Weirdhouse Cinema: The Crawling Eye

In this episode of Weirdhouse Cinema, Rob and Joe discuss 1958’s “The Crawling Eye” starring Forrest Tucker, Jennifer Jayne and Janet Munro.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:13):
Hey you welcome to Weird House Cinema. This is Rob Lamb.

Speaker 3 (00:16):
And I am Joe McCormick, and today we're going to
be discussing the nineteen fifty eight British sci fi horror
film The Trollenberg Terror, which was released in the United
States and probably better known overall as The Crawling Eye,
a title that is in really bad taste because I

(00:36):
think it flagrantly destroys the tension and mystery leading up
to the revelation of the monster's true form in the
final act. Rob, you and I were talking about this
the other day. I love how careless titling and other
movie meta used to be with just ruining all the
surprises of the story. Here. I believe we have the

(00:58):
Distributors Corporation of America to thank for this title. And
I have to think like if Citizen Kane had been
a foreign film and they had released it in America,
they would have called it like Sled Problems or something.

Speaker 2 (01:11):
Yeah. I think we still do see trailers in our
modern day that give away way too much and reveal
like most of the plot. I've seen trailers where afterwards
I'm like, okay, that's that's most of the movie. I
could maybe just watch the last five minutes of the
film to see how it wraps up, and I'd be
good at this point instead of watching the whole two
hour plus. But yeah, these films of this nature where

(01:34):
it was it was something being released to the US
market and then packaged in a different way, so as
I guess, just try to maximize the eyeballs on it,
and maybe too, there is the idea it's like, look,
the American teenager just wants to know what they're going
to be making out to. We're just going to go
ahead and make sure the monster is mentioned in the.

Speaker 3 (01:54):
Title transparency and advertising.

Speaker 2 (01:57):
And also maybe leaning more on like the I don't know,
like the drive and spectacle of the thing. You know,
it's like crawling eye. Don't you want to see that
as large as life? I don't know, that's my best bet.
I think it's mostly though, just take this thing from
the UK and just try and get the most attention
gathered around it, and so yeah, go ahead and spoil everything.

Speaker 3 (02:19):
To be fair, Trollenberg is not a word that most
people would recognize, and for good reason, because this is
not a real place in the movie, like the movie
makes up this mountain in Switzerland called Trollenberg.

Speaker 2 (02:31):
The Trolenberg Terror is a better title in many ways though,
because I think the Trolenberg Terror gives you more of
a taste of the slow build and a slow burn
aspect of the picture. That the picture is more mysterious,
and it is not really a giant monster movie except
for you know, just like the last what fifteen minutes
or so of the picture, but.

Speaker 3 (02:53):
Then it really goes whole hog on Giant Master movie.

Speaker 2 (02:56):
Yeah, it's rather ambitious and its special effects towards the
end with mixed result but also some great results.

Speaker 3 (03:01):
Yes. Yes, On the subject of sloppy marketing material, I
would like to submit into evidence the poster for the
US release of The Crawling Eye. Sometimes we talk about
movie posters, I think, especially with movies from the fifties,
this was just a golden age of posters and we've
really got some meat to chew on here. So on

(03:25):
the Crawling Eye poster, we have emerging from a black void,
a giant, distinctly human eye, complete with tear ducts and
lids and lashes highlighted by makeup. You can see mascara
and eyeliner, so it does look a little freaky, but

(03:45):
it does not suggest eyeball monsters from another planet. I
think it implies instead a supernatural, disembodied human observer reaching
out through some kind of dark space. Maybe you could
say that the eye on the poster here connects more
to the psychic and esp themes of the movie than
to the giant physical eyeballs that we will be hurling

(04:08):
firebombs at later in the film. But I think that
that's kind of a stretch to say that's really what
it's going for, especially since the psychic character is not
threatening at all in the movie and this eyeball is
clearly coming to get you. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (04:21):
Yeah, I think that's a good read on it.

Speaker 3 (04:23):
Also, this human eye on the poster has translucent yellow
and pink octopus arms, but only four of them, so
I guess this would be a tetrapus arms, and the
arms are wrapping around the body of a shrieking, recumbent
woman in a yellow party dress and high heels, who
I'm pretty confident does not appear in the movie unless

(04:45):
this is supposed to be Janet Monroe, but it does
not look like her. To me, and I don't think
she ever wears an outfit like this.

