While this might also be considered a science fiction movie, the horror elements are much stronger than the (highly questionable) science. This one really scared me as a kid.
Tagline: “It rises from 2000 miles below the earth to melt everything in its path!”
WTF Factor: **
Notable Dialogue:
- Royston: “Now, Mac, how would you go about killing that?”
- McGill: “What is it?”
- Royston: “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?”
Synopsis: We open on a muddy gravel pit in Scotland, where the military is training soldiers to detect radioactivity with a Geiger counter.
A final hapless soldier, Private Lansing, goes out to practice, but he detects radioactivity where there shouldn’t be any. Standing over the spot, Lansing [who might as well have a red shirt] notices mud bubbling up, then a fissure opening. Everyone scatters except Lansing, who is right there when the fissure widens and begins to belch flames.
Next we go to the atomic energy facility nearby. John Elliott (Edward Chapman) is the director of the facility and his son Peter (William Lucas) works there as an administrator. John is looking for Dr. Adam Royston (Dean Jagger), who is involved in his own experiments, apparently related to the effects of classical music on radioactivity [not exactly, as it turns out], in his lab. When they meet, John castigates Royston for doing independent investigations and forcing a willing Peter to perform Royston’s designated experiments. John assigns Royston to investigate the military incident.
Royston cannot detect the radiation, but Lansing and another soldier have developed severe burns. Lansing is dead before nightfall. The scientist brings out his equipment to investigate but he doesn’t detect the radiation from outside the fissure. He suggests to Major Cartwright (John Harvey) that the fissure might be “bottomless.”
Royston asks the Major to put up a guard, but instead, the Major plans to just rope off the area and put up signs to keep the locals away.
Two scared young boys in the woods nearby are fulfilling a dare: Willie (Michael Brooke) will sneak into an abandoned tower and see if local derelict Old Tom sleeps there. In a genuinely creepy scene, Willie makes his way through the dark woods while his friend Ian stands watch. Just as Willie approaches the tower, he hears a strange noise like static and turns aside, seeing something that terrifies him.
Willie runs away, past his friend and off into the woods. The next we see Willie, he’s in a hospital, where Royston diagnoses him with radiation burns. His parents found him like that in the morning. Royston visits Ian to find out what happened, and convinces him that Willie would want him to tell.
Royston goes to the tower and finds Old Tom and a dripping still. Tom has a lead container from Royston’s lab, which he says he found outside. Royston then finds that someone has broken into his locked lab, and destroyed much of his equipment, when nothing appears to be missing except the radioactive sample of “trinium” he was working with [an element that I have not encountered outside of the Stargate universe].
Royston: “Yesterday the material in that container was giving a danger-point radiation reading. Now, as you just saw, it’s nothing.”
Peter: “But that’s impossible!…Isn’t it?”
Royston: “Yesterday I would have said ‘yes,’ but this fact is inescapable. The energy trapped in that trinium has been sucked right out of it. And furthermore, these windows were barred and that door was locked all night. So whoever it was came in here must be…most unusual.”
Inspector (Mr.!) McGill (Leo McKern) arrives from the U.K. Atomic Energy Commission, having been summoned by the local police. John is not pleased but McGill shuts him down immediately. McGill (Mac!) finds Royston in the cafeteria and asks about the burned child. He had already talked to Old Tom and determined that Willie never went near the trinium container. Mac wants to find out what did burn him.
Willie dies just as Royston and Mac arrive at the hospital. Willie’s father confronts Royston.
Father: “There’s nothing you can say will help. I know about you, Dr. Royston. You’re a scientist, not a doctor. You don’t look after the sick. You meddle with things that kill, like what killed my boy in there! You should be locked up in prison, locked up with others like you, letting off bombs you can’t control. You’re not safe. You’re a murderer.”
After the hallway clears, a radiation technician summons a nurse into his facility for naughty purposes. She’s into it. Unfortunately, we hear the strange, staticky sound that Willie heard in the woods. Suddenly the radiation detection equipment turns on and the tech goes to investigate while the nurse watches through the glass. He sees something terrible and then it attacks him. His fingers swell up and his face melts off.
When Royston and Mac arrive to investigate, they find all of the hospital’s radium gone, with a giant hole melted in the lead safe. The nurse is incapacitated.
Mac: “You mean she won’t be able to tell us what happened?”
Doctor: “She won’t be able to tell you her own name.”
Royston figures that the culprit came in through the ventilation grille. The others protest that the opening is too small.
