"The Crawling Eye" -1958.
Tagline: "The nightmare terror of the slithering eye that unleashed agonising horror on a screaming world!" Whoa, whoa! Not the "world"! Just Switzerland. Sheesh! Relax! The Swiss have got this. Simmer down.
Let's talk poster: Completely wrong. Right down to the eye colour of the crawling eye. Tentacles are wrong, eye is shown as only an eye, not a goopy body with an eye,
the crawling eye never grabs any of the women... D-. See me after school.
Side note: (Ooh! New category!) This film was originally released as "The Trollenberg Terror" in the United Kingdom.
It was renamed "The Crawling Eye" by the U.S. companies who were distributing it.
They also cut the movie from 84 minutes down to 75 minutes, to "get to the monster faster".
Plot: Three mountaineering students are climbing The Trollenberg
when the climber above suddenly screams and falls from the mountain. His two friends haul him back up
by his safety line, but just before the rope breaks, one student can see his friend's head has been torn off!
Well, could be anything. Bad head cold, sneezing fit, one-eyed aliens....who knows? We won't find out for a while, because we cut to a train. Three people are sharing a compartment. Anne Pilgrim, her sister Sarah
(both from the U.K.) and Alan Brooks, an American on vacation. Alan is stopping in the little town of Trollenberg to visit a scientist friend of his. Anne and Sarah are on their way to Geneva but Anne looks out the window of the train and announces they must get off at Trollenberg. Anne then promptly passes out and falls into Alan's newspaper,
totally ruining both the "Dear Abby" and crossword sections. Alan is a gentleman, however and helps them off the train and also shares a ride to where he is staying, courtesy of Mayor Klein.
Anne discusses the aforementioned decapitation with an eerie precision. It becomes obvious Anne has some form of ESP. Upon arrival at the inn, Alan is greeted by Phillip Truscott,
who seems to have some sort of secret agenda. Truscott has a lot of questions about the "accident" on the mountain and seems to think Alan might know more than he's letting on. Herr Klein, being the Mayor, is trying to downplay the unfortunate incident. After all, it is a mountain and accidents do happen. No need to panic. On that note, a rotund man named Dewhurst
has decided to have a go at The Trollenberg, with the help of his more experienced climbing partner, Herr Brett.
(That's Mr. Brett gazing lovingly at the back of Alan's head....for some reason). Naturally, since they will be taking on a huge cardiovascular workout, they stop at the bar to have a snort. "Hey! We'll soon be dangling by ropes thousands of feet above the ground....I know! Let's poison our brains with alcohol so our judgement and reflexes are compromised! Yay!"...I'll go out on a limb and say Sir Edmund Hillary
wasn't three sheets to the wind when he ascended Mt. Everest. Just a guess. Anyway, Mutt and Jeff take off on their little adventure and Alan decides to drop in on his friend who works at an observatory stationed on the side of the mountain.
That is a good, solid-looking observatory. The perfect place to withstand some sort of attack. Anyway, Alan is greeted by his friend Professor Crevet,
who gives him the 50 cent tour. (No, not that one.)
The Professor
(no, not that one this time) shows Alan the multiple cameras
that can be used to view what goes on outside after the avalanche proof shield is lowered over the only window. Can we say "foreshadowing"?
A conversation between the two old friends reveals that Alan and the professor investigated a series of peculiar deaths in the mountains of the Andes three years before. Strange deaths and the bodies of the unfortunate climbers were never found. And, just like the Andes, the Trollenberg has a small cloud where there shouldn't be a cloud.
A cloud that registers as being radioactive!
But Alan makes it clear he isn't sticking his neck out and sounding like a lunatic again. Not this time! Look what happened in the Andes! He came off looking the fool! No proof of any kind, no bodies, no nothin'! However, there are many similarities, like Anne's strange compulsion that she and her sister must get off at Trollenberg. Enough similarities to make Alan concerned but not enough for him to risk his career. Not yet. But now the two drunken climbers can be seen on the cameras.
Professor Crevet fears for the climbers safety and presses Alan to act. But Alan is still reluctant.