Speaker 2 (04:52):
No, no, you know, liked we've talked about before on
the show. If you could at all get the monster
carrying a screaming woman on the poster, you absolutely did it.
The monsters in this film, maybe it's a little more
of a stretch to imagine them carrying a woman, and
therefore this is just a rough approximation of what that
might consist of.

Speaker 3 (05:12):
The only person we see them carrying in the movie
is the newspaper guy. We see he gets grabbed up,
but he has not even held horizontally like the woman
shown in the poster. They're holding him firmly vertically. Yeah,
and it implies that they usually pick people up vertically
because they got to pop the head off, so they're
going to be going around, you know, kinda like around
the neck near the top. Anyway, nothing about this poster, also,

(05:36):
I would point out, suggests that the movie has to
do with mountains or mountain climbing, which it does. Next,
there is the copy on the poster. It says, the
nightmare Terror of the Slithering Eye that unleashed agonizing horror
on a screaming world. Now On one hand, I'm hesitant
to nitpick because I myself completely the ability to write

(06:01):
with any style when what's needed is some kind of
marketing or promotional copy like that. I just kind of
freeze up mentally there. But this is too wordy. Not
every now needs a modifier, but more to the substance
of what they're trying to say with taglines like this
that unleashes agonizing horror on a screaming world. This got

(06:23):
me thinking about how titles and taglines and plot descriptions
of horror and sci fi movies from the nineteen fifties
display an incredibly strong trend of plot scope misrepresentation. By that,
I mean like the actual plot and the events of

(06:44):
the film are incredibly local and small ball, but the
title and the description imply a feeling like the end
of the movie Independence Day, where it's the alien Horde
against a coordinated attack by the entire planet Earth. And
usually in these movies, only a few characters are involved
or presumably even aware of the events of the story.

(07:07):
Probably the whole thing takes place within a five mile radius.
That's usually the case with these Roger Korman movies and stuff,
And yet the movie will be called the monster that
conquered the planet Earth.

Speaker 2 (07:18):
Yeah, like it conquered the world. As a classic example
of this, as we discussed in the show, it basically
conquers the Tri County area.

Speaker 3 (07:24):
Yeah, but it's like bigger than just those few examples.
It happens over and over again. The actual story is local,
but the title suggests a world, world spanning events. And
I'm kind of curious about this, Like, why did advertisers
always want to make it seem like the plot had

(07:45):
big implications involving millions of people. There's nothing wrong with
small stories. Small stories that affect only a handful of
characters can be just as thrilling. In fact, I would
argue it's easier to make a small scale story thrilling.
Was there actually any evidence to suggest that drive in
audiences would always prefer the plot of an alien monster

(08:05):
movie to involve the entire world?

Speaker 2 (08:08):
This is an interesting question. I imagine some folks have dug
into this. There might be some sort of a Cold
War read on the ramifications here. But yeah, but I
do certainly agree with you that, like the lower stakes,
the localized stakes can certainly be just as thrilling, And
I think many of these movies are not merely like

(08:29):
incidentally having like a low stakes, like small hometown invasion angle,
Like that's the kind of thing that people can relate to,
like the aliens are coming here, the zombies are coming here.

Speaker 3 (08:41):
It is actually what makes the story work in the
cases where it does work. I mean not to say
there are some movies from this period that there are
more kind of world stage in terms of their actual mechanics.
I think, you know, The Day the Earth Stood Still
is more kind of a world stage movie involving those
big stakes, but a lot of yeah, they're actually quite local,

(09:01):
and when they work, they work because they're local. They
set the scope of the plot correctly to the ambitions
of the story they're going to tell. But then the
other thing I was going to ask is I think
the answer to this question is more clear. But I
was thinking specifically with these lower budget movies, if they
thought audiences wanted a huge story with global implications, why

(09:25):
did they not actually write a story like that? Why
did they make these local stories? I think the answer
there is just got to be budget, right, Like the
bigger story requires more actors, probably more sets, And so
I think you sometimes see these movies trying to bridge
the gap by having the direct plot be very local
with a small number of characters, but like the well,

(09:46):
they'll have a character like placing a phone call to
a general in Washington, you know, to like relay the
events or something, as if that that kind of gets
you halfway to the feeling of world spanning events.

