ENCOUNTER WITH THE UNKNOWN (1972) *

Encounter with the Unknown is an amateurish low budget horror anthology that is only noteworthy because of the participation of The Twilight Zone’s Rod Serling, who narrates the trio of tales.  His familiar voice is the only touch of class in this otherwise dreary slog of a film.  I’m not sure how much he got paid for this gig, but it probably kept him in cigarettes for a few days. 

The first story (*) involves a trio of teens playing a prank on their friend, which predictably goes wrong, leading to his death.  At his funeral, his mother curses the three boys responsible for the prank.  Then, every seven days, one of them meets an untimely demise. 

The acting is bad, the pacing is sluggish, and the whole thing feels like a student film.  Even though the story is less than a half an hour, it’s heavily padded with repeated sequences and flashbacks to stuff that happened just a few minutes prior.  The awkward structure doesn’t do it any favors either. 

The second tale (* ½) begins with a boy looking for his lost dog.  Eventually, he stumbles upon a mysterious hole in the ground.  His father investigates and hears a strange moaning sound coming from the hole.  His buddies lower him into the dark cavern, and he is ill prepared for what he finds there. 

This one suffers from low budget as the period setting is hardly believable.  It almost looks like one of those cheap filmstrips they used to show in history class.  Or maybe an episode of The Waltons directed by Charles B. Pierce.  At any rate, it squanders a decent premise almost immediately, and the complete non-ending is downright infuriating. Like the first story, there’s a lot of unnecessary flashbacks to stuff that just happened that help to pad things out. 

The last tale (* ½) is a familiar enough ghost story.  A motorist discovers a young woman wandering alone on a rickety bridge in the middle of the night.  He offers to give her a lift back home and discovers she hasn’t lived there for a very long time.

This story is predictable, but it’s probably the best of the bunch because it is the shortest.  Even then, the story is needlessly stretched out with (you guessed it) flashbacks.  It might’ve got ** if it was only fifteen minutes long, but it goes on and on senselessly for another five minutes, which is nothing more than endless scenes of the ghost girl and her former lover having romantic interludes through the woods while a sappy love song plays on the soundtrack.

I would have split the difference and gave the movie an overall score of * ½.  However, after the stories wrap up, another narrator comes along and gives us a recap of every tale, each one lasting several minutes.  These scenes didn’t work the first time and are even more excruciating the second time around. 

Without all these repeated scenes, Encounter with the Unknown could’ve easily been a sixty-minute movie.  Thanks to the heavy doses of padding and unending narration, it clocks in at a whopping ninety.  The egregious padding helps to make it one of the worst horror anthologies of all time. 

To sum up, this is for Rod Serling completists only.  His intros are the only thing worth a damn.  The rest of the movie is just mind-numbingly bad.