Yes, it's another one of those - a movie which, when
viewed as a young Dr. Freex, terrified me like few others. Now,
viewed many years later, The Crawling Eye holds up passably
well, unlike many other such films, which have only become laughable
with the passing years (although it should be mentioned that this
was the inaugural film for Mystery Science Theater 3000 ).
Based on a British TV serial called The Trollenberg Terror,
there are segments that still pack a punch, forty years later.
We start with the typical TV teaser: three students
are climbing the Trollenberg, a mountain in Switzerland; while two
rest on a ledge, the third has gone ahead to scout about. He calls
to the other below that it's incredibly foggy up there; wait, there
seems to be somebody else up here; then a scream, and his body plummets
past them. The two on the ledge stop his fall with the safety ropes,
and haul him back up, only to discover, to their horror, that his
head has been torn off.
But enough of that, we have to catch a train to Trollenberg,
upon which we meet American Alan 
Brooks
(Forrest Tucker) and two British sisters, Sarah and Anne Pilgrim
(Jennifer Jayne and Janet Munro, respectively). Brooks' destination
is Trollenberg village, but the girls plan to go through to Geneva
- the plan goes awry, however, when what seems to be an extraordinarily
powerful case of deja vu causes Anne, the younger sister,
to insist they, too, disembark in the village.
The girls have no problems getting a room at the Inn,
however; people are staying away from the Trollenberg in droves,
thanks to a series of deadly accidents, of which the beginning beheading
is only the latest. They do, however, find a fellow Brit in the
hotel bar: Philip Truscott (Laurence Payne), who seems inordinately
curious about the arriving trio, especially after he spots a gun
in Brooks' valise.
Brooks takes a cable car to his ultimate destination:
an observatory built into the side of the 
Trollenberg,
run by his old friend, Dr. Crevett (Warren Mitchell), who is studying
cosmic rays. For some reason, the study of cosmic rays requires
an observatory that is built like a fortress, complete with steel-shuttered
window. Crevett has summoned Brooks not only about the mysterious
spate of accidents, but a strange radioactive cloud that hovers
near the summit of the mountain, never moving in spite of the weather.
"It's just like what happened in the Andes," Crevett opines.
It is at this point that the movie makes a slight
shift in tenor, as the audience starts to piece together what is
happening - Brooks is some sort of UN troubleshooter whose career
was ruined by "what happened in the Andes", and whatever
it was resulted in a lot of death and destruction. Brooks is, therefore,
a tad gunshy about about calling in The Authorities. "It's
not at all like the Andes," he counters. "There's no mental
domination."
Funny you should mention that - Truscott has already
recognized the sisters as a Mentalist act he saw in London. At the
Inn, our major characters meet Dewhurst (Stuart Saunders), a geologist,
and Brett (Andrew Faulds), his guide. They're preparing to climb
the Trollenberg to investigate the accidents, and they might as
well be wearing red shirts with Star Trek insignia. Attempting to
comfort the apprehensive Brooks, Crevett says, "They'll be
alright as long as they stay away from the cloud."
The Pilgrim Sisters do their act for the major characters
that night - Sarah keeps her back turned
to Anne while Anne identifies randomly chosen objects behind a screen
as Sarah touches them. It becomes increasingly apparent that the
act is not an act at all - Anne is genuinely telepathic. One of
the objects, a snow globe with a mountain hut, puts Anne in touch
with the mind of Something that is approaching the climber's hut
halfway up the Trollenberg, where Dewhurst and Brett lie sleeping.
Brooks immediately rings the hut on a direct line, only to find
that Brett has wandered off. The observatory calls on the regular
telephone
to inform Crevett that the cloud is moving - toward the hut!
Dewhurst sees something outside the door, screams, and throws a
heavy bolt across the door - to no avail. On the other end of the
line, Brooks hears the geologist's scream before the line goes dead.
The next morning, the rescue party finds the door
still bolted from within. The door is forced open, but within, all
that is found is a layer of frost coating everything... and Dewhurst's
headless body. The phone lines have not been cut, but have shattered,
as if dipped into liquid oxygen. Two searchers later find Brett,
who is carrying the missing head in a rucksack. And an ice axe,
with which he dispatches the searchers.