Speaker 2 (09:59):
Yeah, throwing a few phone call, throw in a little
stock footage and you're good to go. News footage as well.

Speaker 3 (10:05):
Oh that's a good one, yes, yeah.

Speaker 2 (10:07):
Yeah, Like, you know, a great example of this is
Santa Claus Conguers the Martians, you know. Yeah, they actually
pull a number of levers in that picture to really
drive home the international scope of the of the threat.

Speaker 3 (10:19):
That's a really good point. Yeah. So anyway, I was
thinking about this, and I did have another thought back
on the other side, which is that with a lot
of these movies, you could make the argument that, well,
the direct plot doesn't really involve the whole world, there
are a lot of downstream implications for the whole world.
Like I was thinking about how many of these fifties

(10:40):
alien monster movies essentially have the same basic plot situation,
and it's that a small group of humans encounter a
some sort of advance team or small contingent of alien invaders,
usually just a single alien individual, with the idea that
if this one a monster, is not defeated, it will

(11:02):
pave the way for a full scale invasion and takeover
of Earth. So even though the actual plot you're seeing
in the movie is small and local, it presages a
global conflict. And yet in this case, I've been promised
by the poster that the world will be screaming, not
just that a guy named Hans will be sam A

(11:23):
couple of other great things about this poster. I love
posters that try to make you feel like your life
might be in physical danger by seeing the film. This
one says warning, if you've ever been hypnotized, do not
come alone.

Speaker 2 (11:37):
I like that, and that's that's some William Castle will
be proud.

Speaker 3 (11:41):
Uh huh. Also we get the like a second tagline,
as if the first one wasn't good enough. We see
a man dissolves ellipsis, and out of the oozing mist
comes the hungry eye, slave to the demon brain. How
well does that describe the movie? That's interesting because it
those are all words that would to describe things in

(12:05):
the movie, but in this sentence they refer to the
wrong things.

Speaker 2 (12:09):
This is back when they would employ poets to compose
a short poem that could go on the poster that
that speaks to, you know, some theme or a particular
scene from the picture.

Speaker 3 (12:20):
That's right. And then final thing on the poster. We
get a DCA release again, this Distributors Corporation of America,
and it's it promises that this is the company that
brought you rodin. I mean, come on, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (12:35):
And then then also star Forrest Tucker's name is in
red letters. Uh really, you know, going after that F
Troop audience, make sure they make it end for the picture.

Speaker 3 (12:44):
I don't even know what that refers to. What is
F Troop?

Speaker 2 (12:46):
F Troop was a TV show that Forrest Tucker was on.

Speaker 3 (12:49):
Oh okay, I have questions about what you're supposed to
get out of Forrest Tucker in this movie. He's not
bad in it, but he is. He's such a roast beef,
you know.

Speaker 2 (13:01):
Yeah, yeah, we'll definitely talk about his performance. But I
think in general, it's the nineteen fifties, there's an interstellar threat.
You need a tall, strong man to potentially lean your
head on and that's where Forrest Ducker comes in.

Speaker 3 (13:13):
Yes, now, all of this said, I actually think The
Crawling Eye is not bad. It is, in my opinion.
I wonder if you agree, Rob, this is one of
the better drive in sci fi monster movies of the era.
I found it quite engrossing, not boring, with a lot
of the same kind of goofy character tropes you often

(13:35):
see in these films, but with some pretty good dialogue
and some intrigue, some actually quite scary moments, especially with
like the zombie assassins later on and the scenes in
the cabin up on the mountain and stuff. There's some
stuff that actually works his horror.

Speaker 2 (13:51):
Yeah, absolutely, I think The Crawling Eye is a pretty
solid picture. It works better as the trollingburg Terror though,
again because yes, it's ultimately that sort of film. There's
a lot of a lot of mystery. It gives you,
gives you some things to think about leading up to
the monster battles, which again is it's only going to
be the last ten to fifteen minutes of the picture,

(14:11):
and at that point they do attempt to pull out
all the stops.

