Creature Quarterly Presents: The Crawling Eye
A hair-raising scream, and a body tumbles from above. The two climbers frantically haul on the line as it frays against the sharp rocks. Suddenly, one man's eyes bulge and he drops the rope, which snaps. The dangling body of the third man plummets unseen to the depths below.
"What's wrong with you?" his friend shouts. "We almost had him."
"Didn't you see?" replies the first man, his eyes staring in horror and his voice strained. "His head! It's been torn off."
Thus begins one of the more interesting and better-written creature features of the late 1950's, The Trollenberg Terror or, as it was more graphically titled in the United States, The Crawling Eye.
Directed by Quentin Lawrence, who went on to become something of a fixture in television, and written by Jimmy Sangster from a story idea by Peter Key, The Crawling Eye avoids most of the SF movie formulas that had already become cliched by the time it was released in 1958. Unlike its predecessors, where there was an unquestionable villain right from the start, the intentions of the aliens perched high atop their alp aren't revealed until more than halfway through the film. We might have our suspicions, but we aren't sure until the bodies start to pile up.
On a train bound for Geneva, UN investigator Alan Brooks (Forrest Tucker) meets the Pilgrim sisters, Anne (Janet Munro) and Sarah (Jennifer Jayne). The two are on holiday, bound for Geneva, but Anne suddenly demands they stop instead at a tiny village at the foot of the Trollenberg, then faints. After helping them find a room, Brooks takes the cable car up to a bunker-like observatory halfway up the mountain. There he learns from an old friend, Dr. Crevette (Warren Mitchell), that an event identical to one he experienced a year before in the Andes is occuring again. A strange cloud has appeared near the top of the alp, a radioactive cloud. Unfortunately, Brooks's first report to the UN on the phenomenon was dismissed for lack of evidence, and he has no hope of convincing anyone in authority that trouble is brewing.
For there are aliens in the clouds, and they are gradually acclimating themselves to the earth's environment by learning to live in temperatures warmer than their ideal. They must destroy Anne Pilgrim, whose clairvoyant abilities allow her access to their thoughts. And when they have finished with Anne, they will take on the rest of the world.
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