Royston: “10,000 gallons of oil would take up a pretty large area, wouldn’t it?”…And yet, 10,000 gallons of oil could come through the holes in that grille, couldn’t it?”
Mac: “Yes, it could.”
Royston: “Then that’s how it got into my workshop, it came in under the door. Obviously this thing can take up any shape it needs to.”
Royston figures the “thing” is out on the ridges and he’s grateful that the military didn’t place any human guards. Unfortunately they did. Fortunately, it’s our comic relief soldiers, ‘Spider’ Webb (Anthony Newley) and Haggis (Ian MacNaughton). Haggis sees a glow coming from the fissure. While the two haggle over who will go to investigate, the glow disappears.
Haggis goes down to look. He calls to Spider and then screams. Spider runs to the fissure and finds Haggis’ gear, and then the staticky sound starts. He sees something and fires his rifle at it, to no effect. He goes down screaming. Later, Royston and Mac arrive with the commanding officer, but the men are gone.
There is a meeting with Royston, Mac, John, Peter, and the Major. Royston expositions about energy below the crust of the Earth being compressed and humans evolving, and…
Royston: “Isn’t it reasonable to assume that the forces contained in the center of this Earth have developed an intelligence of their own?” [Sure, Jan.]
He reckons that these forces don’t like being squished and are heading to the surface to live. More exposition about increased surface pull every fifty years associated with tremors and fissures, and “energy can only be fed with more energy.” The forces are breaking through the crust and looking for energy sources, and only now is there radiation [???] to feed on and grow. Royston admits he has no idea how to proceed. Mac says they must destroy it and Royston asks, how? John points out that this is all conjecture and he’s not buying it. Everyone else seems on-board, though.
Although it’s still night, Royston suggests that someone needs to go down the fissure so they can detect the monster/whatever. That someone would be Peter. They have rigged up a chair that can be lowered into the fissure by two guys with hand cranks [!!!].
In a suspenseful scene, Peter is lowered with a Geiger counter. Everything goes smoothly for a bit, but then the line slips and Peter drops precipitously. He comes to rest beside a ledge that contains human remains. After more lowering, Peter detects high radioactivity levels. He looks below and frantically yells to be hauled up. When he finally reaches the surface, the Major says his orders are to kill whatever is down there and then seal the fissure. Royston looks skeptical but doesn’t argue.
The army uses flame throwers and dynamite down the fissure, then plug the hole with concrete. When Mac reports to the lab, Royston is almost certain that these measures won’t help. Mac has been called back to London, but Royston expositions about an invention he is working on that will break down atomic structure without causing an explosion. If a radioactive sample is placed between his scanners at a certain sound pitch, the radioactivity could be neutralized. Royston says he might have this up and running in a few months [or tonight, as it turns out].
The facility is proceeding to remove the radioactive cobalt from their nuclear pile and they can’t locate John for approval. Meanwhile, the concrete over the fissure cracks and a giant blob starts oozing up to the surface.
Royston and Peter are planning to load the cobalt onto a truck and send it away. Meanwhile, Mac has contacted his boss from the police station and asked to stay for one more night. The phone lines are all staticky, but they receive a report of an accident and “people melting.” Mac goes to the accident site and finds telltale sticky residue. He calls Royston to warn him that the creature is on the move. At the same time, John shows up and lays into Royston about shutting down the pile without authority. He takes that back shortly.
Royston figures out that the creature can sense radioactivity and when it does, it heads there in a straight line to feed and goes back the same way to the fissure. He shows that the road accident occurred along a straight line to their nuclear facility.
Royston: “That’s right. It’s on its way for the biggest meal of its life.”
Mac returns as they load the cobalt onto a truck. He tries to warn the guard at the gate, but the scritching sound indicates that it’s too late.
Luckily the guard manages to sound the alarm before he dies. It’s too late now to ship the cobalt out so Royston orders everyone to safety. Peter climbs a ladder and see the blob coming toward the radioactivity.
Sure enough, the monster eats the cobalt and heads back to the fissure. A town near its path has evacuated the residents into the town church, but then a helicopter determines that the blob isn’t heading back in a straight line [the reason is never indicated]. Instead, it’s heading right up the main street of town. A little girl is outside the church when the blob breaks through the cemetery wall, but the priest manages to snatch her back in time.
Meanwhile, Royston is testing his little scanners on a radioactive sample. It works! The radioactivity levels go way down.
