Great atmosphere, silly special effects

"The Crawling Eye" is one of those movies that people like to lump in with campy fifties monster movies like "The Brain that wouldn't Die" or "The Giant Gila Monster". It's actually several cuts above those films due to the intelligent script and the beautiful cinematography--the Swiss Alps never looked better even if it was all shot on a set. Forrest Tucker makes a capable leading man as he does in "The Abominable Snowman". The sinister cloud was apparently done by filming a piece of cotton attached to a photograph of a mountain, but it is amazingly effective. Less successful are the "crawling eyes" themselves at the end of the film--they look like white, veiny cabbages waving their leaves around. Particularly unimpressive is the climactic shot of them gathered around the obviously miniature observatory. But the journey is the main thing. Up until the fx let you down, you have a well paced, well directed thriller that stands up with the best of that period.

The Crawling Eye and the Trollenberg

After watching The Crawling Eye, also known as the Trollenberg Terror, I had a dream in which I was gripping the cable car's wire as I was descending the Swiss mountain. My boyfriend and I watched the film on Halloween, and it was the perfect horror movie. It was so convincing that I bought into the premise that a radioactive cloud and space aliens could pose a threat! This is a classic 1950s picture, and the black and white photography is superb. It would be the perfect drive-in movie, if drive-in theaters were still around!

THE BIGGER TO SEE YOU WITH

Originally released as THE TROLLENBERG TERROR, this late fifties British scifi thriller may seem corny and amateurish by today's special effects standards, but it's still an effective little thriller. We don't even see the monsters until late in the film, but that adds to the movie's suspense. F TROOP'S Forrest Tucker is an American on holiday in Europe when he is called upon by old friend Warren Mitchell to help him in discovering the cause for several "accidents" involving climbers. Seems like it's parallel to an old misadventure they had in the Andes some years before. Along for the ride are two sisters, one who is a mindreader obviously affected by the mysterious cloud hovering over the Trollenberg mountain. Janet Munro, a staple of many British films of the late fifties and early sixties, plays the psychic. Ms. Munro is a capable actress whose career ended at the age of 38 when she succumbed to cancer. The lovely Jennifer Jayne plays her concerned sibling. Although overwrought and even laughable by the ending, THE CRAWLING EYE remains a fine example of those loveably cheesy scifi films of that era.