Speaker 3 (14:14):
Yes, and regarding pulling out the stops in terms of
the visual effects, I want to say, also, this has
got to be one of the glorioust films I have
ever seen from the nineteen fifties, so actually rather shocking gristle.
The scene I was thinking of is when they pull
the geology professor Dewhurst out from under the bed and

(14:35):
you just see a bloody stump on his neck. You
don't see other fifties movies like this.

Speaker 2 (14:40):
Yeah, yeah, I thought that the gore was shocking, you know,
certainly for the nineteen fifties.

Speaker 3 (14:48):
As for the monster design, this is one that has
gone down through the ages as a as a widely
mocked monster design, and I do the design is indeed hilarious,
Like the effectively scary moments sort of dry up after
the monster's true form is revealed. But also I really

(15:08):
admire this monster. It's not hilarious in the attack of
the the eye creatures way like that. It's hilarious in
its shoddiness. This is hilarious in its exquisite detail. I
really admire when movies of this era would commit to
a fully realized, absolutely insane monster anatomy like we get here,

(15:31):
rather than trying to like tone it down, make it
maybe look more tasteful or plausible. Take less risks. No, no,
you fools get weirder, risk more, and they absolutely did here.
This is a swinging for the fence's monster design, and
it looks weird, and yes, it looks funny, but it is.
It makes the movie.

Speaker 2 (15:51):
Yeah, absolutely, I really like the monster design here, and
I agree that. I don't know. On one hand, I
certainly agree that people have left at it over the years,
and we'll get into some of the reasons why. And
you know, I made sure to point it out to
people in my household so that they could laugh at
it as well. But I don't know. I don't that
I didn't think it was that funny. I thought it

(16:11):
was pretty effect like it looks real, like I feel
like it's a real monster. And if I'm laughing at it,
I'm not laughing at it because it's an effect, but
I'm like mocking an alien life form.

Speaker 3 (16:21):
It's just funny that aliens look this way.

Speaker 2 (16:23):
Yeah, I mean it's some of it, to be clear,
Some of the shots are shot here looking than others,
But like that main shot of the crawling eye coming
directly at you, I think that's pretty amazing looking.

Speaker 3 (16:37):
The smoke coming up around it.

Speaker 2 (16:39):
Yeah, Yeah, I think that's a that's a solid sequence,
and that's one of the reasons they use it several
times like that.

Speaker 3 (16:45):
I also like how many different themes are thrown against
the wall in this movie. I think it it keeps
the plot feeling kind of fresh, the fact that it's
not just an alien invasion movie. We get themes of mountaineering, mystify,
curious fog, psychic powers, and esp international intrigue kind of espionage,

(17:06):
like themes witchcraft and Resurrection of the Dead. There's there's
a lot of stuff going into the stew Yeah.

Speaker 2 (17:14):
A lot of times in nineteen fifties films, there's this
feeling of a very straight laced world and then there
is the strange element that is the threat. And here
there are enough of strange elements that kind of create
a world itself that feels a little off kilter from
the buttoned up world we might expect to encounter. The
psychic aspects of the plot particularly interests me because while

(17:35):
the sisters that we'll get into here, while they are entertainers,
one of them does have psychic abilities, and the reality
of psychic phenomena in the film feels widely accepted. I
don't know to what extent this is just kind of
an accident of the writing, or if this was a
part of their vision for it, but this would seem

(17:56):
to be a world where psychic phenomena is legitimate, but
also perhaps not widely understood or certainly capitalized upon.

Speaker 3 (18:03):
I think in the nineteen fifties there were probably a
lot of people who generally thought that among those in
the know, parapsychology phenomena were widely accepted, that it was
to some people thought of as a kind of a
kind of thing that the elites were just aware of,

(18:25):
that parapsychology really is onto something. There really is something
strange going on. There are powers we don't quite understand,
and that the people at the highest levels of society,
the real operators out there, all know about and accept this.