"I'm not going to stick my neck out again like I did in the Andes," he says. "They practically accused me of dreaming the whole thing up. If I was to take a hand here, I'd have to have a list of documented facts, and they'd have to be pretty conclusive." Alan is torn between the horror of knowing what may happen and knowing there will be no evidence left after it happens to prove it. Alan is relieved to find that Dewhurst and Brett arrive at their cabin
without injury or beheadings. Well, I suppose a beheading would also cause injury. Okay, just no injuries then. Brett uses the 1958 iPhone
to call down to the inn and report to Mayor Klein that all is well.
This relaxes everyone (to a certain extent) and Anne and her sister agree to a quick example showcasing Anne's mind reading capabilities. Several items are laid out and hidden behind an open book. Anne enters the room and describes each item in detail,
even the serial numbers on a bank note. Everyone is quite impressed, until Anne gets that woogie look in her (quite beautiful) eyes
and announces (from a first person perspective) that Herr Brett has left the cabin and is walking up the mountain into the mysterious cloud. Unfortunately, she is absolutely right. Anne goes into great detail on Brett's zombie walk
and then promptly faints again. To her credit, she avoids everyone's newspapers this time. Meanwhile, Alan hops to the phone that communicates with the cabin to check on the two climbers. He wakes Dewhurst who is surprised to learn that Brett has indeed wandered off in the bitter cold. Dewhurst leaves the phone off the hook to go the door, but he is suddenly terribly frightened by something in the fog and runs back in to lock himself in.
He does, but it doesn't mean he's safe.
Dewhurt's panicked screams are enough to incite Mayor Klein to organise a party.
Uhm, no. Actually a rescue party. Similar to a bachelor party but with less alcohol and more missing persons.
Anne has been carried to her bed and is tossing and turning,
blurting out things going on on the Trollenberg that she couldn't possibly know. Anne even describes the rescue party ascending the mountain towards the cabin where Dewhurst and Brett were. Alan, Truscott and the rest arrive at the cabin to find it still bolted from the inside.
Alan breaks in the door to find everything inside is frozen stiff. Ice crystals glitter on the frozen door and the blankets,
but no ice crystals can be found on Dewhurst's head, for very good reason:
Well, I'm no doctor but I think we can all agree that this is not death by natural causes. But, hey, good news! Now Alan has a body and therefore proof. Now he feels more confident about pressing the authorities for help with these deaths. This business with the extreme cold is strange. So cold even the phone lines have snapped in two.
Meanwhile, Anne has given in to the strange urge she feels to go high on the mountain and has snuck away from her sister. She feels as though someone is calling her to them.
The search party has not given up on Herr Brett and has even enlisted the help of a search plane.
With the help of the plane, it isn't long before Brett is spotted and two of the rescuers
are directed to his location. Yay! Or, wait...what the Hell? Where's Brett?
And what's in his strangely bloody back pack?
Jinkies! It's Dewhurst's very precisely removed noggin! That's peculiar. If only Herr Brett was here to explain these strange events. Oopsie! Careful what you wish for! And down goes the two rescuers.
And now I have "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" going through my head. Oh well. At least it's not "Octopus' Garden"...I hate that stupid song. Meanwhile Sarah has discovered Anne has taken the tram up the mountain and calls the professor to intercept her. He does but it isn't long before she attempts another foray up the mountain, but this time she is met at the door
by Alan and the rescue party. That's 0 for 2, psychic aliens. Nice try. Everyone returns to the inn and a discussion ensues where we find two things: Truscott is a journalist who knows a great deal about the strange deaths and what happened in the Andes and Alan reveals that he is the leader of a special task force in the U.N. that is researching the possibility of alien invasion.....what? The U.N. does that all the time. Where have you been? Look at the uncanny resemblance between Agent Jay
and former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan.
There you go! A few less gray hairs and some cool Ray Bans and Kofi could easily be protecting the Earth from the scum of the universe. "Your argument is invalid." In the middle of this, Herr Brett comes staggering through the door,
not looking quite himself. Alan has seen this before (in the Andes) and offers to buy Brett a drink. But Brett has a drinking problem
and not in the typical way. His perception is skewed and that's not all. It seems that when Anne pops in for a nightcap
Brett suddenly regains all his faculties and hurls himself towards her, knife drawn!
Now, I'm no Cassanova but I'm here to tell you that 60 per cent of the time that won't get you a second date! Luckily, Alan is right there and dispenses some fisticuffs (what?...it's a real word! Go look it up!) sending Brett crashing into a conveniently placed sculpture,
knocking him unconscious. What's weird is this: Brett gets a large gash in his pumpkin but doesn't bleed.
