Reviews

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.

So many films have yet to be released that it's shocking what does trickle down from on high onto DVD. You'd think whoever owned this little souvenir of 70's syndication would want to start seeing some long overdue profits from it already. They must be working on a Director's cut. Right.

I haven't seen this TV movie for a very long time, but I remember it well. There was a song that played over the credits that was the eeriest thing about Picture Mommy Dead. It was a little nursery rhyme with the chilling refrain;

"The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out, in your stomach and out your mouth," or something appetizing like that. Is it coming back to you now?

If not, check the DVD when it does come out and see what an evening's TV entertainment used to look like in America in the late 1960's. The best thing about these movies is that because there were only a couple of options on the toob back then, everyone seems to have seen them. These were the days of the 75% share for a TV movie. "Friends" doesn't even come close in viewership. For better or worse that age has come to an end and made us less of a family.

The holes in this film are too many to try to fill with platitudes and appeals to "suspend your disbelief" so I will point out only one, which I still find so ridiculous that it almost kills the rest of the film for me each time I see it. When James Brolin's character says that you can tell the humans from the robots by their wrinkly hands because "they haven't perfected the hands yet", it begs the question; what was so difficult about making robot hands?

They seem to have perfected other, more complicated parts of the android anatomy. The eyes, the central nervous system. No complaints from Brolin and company after a night with two cyborg saloon harlots. Let's face it, if their butts looked like those hands Westworld would be out of business in a week.

Space: 1999 will be remembered mostly for it's ubiquitous Eagle spacecraft. Like squatting crocodiles they took off and landed as often as time would allow during the shows three years on the air. This was one of many elements which made this series a stand-out for Science Fiction TV lovers. And besides, the crew of Moonbase Alpha lacked the Enterprise's beaming console so sometimes it was Eagle or nothing.

The design and style of Space: 1999 was nearly as important to its youthful fanbase than the stories or the characters. Moonbase Alpha was an inviting place for children, despite the dangers. It was a candy colored, spacious labyrinth of "what does it do?" buttons and tubes, ultra contemporary furniture, and its own subway system. It was always clean and efficient and while you often felt a rush of relief that you were not roaming aimlessly across the Universe doomed to battle lifeform after lifeform year after year not knowing if you were going to be brought back for the next series (they changed the cast a few times) you did secretly yearn to be one this intellectual community that seemed to lack the pettiness of back home.

Truth is this series made no earthly sense. And for those who are stopped by that, good luck to you. You can stay but don't think you're getting a membership certificate. Only aficianados of the genre will know that while physics is important sometimes, great sci-fi demands going over the line a little. For instance where is all that sunlight coming from on Alpha? Whatever. How do they have regular gravity. Ever heard of a gravity machine. Hello?

Acts like Trek, looks like Star Wars with a bit of Dr. Who for good measure. For those who are card carrying members of the cheesy Sci-fi club, it is nirvana.

Director Larry Buchanan's Curse of the Swamp Creature is a worthy companion to the parade of "swamp-stomping mad scientist trying to shake off meddlesome interloper" films which populate one of horror's tiniest genres. It's not hard to make waves in such a small pond, and Curse of the Swamp Creature certainly doesn't disappoint devoted horror fans, many of whom follow Larry Buchanan as a kind of successor to Schlock horror's undisputed Grand Champion, Ed Wood.

The Curse of the Swamp Creature is that he lives at all. In the murkiest reaches of Louisiana's bayou a reclusive scientist experiments with the genetic map and creates a sort of man-phibian out of one of his apprentices. Meanwhile a cadre of well-meaning interlopers and less-well-meaning con-artists threatens the Doctor's harmonious freak-making activities and themselves become fodder for future human-animal hybrids. If they don't stop him, no one will be safe from "The Curse of the Swamp Creature."

All of the elements of good "bad" cinema are here in spades. Dopey acting, campy dialog, silly monsters, and interior sets that look like someone's Grandma's house got invaded over the weekend and turned into an evil laboratory brimming with everything one would need to do radical genetic engineering. Well, maybe not everything. But he does have an aquarium and some test tubes.

Dan Curtis of Dark Shadows fame gets his chance to play to the big screen (instead of TV) and pretty much louses it up. But is it as bad as your tireless reviewers have said it is? I don't know. I like it. But then I have a thing about films that go "clunk" in the night.

The main beef people seem to have is that this film is very poorly acted. Karen Black sails through to a paycheck without really trying and the young man who plays her son is out of his depth completely, but doesn't know it. Still, Burgess Meredith, Bette Davis, Eileen Heckart, DUB TAYLOR? These are not second rate actors (except for Dub Taylor) and he's actually a lot better than the kid who plays their son. Makes Dub Taylor look like Robert DeNiro.

After a while it is plain to see that all have been charmed by the director into hamming-up their roles "soap-opera" style. It's Dark Shadows all over again only this time in a turtleneck and Wallabees. And when they're not going over the top, the players just look unsure of their characters' motivation. Oliver Reed seems to be particularly out of it on one or two occasions. Of course the British master thespian may have just popped-in to the pub between clapper-boards to slake his blue ribbon thirst. That would explain a lot.

This film should have been a TV movie and as such would have been remembered as a gem. But because they chose to pad the 45 minutes of story with another hour of total B.S. they get the Golden Turkey. As Nigel Tufnel once said, "It's such a fine line between stupid, and clever."

As you have read Snowbeast is an awful yet endearing "Yeti" film with an all-(ex)star cast. The shockingly familiar "JAWSesque" plotline is quite at home on the slopes of Crested Butte complete with a washed-up Biathlete (that's the ski and shoot type not...you know), a doubting sheriff, a nervous ski-lodge operator, and the usual cadre of hapless and nameless victims... Oh, and a big guy in a fur suit with scary hands to play Bigfoot.

Other reviewers have mentioned the unintentional humor which abounds here. The script was written by Outer Limits' Joseph Stephano with Roger Patterson as consultant. Patterson is eminently qualified as he was responsible for that now famous shaky film of Sasquatch marching through the woods we've all seen too many times. Since Patterson's Bigfoot looks a lot more convincing than the one in Snowbeast he maybe should have been consulting with the make-up department. He seems to know a thing or two about dressing actors up as manbeasts. Stephano is a great TV writer in most cases. He pulled this off in a couple of days I would think.

While some B-movies are for the aficionados only this one is for everybody. Anyone of any age watching this will appreciate it's lack of merit and it's almost purposeful lack of sophistication. It's silly but fun and might make your next trip to a lonely ski slope a little tingly, if you could find a lonely ski slope anywhere in the country. If you want to see what they used to look like check out "Snowbeast."