Rod Serling’s Encounters with the Unknown (1973)

This movie is a collection of 3 stories that are supposed to be somehow tied together by a cemetery.  The first story is about a trio of college age guys that play a prank on a less popular acquaintance that gets him killed.  They attend his funeral and the dead guy’s mother threatens them with some sort of goofy curse.  Of course they all get killed in terrible ways that match up to her threat.  Then there is a story about a mysterious hole in the ground that has all sorts of odd noises coming out of it.  A guy gets lowered down and goes crazy.  Then the final story is a retelling of a classic ghost story of the girl that gets herself driven home decades after dying in a tragic accident.

First Rod Serling does a bit of narration here (and not even all of it), but I think that is about it.  The movie had potential, but something went wrong along the way.  The stories are interesting, but there isn’t enough material to fill the runtime out.  I’ve never watched a movie that recaps itself as much as this one does.  Trust me we will hear the mother’s threat 5 or 6 times throughout the movie, and it is a couple of minutes long.  You will see the same or similar scenes played out again and again.  This is obviously an attempt to stretch the already thin material to feature length.  Now that said I did enjoy all three stories.  The first one had a creepy supernatural feel, the second was just goofy as hell with the hole to hell, and the final one is a classic ghost story.  If they had shot a couple extra stories instead of stretching what they had I think this could have been a pretty good bit of 70s cheese.  As it is I found it really boring after the first recap. 

This is obviously a lower budget production.  Some of the production values are a bit rough and the car crash looks silly, but it isn’t too badly done.  Though I’m thinking they shouldn’t have tried to show the aftermath of a plane crash because it looks sort of silly.  Then again for what looks and feels like a drive-in movie (have no clue where or if it ever played) it feels about right. 

In the end this really isn’t all that good of a movie.  Though the cool thing is that if you want to check it out you can do so for free.  Head on over to the coolest website (other than Gutmunchers of course) at http://cultrararevideos.com/ to download and watch it for free.  While this isn’t the greatest movie he does have some killer stuff over there to watch and is one of my favorite places to hang on the web.

1 out of 4

reviewed by John Shatzer

© Copyright 2009 John Shatzer