What is definitely baloney is Warner Bros. and their insistence on keeping their logo up over the first 17 seconds of the opening credits! That's right, it’s not an exaggeration, not a dream, and not an imaginary tale, the WB logo is literally splayed across the first 17 seconds of the opening intro like a drunken Tara Reid desperate for any kind of exposure she can get her fugly mug on... as if there were any other kind of Tara Reid for that matter... Anyway, shameless American self-promotion aside, our story begins in the muddy moors of Scotland, where a military exercise finds a group of soldiers doing Geiger counter training. Of course nothing so simple is allowed to go as planned in a '50s atomic scare movie, so a mysterious underground explosion ignites and radiates, uhm, radiation... The exposed soldiers suffer from violent and painful radiation burns and atomic expert Dr. Adam Royston (anybody else think that it was a bit of an inside joke to name the main character, an atomic research scientist, “Adam”?) is brought in to check out the resultant fissure. Meanwhile, a pair of soldiers stands around and talks about how hungry they are to provide comic relief. Oh those wacky Scottish soldiers and their tea! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA… I wonder if either of them would be willing to lend me their gun…

Not wanting to post soldiers in the area to guard another one of Mother Earth’s buttcracks, the military posts signs and ropes off the fallout zone. We all know that stuff like signs and "DO NOT CROSS" ribbon mean nothing to the curiosity of young boys though, no matter where in the world they're from, so a pair of lads poking their snot noses around a nearby abandoned tower shake hands with slow and painful death as an unseen horror sends them scrambling into the night, and lands one of the kids into the hospital with serious radiation burns. Investigating the tower the next day, Dr. Royston and his buddy Peter Elliot discover an old wino, his still, and some nuclear material... that's had all of its radiation "sucked" out of it... not unlike “Lil’ Anubis” on a payday.

Later, a doctor and nurse canoodling in the hospital's radiation treatment ward discover what every canoodling couple in a horror movie learns sooner or later: canoodling = painful death! Hmmm, I'm starting to see why Ragnarok likes to say "canoodling" so much... Anyway, the naughty doctor-nurse combination finds their on-the-clock love affair interrupted by an unseen atomic terror that gives the doc's hands a case of gigantism before melting his face right the fuck off of his skull! His sultry candy-striper mistress Zena (I shit you not) watches on in abject terror and completely loses her mind as a result. It's probably all for the better in the dead doctor's case anyway, as I imagine bumpin' uglies with co-workers in the Radiation Room would've just led to years of agonizing and awkward genital diseases had he been allowed to continue. I think I'd rather have my face melted off in a brief moment of horror than have to one day wind up like Quentin Tarantino in Planet Terror, carrying my meat and two veg around in and old soup can.

When Royston shows up to investigate, it turns out that one gooey physician isn't the only crime at the scene, as the hospital's entire stash of Radium has disappeared too! With the lead casing melted through and no reports of anyone seeing anything suspicious on the grounds, Big R deduces that whatever it was that came into the room had to have slimed itself through the ventilation system! Back at the site of the original incident, it seems that our comedy relief has been stationed to watch after the fissure in case any more idiot kids happen to be hanging around looking for an excuse not to make it to puberty. Unfortunately for "Spider" and "Haggis", they won't be seeing either of their whimsical namesakes ever again. Yep, you guessed it, monster chow.

On a brief side note, why is the monster eating attacking people anyway? Obviously it feeds on radioactive material, and I can understand it causing burns and the occasional gooified visage on people who get too close to it, but why did it attack the soldiers? Additionally, unless a civilian couple was carrying their collection of irradiated rocks that they picked up on their vacation in Hiroshima, there's no reason for the creature to turn the two into primordial ooze! Meh, I guess you could come up with an answer if you listen to Dr. Royston's mandatory "head scientist provides a background story for the monster with a 'hypothetical' 5 minute monologue" scene, but as Dr. R's boss says following his little speech, it's amazing how easily everyone else just accepts the Doc's random guesstimates without question. Whatever the case, Rosyton thinks that the only way they're going to get any answers is to send someone down into that fissure! Pete, the wanna-be Quartermass that he is, jumps at the chance. He barely makes it out alive after discovering the remains of one of the dead soldiers and something so spooky he drops a deuce in his trousers, and once he's clear the military makes it a point to fill the crack with fire and a few sticks of TNT, then fill it all in with a few tons of tax payer concrete. Despite the grunts' confidence that any problem can be solved with explosions and cement, our man Royston is working on a way to solve the problem for real that involves neutralizing the radiation with sound waves. It's good thing too because, as you probably guessed, the creature finally reveals itself as a sentient flow of chocolate pudding breaks through the concrete and heads for civilization! And it's not long before reports of more molten humanity start coming into the police station as, like the living payload of an Exxon Valdez tanker, the blob monster storms Royston's crib at the Government Radiation Facility, hungry for some fat cat quality nuclear payload! Will Royston be able to perfect his neutralizing frequency modulator whatcha-ma-gizmo before the pissed off desert can consume a church full of people?! By Isis, I hope not!

X the Unknown is a very capably cobbled classic-of-sorts from the Hammer crew’s early days. Leslie Norman, despite his very girlie name, wields his suspense gun like Ron Jeremy wields his kielbasa: with great skill and leaving all who see it in awe! Well, maybe not “awe” exactly, but it’s still pretty good for a movie older than Sally O’Malley and all her kicking, stretching, hiking, and cameltoe-ing. By not showing us the monster for the first hour or so of the movie, our brains are left to fill in the blanks, not unlike the entity in the Evil Dead movies. Though the movie’s slime effects aren't amazing (again, come on, it was the fucking ‘50s man!), they're still better than lizards with fins glued to their heads or guys in ape suits manhandling dolls and plastic army men. The acting is all exceptionally well done too thanks to a great little cast and some well written dialogue! Granted, one more scene with Spider and Haggis and I would’ve put a rusty screwdriver through my surround sound, but at least they both get killed off in what we can only hope was flesh searing, pants wetting, brain melting pain.

By avoiding the standard issue cheeseball trappings of your typical '50s atomic monster movies, X the Unknown turns out to be a good way to spend a day from your sick bed. My only real gripe was that the flick was sadly lacking much of a soundtrack, and any good movie can be made 10 times better with a few dramatic twangs of a stringed instrument or two in the right spots. It’s not that there wasn’t any good mood altering auditory moments to be had, it just seems like the sounds budget could only afford to cover a handful of scenes rather than all of them.

Hopefully this will satisfy all of you Hammer fans out there who think the Tomb has been snubbing your studio of choice as of late. Additionally, I hope the rest of you who feel I give too much time to modern movie will be happy once this “52” project winds down at the end of the year. Up next will be the always infamous (and good for a laugh) 1957 Sam Katzman produced big buzzard flick The Giant Claw. Will I be able to handle the biggest squab this side of Q the Winged Serpent, or will the bug-eyed beastie clip my wings? Tune in and find out, over stimulated viewing type person!