Recently, I went to see 28 Years Later in the theater, the first time I have been to the cinema in over a year. There was the usual block of trailers and advertisements before the feature presentation. I can’t believe this now adds another half-hour to the time you have to wait for the commencement of the film you paid to see. I’m not entirely sure what about these ads left me depressed, but I ended up feeling very old. It was like I was on the other side of a divide across which was the target audience for every commodity advertised. Like Brian Wilson once sang, I just wasn’t made for these times.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, my tastes already skew largely to an era some time before I was even born. Consider 1951’s Unknown World, a low-budget sci-fi flick I latched onto harder than anything I saw in the theater earlier that same day. The underlying concept of the movie was even rather old hat by the time of this picture’s original release. It is odd the filmmakers didn’t title it Journey to the Center of the Earth, as it another variation on the Jules Verne book from nearly 100 years prior. The connection is strengthened by having the words from that title on the theatrical poster.
Unlike the book of that title, this one doesn’t have any dinosaurs. And, unlike the many films with the same basic conceit, there also isn’t the discovery of carnivorous plants or any lost branches of human development. Unlike 1976’s At the Earth’s Core, it also doesn’t have a scantily-clad Caroline Munro.
Instead, this is a startlingly somber affair, even so far as the reason why this mission is being conducted. In an opening newsreel, we learn about physicist Victor Killian’s worry that nuclear weapons might destroy the planet. At a speech he’s giving, some excited young women come up afterwards. I have never heard of physicist groupies before. Since Killian’s plan to establish the world’s largest fallout shelter far beneath its surface in the even of a nuclear apocalypse, maybe he’ll have some volunteers to help repopulate the planet. Hey, it’s what Dr. Strangelove would be proposing roughly a decade later.
He unveils plans to borrow miles below the surface using a device he calls the cyclotram, which is described as being like a submarine except it drills into the ground. So, basically, not a submarine at all, but more like a large metal mole.
Others on Killian’s team include Otto Waldis, a geophysicist who fled the Nazis. There’s also Tom Handley, a metallurgist. Dick Cogan is an authority on soil conservation. Jim Bannon is a “sandhog” and explosives export, and he will be driving the cyclotram.
Joan Linsey is, according to narration in the newsreel, a “medical doctor and ardent feminist”. For her chemistry word, she was honored by the American Confederation of Women Scientists. I could not find information on such an organization, so I doubt it ever existed. I’m not sure how pleased I am the script has a female scientist if it is going to qualify the acknowledgment she received so as to be considered only among her gender. Inevitably, she will also be the potential love interest for a couple of the guys.
It is obvious she will end up on the arm of Bruce Kellogg, the son of a wealthy newspaper magnate. He is the creator of the newsreel which occupies a great deal of the first minutes of the runtime. Using daddy’s money, he will foot the bill for the expedition, but only if he can join it. Having no other options for funding, the group takes him up on his offer.
The gateway for their journey is a dormant volcano in the Aleutian Islands. Within eyesight from the summit is an active volcano. That would have given me pause, but not our intrepid heroes. Curiously, their journey appeared to me to be a more horizontal than vertical progression, with them mostly driving slowly through cave systems and apparently rarely having to use the drill at the front of the vehicle. Also, the crew take their meals in pill form, which today only inevitably recalls The Jetsons. I guess that delivery mechanism makes sense in a vessel where space would be at a premium.
I’m sure the science in this is largely hokum, but it at least scans as truth within the world of the film. There is some talk about how stalactites and stalagmites are formed, which may be educational for some in the audience, but which beggars belief as to why a group of distinguished scientists and experts in their respective fields would need to have this conversation. Still, I felt the movie had the right intentions, even if the sheer amount of talkiness might lull into inattention those viewers the script is trying to inform.
The main threat posed by the caves they traverse is the potential for poison gas. What is odd is, for a cast this small, the body count by the end will be surprisingly high. There’s also an interesting plot tangent where the crew struggles to find water after their onboard supply is tainted by gas. One potential storyline goes nowhere as water Nash finds makes her start hallucinating. That experience is brief, and I wondered why none of the others were impacted in any way. Heck, one guy is licking water off a rock. This strange visual had me thinking that guy is the most likely in the group to be tasting colors and seeing chemtrails.
Our heroes eventually find the obligatory monstrous cave far below the surface, a place which looks like the great outdoors because, naturally, that’s where these scenes were shot. Supposedly, the ceiling of this impossibly vast space is phosphorescent, yet everything has shadows that are clearly from the sun. Ideally, there should be no shadows at all if the light is coming from many angles at once
There is also a huge ocean and waterfalls and deserts and all that. At first, everybody is excited about the potential for this place to sustain humanity if nuclear war should ever decimate the planet’s surface. Instead, it proves to be an area devoid of life. Rabbits born from the test subjects brought by Nash turn out to be sterile. All hope is gone and everybody gets really dour. As Waldis puts it, “We’ve gone nowhere. We’ve gone deeper and deeper into nowhere.”
Even without any creatures, there are some solid effects courtesy of Jack Rabin and Irving Block. These two were the go-to guys for low-budget sci-fi, working on such productions as Rocketship X-M, The Man from Planet X, Invaders from Mars and, um, the lamentable Robot Monster. The cyclotram is largely passable, and it is mostly shot from a forced perspective using an obviously small model. Other shots use some clever, though imperfect, matting to incorporate it into scenes with live actors.
I can’t say I would recommend Unknown World to anybody but sci-fi completists of that particular era. Even so, it had a curiously morbid and subdued vibe which distinguishes it from much of the similar fare of the period. I mean, quite a few people in a small cast won’t be making the return trip, and their mission only discovered humanity doesn’t have a plan B. It is as Killian says early in the runtime: “We have no plans. We have no hope.” Perhaps it is just as well, as Nash initially informs us through narration that the world they have discovered inside the world “is rich in chemical resources. That means power and industry.” Great—we once again discover a new place and the first thing anybody thinks of is how to exploit it for commercialization.
Dir: Terry O. Morse
Starring Victor Killian, Bruce Kellogg, Marilyn Nash
Watched on Severin blu-ray