X The Unknown (3)

One thing that X The Unknown makes me think about is Y... why watch it? Huge amounts of forgiveness could be given for this 1956 film but honestly, it didn't hold my attention at all. It scores a meagre 3 on the geiger counter.

Dr Royston is studying radioactivity in Scotland which is very handy since the army has found something "strange" in a bog just near by. People are being mysteriously burned by radiation, and when radioactive material is being stolen in even stranger ways, Royston postulates an even stranger explanation. His speech about evolution is way off the weirdness scale, and yet the parents of the dead boy who complain that the is a creator of death were much more eloquent. Eventually they all believe him - that a radioactive mud monster is eating radiation. The army blow up and concrete over the the bog but when you're fighting a mud monster, that is not enough and you need science! Dr Royston to the rescue! He invents a dangerous anti-radiation scanner and makes a trap to kill the mud monster.

This is similar to The Colditz Story where I just can't believe that people behaved and spoke that way. This is meant to be a serious a scary horror but all the time I'm just cringing and am gobsmaked at the characters. Probably it's an image of idealised life, complete with the token Scott in the army called Haggis, and everyone else with plum English who I at first thought were calling him Aggis. Probably they're all just hamming it, probably the science was fine for it time but very little of it was fine for me. Instead of this, watch the much better The Quatermass Xperiment.

The bits I did like were the classic "see people dying from the monsters point of view because the special effects are too hard", and the monster itself - that was good. And there were ashtrays in the hospital.