Encounter With The Unknown (1973)

An incredibly tatty-looking anthology film from the early seventies, Encounter With The Unknown is, indeed, 'one of those rare films you will never forget'.  Mainly because of its cheapness and bargain basement production values.  The only 'name' i the cast is narrator Rod Serling.  Except that he doesn't narrate the whole film - a second, uncredited, narrator pops up at the beginning and end of the film.  We'll return to him later.  The film presents the viewer with three stories of the supernatural - all allegedly involving people buried in the same graveyard and all case studies of a 'respected' paranormal investigator.  The latter, of course, doesn't exist, despite the film's earnest assurances that he is some kind of leading authority on psychic phenomena.  Each story is introduced by Serling's narration, his authoritative tones giving the nonsensical gibberish he spouts a sheen of false plausibility.  The stories themselves are pretty thin and unconvincing.  The first is a rambling tale of a graveside curse placed on three students by the mother of their friend, whose death she blames on their prank-gone-wrong.  All three, apparently, will die at seven day intervals - one by land, two by sky.  One is quickly run over by a car, a second dies in a plane crash, but only after having a rambling pseudo-religious conversation about fate, superstition and the supernatural with a fellow passenger, a priest.  The priest tries to contact the third student, only to hear that he has gone skydiving... And that's it.  No twists, no surprises.

The second story, set in a small Western town in nineteen hundreds, is vaguely Lovecraftian with its plot involving a mysterious hole in the ground from which inhuman howls and screams emanate.  A farmer, whose son fears his dog might have fallen down the hole, volunteers to be lowered into it n a rope.  Of course, once he is out of sight, he screams horribly and when pulled to the surface, is found to be stark, staring mad.  Again, that's it.  There's no further development, no hints at what was in the hole, nor what the towns folk eventually did about it.  That said, it is probably the best of three episodes, making the most of its meagre resources to create a good period feel and is reasonably atmospheric.  The third and final story is a straightforward re-telling of the 'phantom hitchhiker' urban myth - motorist picks up lone woman on the road, takes her to an address she claims to live at, when he arrives, she has vanished from the car.  There are countless variations on the basic story.  The film tries to flesh it out a little by providing a back story in flashback (apparently filmed through a net curtain, involving the girl eloping with the suitor her father disapproves of, but being killed in a car accident t the very place where the motorist picks her up.  In a coda, her father, now aged, is still living at the address she wants to be taken to and makes it clear that this isn't the first time this has happened.

Both collectively and individually, the main audience reaction these stories invite is a shrug of the shoulders - they are little more than anecdotes of the sort teenagers tell each other in fumbling attempts to illicit a scare.  Despite all of the film's attempts to give them some weight and significance - the accreditation to the fake paranormal expert and Serling's portentous narration - they never rise above this level.  But the film doesn't end with the last story and Serling's closing voice over.  Instead, we get what amounts to a recap of the entire film, with scenes from the three episodes inter-cut, key scenes and dialogue repeated, as the second narrator rambles on about the existence of witchcraft, its origins in the 'old religion', Ancient Egypt and all manner of other occult nonsense.  (There's something similar, but shorter that acts as a prologue at the start of the film).  I can only assume that this was added to bring the film up to a ninety minute running time, as the three stories alone would have left it seriously under-running.  This epilogue somewhat reminded me of similar sequences often to be found in 'Mondo' movies, as the narrator tries to pull together the preceding footage's various themes, (as part of their quest to pass themselves off as serious documentaries, most 'Mondos' would proceed from some opening 'theory' which the supposedly genuine footage that followed would 'prove').  Overall, though, Encounter With The Unknown most resembles those TV series which mainly consist of dramatisations of supposedly true cases of the paranormal, but with an even lower budget that can't even muster William Shatner as a front man.  On this level, it is actually reasonably entertaining, although the best part remains that added on epilogue which touches on the surreal in the way in which cross-edits the preceding footage.