EDITOR’S NOTE: The Unknown Terror was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, November 16, 1963 at 3:00 p.m., Saturday, July 25, 1964 at 4:00 p.m., Saturday, January 12, 1974 at 1:00 a.m., Saturday, April 3, 1976 at 11:30 p.m. and Saturday, August 5, 1978 at 1:00 a.m.

I wonder what’s wrong with the people in these movies. If you told me there was a Cave of the Dead teeming with parasitic fungi, I’d say, “No thank you.” As it is, I barely want to leave the house.

Jim Wheatley (Charles Gray) is one of those people who didn’t listen and went to the Caribbean to find this cave. Now, his sister Gina (Mala Powers) and her husband Dan (John Howard) have come to find him, only to also find Pete Morgan (Paul Richards), a man who saved her husband’s life once, giving him a permanent limp and oh yeah, they were all in a romantic triangle once. Along with Raoul Koom (Richard Gilden), all four search for the cave, inspired by the lyrics they heard in a song by calypso performer Sir Lancelot.

Again, if I hear someone sing a song with lyrics like, “He’s got to suffer to be born again,” I’m out.

In Raoul’s village, Dr. Ramsey (Gerald Milton) — an ugly American — has married local Concha (May Wynn), who he regularly beats into oblivion. He’s been gathering slimy and fuzzy fruit from the area to do research on slime mold — as you do — and Dan decides to spread around some American money — $200 worth — to anyone who knows where the cave is.

Concha knows a place where you can hear dead men screaming and shows the men. At the same time, a moss man chases Gina. Soon, everyone is trapped in the cave and it’s been flooded, all the work of one of Raoul’s henchmen, Lino (Duane Grey). The cave is filled with fungus that grows all over everywhere, which is some experiment that Ramsey is doing for some reason. Seriously, what are the motivations of anyone in this other than some aberrant manifest destiny to do things because they haven’t been done yet?

Dan breaks his back and ends up dying, which frees up Pete to save Gina and they swim away as the fungus destroys everyone else. At least Concha gets to blow her husband up real good.

Released as a double feature with Back from the Dead, this was sold into syndication in 1960, at which point it ran non-stop on American television.

Director Charles Marquis Warren was mainly known for his Westerns and he developed Rawhide and Gunsmoke for TV. The godson of F. Scott Fitzgerald, he also wrote for pulp magazines, won the Purple Heart, a Bronze Star and five battle stars for his World War II service and directed and wrote the Elvis Western Charro! Many credit him as the creator of the television Western. Writer Kenneth Higgins also worked in TV and wrote the script for Ghosts On the Loose.

This was one of several B-features made by Regal Pictures, which was a company that 20th Century Fox used to shoot films in Cinemascope. That way, theater owners that paid for screens and projectors that used that format would have enough films to show their customers.

The monsters look good, the fungus looks like soap suds because it is, the natives see the cave as purgatory and white rich people intrude into their ancient ways and pay for it with their lives. This is what I call a nice rainy Saturday afternoon movie.

You can watch this on YouTube.