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 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.

Hey .. About this movie i mostly like the first story about the cursed kids in billiards... But the most importantly , I'm really proud of myself and all you people reading this , meaning we that care much about movies that spend dollars to find these old and unique movies and watch em so carefully that come to check out what others think bout em ...!! We dont let the film maker's efforts just be for nothing... Thank you all ... I also should thank the producers of this movie and all alikes for spending time , energy and money to at least try to make something ( Movie ) with low and the loss of equipments at that time like 50 years ago for the 1970's fans and us in 2021 and so on .... Who knows ?? Maybe somebody in 2071 comes reading my Comment and thanks me for my ideas in my time... Lol ..... Ok , let's wait and see...

If you're familiar with the Twilight Zone series, it was an anthology of horror and sci-fi stories. Sticking with the horror motif, this movie takes three stories: a traumatic mother's prophecies, a hole in the ground and the traditional story of the ghostly hitchiker, and tries to scare us by claiming they're true. While there are numerous hitchhiker stores out there, Resurrection Mary the most famous, the movie actually makes a slight impact on the atmosphere level, but it is a bit lacking in its suspense factor. The production as well as some of the musical score is a little off-kilter, but the actors do put a fair effort in telling the stories and relating them to the viewer. It's great entertainment for horror fans opposed to the sensationalism of the blood-and-gore pics, but it's just not as scary as it tries to be..

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.