Speaker 4 (18:40):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (18:41):
Yeah, I think a pretty good read on it. And
certainly we do have historical evidence for some of the
things that were being researched, either in the military or
by groups adjacent to the military at the time, just
to at the very least see if there was anything
to them. But yeah, but it's one of the things
I did like about the picture this idea that like
nobody was like, Oh, those silly psychics, what can they

(19:03):
teach us about this this real world threat. They were like,
I don't know, get the psychics in here, let's see
what they can figure out.

Speaker 3 (19:10):
Well, yeah, and I would say also within the structure
of the movie, there's no real way that the psychics,
that the main one psychic character could be trying to
like scam anybody. There's like nothing she's going to get
out of trying to trick anybody into thinking she's psychic.
She's just like clearly experiencing some kind of information download

(19:31):
from extraterrestrial sources, and this is having an effect primarily
on her more than on anybody else. And so the
other characters are trying to be helpful, and yeah, you
don't see any like undue hostility toward her or anything.
But I also like the scene where they talk about
how the sisters used to be tricksters, that they started

(19:52):
off doing their psychic mind reading act by using a
code where they would just be you know, sleight of
hand type stuffy. They discovered through their career that oh,
just so happens one of us actually is fully psychic
and we don't need to use tricks anymore, which I
thought that was interesting because that almost suggests it's not

(20:13):
a that in the world of this movie, psychic powers
are not something you're born with, but maybe something you
develop through training that somehow by playing the part of
a psychic that is how she actually developed the psychic powers.

Speaker 2 (20:28):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (20:28):
Yeah, Anyway, I thought maybe we should hear, just do
a basic plot summary and then we can refer we
can know what we're talking about when we refer back
to things throughout the connections section and stuff. So the
basic plot is that you've got the Trollenberg Mountain in Switzerland.
This has long been a popular destination for sightseers and
mountain climbers. It's got a mountain side observatory that you

(20:51):
can reach by suspended cable car, a selection of well
established routes to the summit, and a cozy village in
the foothills offering accommodations for travelers. They don't really play
up anything in this movie like, ooh, you know there
are legends about this mountain going back centuries that you
know there's something evil afoot. It really is more like
this is a beautiful, well known mountain and lately something

(21:15):
weird has started happening here.

Speaker 2 (21:16):
Yeah, it's not something old that is threatening, folks, it's
something entirely.

Speaker 3 (21:22):
New, right, And what is that new thing? It is
a series of grizzly accidents in which climbers have disappeared
without a trace, or in a few cases, have been
found with their heads torn off. So in the action
sort of begins with an American agent of the United Nations.
That's an interesting main character here, a guy who's like

(21:45):
a U N fixer, basically named Alan Brooks, who has
been sent to meet with the observatory's lead scientists to
investigate this phenomenon. Also visiting Trollenberg are a pair of
sisters named Anne and a pilgrim who perform a traveling
mind reading act. They were originally on their way to

(22:06):
Geneva by train, but when passing under Trollenberg, the truly
psychic sister of the two and is overcome with a
compulsion to get off the train at this stop. She
has this esp feeling that there's something here she must do.
So we meet an ensemble of characters, including a geologist,
a covert newspaper reporter, a mountain guide, and an eccentric meteorologist.

(22:30):
They all come together with other characters to experience a
weird series of events involving radioactive fog, beheadings on a mountain,
astral projection, psychic enslavement, zombie assassins, and an alien invasion,
all culminating in this big showdown where our human characters
gather inside a scientific facility besieged by giant cyclopean brains

(22:54):
with tentacles. And that's the other half of the equation
is they call this the crawling eye, but could well
have been called the crawling brain as well, because the
main mass of the alien is basically a big like
house sized brain with tentacles coming off of a big
octopus arms reaching all over the place, and then one

(23:14):
huge honkin eye right in the middle.

Speaker 2 (23:16):
Yeah, it could have been the crawling brain as well
as the crawling eye. It could have been the climbing
eye or the climbing brain, because that's really what we
see more of here.

Speaker 3 (23:26):
Were you previously familiar with the Misfits song the Crawling Eye.

