still don't understand why certain dull movies enjoy a so-called classic status, whereas other fine and effectively scary ones are doomed to remain stuck in oblivion! Take "Encounter with the Unknown", for instance. I had never heard of it before, and that usually means it's not worth discovering, but surprisingly enough this turned out to be a really neat and atmospheric anthology film, with 3 simply yet genuinely unsettling short tales, all revolving around the supernatural.

In the first tale, an obviously terrified young man confesses to a priest on a plane how a silly prank, played by himself and two of his friends, resulted in the accidental death of a neighborhood kid. During the funeral, however, the mother spoke out a sort of curse, and now the boy is persuaded that the three of them will die in freak-accidents. One by land and two by sky, once every seven days. The second story is set in a sleepy little town in Missouri, where a young boy discovers a giant hole in the ground whilst looking for his runaway dog. Ominous sounds and fog emerge from the hole, and pretty soon the entire village gathers around the mysterious place. The father of the boy, who still fears that his dog fell into the hole, finally decides to lower himself into it, but the consequences are tragic. The third and final tale is a famous urban legend known as "The Girl on the Bridge". In the middle of the night, a couple stops at a bridge to pick up a beautiful but clearly confused girl. She requests to be taken home, and even gives the address, but her grieving father already knows what happens next. The girl mysteriously disappears from the backseat again, because she tragically died in a car accident many, many years ago already, when she and her forbidden boyfriend ran off together to get married.

Admittedly, "Encounter with the Unknown" is a very cheap and low-keyed production, and none of the stories contain any spectacular stunts or bloody make-up effects. This isn't the least bothersome, though, because the film thrives entirely on macabre ambiance, intriguing stories, and basic but petrifying locations & set-pieces. This gem is literally chock-full of haunting and nightmarish images, like the old cemetery in the first story, the damping hole in the second and the meandering girl in the third. Oh yeah, and there's another thing that makes "Encounter with the Unknown" unique, and it's perhaps its sole link with stardom. The individual tales are introduced and wrapped up by the warm, absorbing and mystical voice of none other than Rod Serling. All to obviously, this was done to generate a sort of "Twilight Zone" effect, but who cares? In fact, I was all set to reward "Encounter of the Unknown" with a glorious score of eight, or even nine out of ten, but the last 10 minutes nearly ruined everything. For some inexplicable reason, a different narrator finds it necessary so reanalyze the three stories in detail and convince the audience that supernatural powers are all around us. The highlights of the films are repeated again, the curse of the grieving mother even three or four times, and the eerie impact of the overall film almost vanishes completely. If you ever come across this obscure puppy, I recommend it wholeheartedly, but my advice is to press "stop" immediately after the end of the third segment.

As another reviewer noted, the hyped "Rankin cluster phenomenon" appears to be total BS. The movie overall has a bit of interest and a few memorable moments.

The first story involves a prank that goes horribly wrong and costs a young man his life, so his witchy mother (in the film's most memorable scene) lays a curse on them at the funeral, although she's never seen to curse the person truly responsible for her son's death. And the guys responsible all die in "accidents" on schedule...

The second story involves a mysterious hole in the ground that appears on a rural farm in the early 20th century. It's just suddenly there one morning. Smoke roils out of it and weird sounds are heard. A local farmer is lowered into it....

The third is the weakest, a rehash of the tired "Phantom Hitchhiker" story that was already a cliché decades before this film was made.

The biggest weakness is that there's so little substance to these stories. Scenes are played over and over and over in obvious attempts to pad it out to feature length. Every story is supposedly based on a "true story" although it seems to either be urban legends or made up from whole cloth. Another amusing bit is in the third story, which has flashbacks to the 20s, and in those scenes were shown a wealthy stylish girl who has long flowing hair...something totally out of whack, as stylish girls of the 20s had bobbed hair! (Of course, by the 70s, long flowing hair was stylish again...) I saw this on a local station back in the 70s or early 80s, and finally came across it again on YouTube. It's cheap hokum, never particularly scary or disturbing, sloppily written and badly edited. Watching it again I can't help but wonder if it was meant to be the pilot for a TV series. It's amusing when one is nostalgic for cheap 70s horror, but ultimately it fails because of the clichéd nature of the stories (except the second one) and the obvious padding. Something with a bit more imagination and more willing to have fun with the material, and even take some liberties with the urban legends, would have been much more enjoyable. The music over the opening credits is memorable, though.

Encounter with the Unknown is an anthology of supernatural stories revolving around events which are purported to have actually happened. We have Rod Serling's testimony to that fact, which in the mid-1970's was good enough.

It's Night Gallery meets Legend of Boggy Creek. When Encounter with the Unknown really ramps-up it isn't half bad. But when it's bad, it's really frickin' awful. You fans of bad cinema will eat it up. All of your favorite low-budget elements are here; terrible acting, abysmal dialog, amateurish sound and dubbing, grubby set design and costuming, and best of all, the master of ceremonies, Serling, "phoning it in" as only he could do at the very end of his tenure.

The stories are not really bad at all. This film, had it had the budget it needed would be have been a classic. But it wasn't and so now it struggles to keep the chills coming and laughs to a minimum.