Main Cast: Victor Kilian, Bruce Kellogg, Otto Waldis, Jim Bannon, Tom Handley
Release Year: 1951
Country: US
Run Time: 73 minutes
Plot
Assembled by the same production team responsible for the minor sci-fi classic Rocketship X-M, Unknown World isn't quite in the same league as its predecessor. The plot is set in motion by Dr. Jeremiah Morley (Victor Kilian), who theorizes that mankind could save itself during a nuclear attack by resettling far beneath the earth's surface. To prove his theory, Morley builds the Cyclotram, a combination drill and exploratory vehicle, with the financial assistance of playboy Wright Thompson (Bruce Kellogg), who insists upon joining the expedition to the earth's core. After several hair-raising adventures, the Cyclotram and its surviving passengers reach a cavern nearly 2000 miles beneath the surface. The cavern contains all the necessities of survival save one: the atmosphere renders anyone living within its walls sterile. Deciding that it isn't worth hiding in the center of the earth if only one generation will survive, the explorers endeavor to get back to the surface -- but who will survive this journey? The obligatory female lead in Unknown World is played by Marilyn Nash, who'd been discovered by Charlie Chaplin for the 1947 film Monsieur Verdoux. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
Dick Cogan - George Coleman; Marilyn Nash - Joan Lindsey; George Baxter - Presiding Officer
Credit
Terrell O. Morse - Director, Terrell O. Morse - Editor, Ernest Gold - Composer (Music Score), Kiva Hoffman - Makeup, Henry Freulich - Cinematographer, Allen G. Siegler - Cinematographer, Irving A. Block - Producer, Jack R. Rabin - Producer, Irving A. Block - Special Effects, Jack R. Rabin - Special Effects, Millard Kaufman - Screenwriter
Dr. Jeremiah Morley (Victor Kilian) is concerned about an imminent nuclear war. He organizes an expedition of scientists and has them use an atomic-powered machine, capable of drilling through earth and stone, known as the Cyclotram, to find an underground environment where people could escape from nuclear obliteration. The expedition, consisting of Jim Bannon, Marilyn Nash, Otto Waldis, Tom Handley and Dick Cogan begins, after government funding has fallen through and they are bailed out at the last minute with private financing from a newspaper heir Bruce Kellogg, who insists on going with them as a lark. Romantic rivalry develops between Bannon and Kellogg for Nash, and two lives are lost to perils of the expedition, but in the end, the scientists accomplish their goal and find an enormous expanse with plentiful air, its own ocean and phosphorus light. However, the lab rabbits they have brought with them give birth to dead rabbits. Ms Nash discovers through an autopsy that the underground world has rendered the rabbits, and hence any other life form sterile. Dr Morley is depressed by the news and when an underground volcano erupts he doesn't enter the cyclotram and perishes. The survivors enter the underground sea and find themselves rising up to the surface of the upper world in the ocean, fortunately near a tropical island.
Many of the plot elements seem to have been reused in The Core.
