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The Crawling Eye movie storyline. On the Swiss mountain Trollenberg, one of three student climbers is suddenly killed, his head ripped from his body. Two sisters, Anne (Munro) and Sarah Pilgrim (Jayne), a London mind-reading act, are travelling by train to Geneva when Anne faints as the train passes the mountain. Upon waking, Anne insists that they must get off at the next stop.
UN troubleshooter Alan Brooks (Tucker), in the same train compartment as the sisters, goes to Trollenberg’s observatory, where Professor Crevett (Warren Mitchell) explains that, despite many climbing accidents, no bodies are ever found; an always-stationary radioactive cloud is regularly observed on the mountain’s south face. Brooks learns that similar incidents took place in the Andes three years earlier, before a similar radioactive cloud vanished without a trace. Local rumours circulated that something was living in the mist.
Anne is giving a mind-reading demonstration at the hotel when she “sees” two men in a base camp hut on the mountain: Dewhurst (Stuart Saunders) is asleep when the other man, Brett (Andrew Faulds), under some kind of mental compulsion, walks outside. Meanwhile, the cloud has enveloped the hut. Anne suddenly faints again, and Brooks phones the hut but no one answers.
A rescue party ventures to the hut looking for both men. Anne, in a trance-like state, urges the rescuers to stay away. Inside the hut, the group discovers that everything is frozen solid, despite the hut being locked from the inside. Dewhurst’s body is found under the bed, its head missing. A spotter plane arrives and circles overhead, and a man is seen off in the distance. At his location, the first rescuer there finds a rucksack with a severed head inside. He is suddenly set upon and killed by Brett, who quickly dispatches the second rescuer.
At the hotel, Brett wanders in, claiming he has was lost. Thereafter, he launches a knife attack on Anne, but the men manage to subdue him. During the struggle, Brett sustains a severe head gash, but no blood flows from the wound. Brett is heavily sedated and locked away.
Brooks recalls a similar incident in the Andes that followed a similar pattern: a man murdered an elderly woman who allegedly possessed psychic abilities just like those displayed by Anne. The killer’s body was discovered to have been dead for at least 24 hours prior to his murder of the old women. Brett escapes his improvised cell and resumes his hunt for Anne, this time armed with a hand axe. Before he can reach her, Brooks quickly dispatches Brett with a pistol. Upon inspection, Brett’s flesh appears to be frozen, and rapidly melts into nothing in the heat.
The Trollenberg Terror (a.k.a. The Crawling Eye in the United States) is a 1958 independently made British black-and-white science fiction monster film drama, produced by Robert S. Baker and Monty Berman, directed by Quentin Lawrence, that stars Forrest Tucker, Laurence Payne, Jennifer Jayne, and Janet Munro. The special effects were handled by Les Bowie.
The story was based on a 1956 British ITV “Saturday Serial” television programme written by George F. Kerr, Jack Cross and Giles Cooper, under the collective pseudonym of “Peter Key.” The film was distributed in the U.K. by Eros Films Ltd. in October, 1958 as The Trollenberg Terror, and in the U.S. by Distributors Corporation of America as The Crawling Eye. It was released in the U.S. on July 7, 1958 as a double feature with the British science fiction film The Strange World of Planet X (a.k.a. Cosmic Monsters in the United States).
The Trollenberg Terror’s storyline concerns United Nations troubleshooter Alan Brooks, later joined by journalist Philip Truscott, investigating unusual accidents occurring in the area of a resort hotel on (the fictional) Mount Trollenberg in Switzerland. Brooks suspects these deaths are related to a series of similar incidents that occurred three years earlier in the Andes Mountains, which involved an unexplained radioactive mist and an odd cloud formation believed by locals to be inhabited.
The main title music from The Crawling Eye was featured on the album Greatest Science Fiction Hits V by Neil Norman and his Cosmic Orchestra, released in 1979 on GNP Crescendo Records. The film is mentioned in Stephen King’s 1986 horror novel It as having been watched by one of the book’s protagonists; a crawling eye creature later appears as a manifestation of It, the novel’s title monster.
Under the title The Crawling Eye, the film was the first of many productions to be mocked on the TV series Mystery Science Theater 3000, after the series moved from KTMA to Comedy Central; the episode aired on 11 November 1989. The Crawling Eye was also briefly mentioned at the end of the season 10 finale covering Danger: Diabolik.
The Freakazoid episode “The Cloud”, airing 16 December 1995, spoofed the opening credits of the film, as well as key elements of the plot (though with the victims being turned into clowns instead of being killed). A song called “Crawling Eye” was featured on American horror punk band the Misfits’ 1999 album Famous Monsters; the song’s lyrics directly referenced the plot of the film.
The Crawling Eye (1958)
Directed by: Quentin Lawrence
Starring: Forrest Tucker, Laurence Payne, Jennifer Jayne, Janet Munro, Warren Mitchell, Frederick Schiller, Andrew Faulds, Stuart Saunders, Colin Douglas, Derek Sydney, Richard Golding
Screenplay by: Jimmy Sangster
Production Design by: Ronald Liles
Cinematography by: Monty Berman
Film Editing by: Henry Richardson
Art Direction by: Duncan Sutherland
Music by: Stanley Black
MPAA Rating: None.
Distributed by: Eros Films Ltd. (United Kingdom), Distributors Corporation of America (United States)
Release Date: October 7, 1958 (United Kingdom), July 7, 1958 (United States)
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