And then it explodes. Mac insists that they have no time for further testing. Then Peter suggests that the two scanners might be out of synchronization. [That’s one possibility.] Anyway, all of Royston’s equipment (including a giant pair of scanners [???]) is at the fissure, so off they go. The military has set everything up and they plan to entice the monster using a radioactive sample on the back of a jeep. The jeep driver is a nervous wreck, so Peter takes charge of setting the bait. John is not pleased.
Nothing happens when Peter drives to the recommended distance from the fissure. He then backs up right to the edge. The blob comes up the fissure, but the jeep tires are stuck in the mud.
At the last minute he breaks free [Whew!] and Royston fires up the scanners. The blob gets all glowy and then subsides, ending in a small explosion. It’s gone! Then there’s another explosion! It’s still gone! Royston wanders over to look in the fissure, clearly puzzled, as the movie ends.
Thoughts:
There were multiple blob monster movies in the Fifties, but X The Unknown got there first. This movie predates The Blob (1958) by two years, with Caltiki The Immortal Monster a year after that. As a kid I found X… to be the scariest of the three, and my adult self will stand by that assessment. Two of the most suspenseful sequences involve Peter going down into the fissure, and then driving the jeep up to the fissure at the end. Peter is a colorless and peripheral character, and adding to the suspense is the fact that we are never sure how safe he is from an untimely end. At any rate, according to the rules of the movie, he should have died of radiation poisoning after being so close to the monster down in the fissure, but those rules seem to vary. The priest and the little girl in town should also be doomed.
This was the first horror script written by Jimmy Sangster, who went on to write Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and (Horror of) Dracula (1958) as well as The Crawling Eye (also 1958 but not a Hammer film). The plot is linear and straightforward. The script is curiously female-deficient, but that means the viewer doesn’t have to put up with the extraneous love interest found in seemingly all of the Fifties science fiction movies. The “comic relief” soldiers are used sparingly and they actually get killed by the monster, so, not so comic.
X… was originally envisioned as a vehicle for the Bernard Quatermass character; the first Quatermass movie, The Quatermass Xperiment (1955; retitled The Creeping Unknown in the U.S.) had just been released and the Quatermass II series was popular on British television at the time. However, Nigel Kneale refused to let them use his creation. If Sangster’s eventual script is any indication, this was a good choice on Kneale’s part. Sangster repeated many of the character dynamics and other elements that were so popular in the Quatermass series’, and simply changed the name of the scientist to Alan Royston. Despite that, Royston, at least as portrayed by Dean Jagger, had none of the trademark force of character that was exhibited by the classic Quatermass character. Royston is no slouch, though, and Jagger’s portrayal is enjoyable enough if you don’t connect him with Quatermass.
The original director for this movie was “Joseph Walton,” an alias for Joseph Losey, who had been blacklisted in Hollywood for his leftist politics. About a week before filming started, he was suddenly replaced by Leslie Norman. The reason for this is unclear; the official word was that Losey had been taken ill. However, others associated with the movie, including Jimmy Sangster, believe that Dean Jagger, an American and known conservative, refused to work with a blacklisted director. In any case, Norman stepped in after most of the movie, including cast and locations, had been set up by Losey. By all accounts, Norman was not a happy camper on set and he never directed another movie for Hammer (he started to direct The Lost Continent (1969) but was replaced during filming). Losey went on to direct a number of ambitious films, some (for example, The Go-Between (1971)) more well-respected than others (Boom! (1968)).
Despite the problems, X The Unknown is well-directed. The pace is good and the moody black and white photography suits the material perfectly (this movie would not be improved by color). Night scenes were actually filmed at night on location, primarily the Beaconsfield Gravel Pits in England, which adds immeasurably to the mood. The monster is wisely kept off camera until the last third of the movie, and unfortunately does not live up to the previous hype.
This movie is much better appreciated for its horror elements than for the iffy science elements. Watch it with the lights out!
Quick bits:
- In the U.S., this movie was released on a successful double bill with Curse of Frankenstein (1957).
- I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the enjoyable performance by Leo McKern as Mac. McKern was a prolific actor and most widely known as the star of the British television series Rumpole of the Bailey (1978-1992). I personally remember him best as a recurring and final Number 2 on The Prisoner (1967-68), another British series.
- Actor Anthony Newley (Webb) is perhaps better known as a songwriter. He and Leslie Bricusse wrote the score for Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971), among other things.
Suggested double feature: This seems like an excellent match with Caltiki The Immortal Monster (1959).
Tagline for Coming Attraction: “A Story of Blood Relations”