Jinkies! That's peculiar as well! They decide to lock Brett up in a room until they can figure out what to do with him, but they obviously didn't watch "The Brain That Wouldn't Die" because Klein wanders too close to the door annnnnnd....
Blammo!....Why, oh why won't these characters in these movies listen to me? "Don't go too close to the door!", I say! "Don't poke the space goo with a stick!....Don't jam a cat's brain into a woman's head!....Don't go the moon where all those Cat Women are!" Nobody ever listens to me. Anyway, Brett escapes, finds a conveniently placed weapon
and makes haste for Anne's bedroom, where he is promptly shot for his troubles.
Brett's corpse is brought to a storage room for examination where two things are noticed: 1- Brett has been dead for over 24 hours (!) and 2- his body melts away from the heat of the lamp.
Naturally, Alan saw this in the Andes, too. Why did it take so long for him to mention all these things, again? Truscott announces that the radioactive cloud is making a bee-line for the inn, so Alan finally pulls his head out of his butt and sends everyone on the tram and up to the observatory in the hopes they will be safe. Hans, the barkeep, panics and drives away, directly towards the cloud. The fool! B-movies, by the way, are the only time you will hear people use those two words together to address a person carrying out an unintelligent idea. The tram thing is a good idea except for two things: 1- trams operate using cables, which are susceptible to extreme cold (like the phone lines)
and 2- little girls are infamous for going back to dangerous areas to retrieve dropped toys.
Finally! A goopy-bodied crawling eye alien thingy! Sheesh! Took long enough!
Not to worry, though! Alan's here to rescue little girls in distress with his handy-dandy climbing axe!
Those U.N. guys....they're something else! Alan and the girl jump onto the tram with the rest and begin the ascent to the observatory, but it's a bumpy ride as the aliens turn the heat way down hoping to snap the cables holding the car up.
Alan rushes everyone off the cable car upon arrival and into the observatory.
Alan is told by the professor that now the single mysterious cloud has broken into several clouds, each one slowly making it's way to the observatory. A knock at the large steel door and here's Hans,
who is acting rather peculiarly and complaining of the heat. Hmmmm....ah, well. I'm sure he's fine. But while everyone is getting organised to fight the Big Slimy Eyeballs Of Death (no wonder they didn't let me name them) Gary Busey sneaks in and attacks Anne!
...Oh, no. Wait. That's Hans still. At any rate, Truscott jumps on Hans' back (resisting the urge to yell "Tally-Ho!", I bet) and there is quite a disagreement, culminating in Alan stabbing Hans to death with a letter opener. You'll never see that now. No one gets real mail, so they have no use for a letter opener. Try stabbing a crazed madman with a PC or an iPad. Stupid e-mail! It'll be the death of all of us! I don't want to die at the hands of a crazed madman! I want to die peacefully in my sleep, like my grandfather. Not screaming like the passengers in his car. Well, Alan's pissed now, and calls the U.N. and orders an air strike against the Gross Killer Eyeball Doohickies.
But bombs might kill everyone, not just the aliens. What to do? Perhaps an experiment. In a world first, an American has to teach a European how to make a Molotov Cocktail.
These homemade firebombs are hurled
at the offending optic oddballs (!) who rapidly develop a distaste for being set ablaze.
Huh. Who knew? Quickly jumping on the bandwagon, Truscott decides to have a turn at tossing a cocktail. Problem: there's another alien on the roof that grabs him around the neck
and hoists him upwards. (See photo of G.I. Joe doll being lifted by alien with pipe cleaners).
Alan to the rescue!
He hurls a Molotov at the Offensive Ocular Icky and it drops Truscott. They rush back inside and take cover.
And a darn good thing, too, since the aliens are about to break in
and there's a bomber on the way!
The bomber does his thing
annnnnd....
Blammo!...or, more precisely: Whoosh!...I don't know...I'm no good with fire noises. Make your own.
Then we have several minutes of Eyeballs Jubilee,
And then a closing scene with a an old fart scooping up a hot young babe again.
What the Hell? This never happens when I'm in a Swiss village being over-run with alien eyeballs! There's a life lesson in here: I'm not Truscott, I'm Dewhurst! Son of a....!
Guess that mess! Ready?
Kudos to you if you identified the photo from my high school prom as being the false one! Your empty soda can and used Kleenex are on their way!
