The Crawling Eye - 1958 quick review
The Crawling Eye (Also known as The Trollenberg Terror)- 1958 Dir. Quentin Lawrence. Screenplay by Jimmy Sangster, story by Peter Key. Starring Forrest Tucker (Allen Brooks), Jennifer Jayne (Sarah Pilgrim), Janet Munro (Anne Pilgrim), Warren Mitchell (Professor Crevett), Laurence Payne (Phillip Truscott).
The small Swiss town of Tollenberg has had a series of mountain climbing accidents for the last few months. UN advisor, Allen Brooks, travels to the town to investigate with the help of Professor Crevett and his mountain top observatory. They find a mysterious, radioactive cloud on the mountain that hasn’t moved for days. Could this be linked to the accidents? And why did one of the members of a mentalist sister act get compelled to come to this sleepy little village?
The Crawling Eye (or The Trollenberg Terror depending on where it was released) is widely known for being one of the many films featured by Mystery Science Theater 3000. Despite being a fan of MST3K as a teen I first caught this film in its original form, either on television or I just bought the VHS because of the hilarious name and box art. I love this film.
From the very start of the film we have two mountaineers calling to a third that is on the ledge above them. The unseen third climber complains that it’s foggy, so very foggy he says. Then screams and falls off the mountain. The two remaining climbers struggle to pull him up and while we get a glimpse of his bloody body, particularly his arms we only see from the shoulders down. And that is because his head was torn off. Then BOOM! Straight into a clip of a screaming train whistle as a train enters a tunnel and we have an intense opening credits scene. I am a big fan of a cold open leaning into a blood pumping credit sequence.
This film is surprisingly creepy if you look past some of the stilted acting and the low budget special effects which happened a lot during this time. There is a lot of mystery to this, it seems every character has something that they are hiding from the rest of the ensemble. While the monster effects are a bit goofy, the monsters are brutal. We see the aftermath of their victims and there is a shocking amount of blood for a film from the 50’s.
I would love to see this film remade as long as it can keep the almost Universal monster movie style feel to it, where the supernatural is shown in an almost natural way. Yes, no one wants to believe the supernatural aspects in the film, but they quickly get on board once things start to go down. It’s such a charming and weird film. Also the crawling eyes look a lot like some sort of giant octopus-like cyclops. They look terrifying but oh so fake and at one point a person is turned into an action figure when a crawling eye grabs him and lifts him off the ground.