Later, Brett shows up at the Inn and tries to kill
Anne. Truscott reveals himself to be a journalist chasing the story
of "what happened in the Andes", and Brooks and Crevett
reveal all. In the Andes,
there was also an old woman with some psychic ability, and this
psychic was picking up on the thoughts of the Something in the Clouds,
until the Something sent a mind-controlled assassin just like Brett
to kill her. Even though the killer in the Andes had been dead
for over twenty-four hours. Sure enough, when Brett's arm comes
too close to an oil lamp, his frozen flesh dissolves like a bone-centered
ice cube on a griddle.
Crevett's theory is that the Something in the Cloud
is from outer space, and is using the great height to acclimate
itself to our climate and atmosphere, as witness the cloud journeys
lower and lower on the Trollenberg each 
time.
In fact, as its flash-frozen zombie has failed, the cloud makes
a beeline for the village. Brooks and Crevett pack the entire village
off to the observatory, after Brooks finally calls The Authorities.
There, the titular creatures (there's more than one crawling eye)
lay siege to the place until Brooks finally figures out that fire
is a pretty good way of stopping creatures that are super-cold.
Several molotov cocktails and close calls later, the UN Peacekeeping
Force arrives and firebombs the tentacled meanies out of existence,
and everyone's safe until another cloud crops up. The end.
As you can tell from the synopsis above, the story
in The Crawling Eye is a bit more involved and colorful than
your average 50's sci-fi thriller. For this we can thank screenwriter
Jimmy Sangster, who wrote the lion's share of the classic Hammer
horror films of the late 50's-60's. Sangster rarely took the well-traveled
route in his scripts, and The Crawling Eye is no exception.
The character of Brooks is, in particular, fairly refreshing, as
everytime a frightened character asks him, "What now?"
Brooks truthfully answers, "I don't know" - over and over
again! And although Truscott and Anne fall into the mandatory young
lover clench at the end, Sarah and Brooks are not, thank God, forced
to form a couple. That would have been too tidy. The acting
is nicely competent throughout. I've always liked Forrest Tucker
as a leading man.
First, for the pointless bitching: I realize that
the title of the Movie was changed from The 
Trollenberg
Terror to the more sensational The Crawling Eye to entice
us brutal, bloodthirsty Americans into the theater (alternate titles
include Creature from Outer Space and either The Flying
or Creeping Eye), but the rather blunt retitling has
other, more unfortunate effects: for one thing, it makes Crevett
seem a bit of a dunce as he ponders the nature of whatever lurks
within the cloud. We in the moviegoing audience have a hunch that
it just might take the form of some sort of Crawling Eye.
So much for any impact the beastie's first appearance might have
had.
More to the point, extreme creepiness in the setup
notwithstanding, the cardboard TV origins of the film show through
to the overall detriment of the film. Too often, people obviously
stand before a painted backdrop. The miniatures are sadly unconvincing,
and never shot with an eye towards slow motion, to give them some
scale. Let's not even talk about the head in the rucksack. and the
worst-served by the budget, of course, are the monsters.
The Eyes look okay, and are even pretty ooky in close-up;
it's when they're called upon to move that we start having
trouble. The models seem to have some sort of mechanism that wiggles
the eye itself back and forth, but the tentacles themselves stick
out, stiff and unmoving in more than one shot. Again, when these
models are set afire, they flail about, stiff-armed, with a speed
that draws 
attention
to their true, small size. The worst occurs when a lurking
Eye hoists Truscott into the air and we cut to a far shot of the
eye lifting a clay model of the journalist, jiggling like the plastic
fish on the end of a child's toy fishing pole. The tentacles that
interact with people are your standard issue ropes-on-invisible-
wires, which behave just like ropes-on-invisible-wires, in a most
inorganic fashion. All these drawbacks, cumulatively, cost the movie
an additional half-Tor, knocking it down to Above Average, rather
than Good - and it gets that on the basis of the genuine
suspense and scares that overcome the glaring cheese of the FX.
Perhaps I am being unnecessarily harsh; as a child,
these monsters were absolutely real and frightening; but I can't
imagine even the most gullible filmgoer of 1958 seeing these Crawling
Eyes and not thinking, "Have I been ripped off?" Ultimately,
your enjoyment of The Crawling Eye will depend upon your
tolerance for such things; if it's particularly high that evening,
the movie can deliver a suitable 50's alternative to what passes
for entertainment on TV these days.