Speaker 2 (23:31):
This is not an era of the Misfits that I've
heard as much from. So this is off the nineteen
ninety nine album Famous Monsters, which I Believe is the
second album from the post Danzig era. I was never
a Misfits listener growing up because the Misfits were like
a little too obscure for me at the time and
maybe a little too dangerous. I was like, Ooh, I

(23:51):
don't know if I should be listening to you. These
are a bunch of bad boys. Yeah, later on I
got in, But at the same time I got into Danzig,
like Danzig seemed appropriate. I don't know, Danzig was more
available because there were music videos and it was on MTV.

Speaker 3 (24:04):
Somehow that feels backwards.

Speaker 2 (24:06):
I mean, some of those Misfit songs are pretty rough.
Oh yeah, A lot later and I enjoy a number
of them, and I enjoy stuff from the different eras,
so I wasn't as familiar with this one, but I
am familiar with a few of the tracks off of
Famous Monsters.

Speaker 3 (24:20):
I also didn't previously know this. I just found it
while I was reading up before doing this episode, despite
it not being in the Danzig era. I kind of
like this song. I mean, the production feels a little clean.
For the Misfits. I think I like their murkier sound
on the earlier albums, but yeah, it's I mean, the
lyrics are just a straight plot description of the movie.

(24:45):
But my favorite verse is one that has a great
neologism in it. It's the verse that says, all these
men are dying crawling I decapitizing Fiends without a face,
attack mankind. Two things are great there. One is the
reference to a completely different crawling brain movie fiend without
a Face, but then also decapitizing. That's just it that

(25:08):
sings to my heart. Nice. It reminds me of other,
of course, misfits neologism's like myrtilation.

Speaker 2 (25:16):
Now this one came off of your scouting list for
weird House Cinema. How did you become aware of the
Crawling Eye? Was it this song?

Speaker 3 (25:25):
Oh? No, no, no, Like I said, I heard this
song for the first time ever today. I'm probably sure. No.
It may be the fact that it was featured on
the first syndicated episode of Mystery Science Theater three thousand,
though I don't think I've ever seen that episode. I
think it's just come up because I've looked at episodes

(25:45):
lists that that could be it, or it could be
I don't know, I might I really don't remember how
I find some of these movies that I put on
our list. I just somehow I come across them. They
look interesting to me, and I throw them up there
to check out again later.

Speaker 2 (26:00):
All right, well, elevator pitch for this one, I'd say
the Misfits lyrics pretty much captured it for us. So
let's move on to hearing just a little bit of
the trailer idea.

Speaker 4 (26:21):
This alarm fills the knife with terror far high on
the mountainside a, mysteriote fear such as no human being
has ever seen before. Where there are mountains, there are
always clouds. But this one remains static on the side
of the trolling berg.

Speaker 3 (26:38):
It never moves. Freak of nature?

Speaker 4 (26:43):
Have they do?

Speaker 2 (26:43):
Active? Freak of nature?

Speaker 4 (26:45):
It strikes without warning, wreaking death and destruction, too horrible
to behold, A force of evil that torches its victims
and hurls them mercilessly to the brink of murder and madness.
What is it and what does it crave? This creeping

(27:06):
horror that hungers and thrives on human flesh while it
inhabits its own silent world that no man can penetrate.
No one is safe from expeller of destruction. A cold,
hypnotic stare striking fear into the hearts of all, creating
a frenzied nightmare for those who behold it.

Speaker 2 (27:32):
All Right, so at this point you might be wondering
where you can watch the Crawling Eye or the Trolenberg Terror. Well,
this one has benefited from various physical releases over the years,
and was again the first season one episode of Mystery
Science Theater three thousand on the Comedy Channel, which would
this would have been nineteen eighty nine, and then the
Comedy Channel became Comedy Central in ninety one, so this

(27:56):
was the first true season of MST following those KTMA episodisodes,
and many of you will remember the titular monster from
the Crawling Eye in the opening credits of MST three
K during that early season. Though, like you, I don't
think I ever watched this episode for one for some
reason or another, I never watched this film MST three K,

(28:20):
so I'm not sure how good the riffs are or aren't.

Speaker 3 (28:23):
I was reading about it. Actually, I've seen a number
of fans say it's not one of the best. I
think generally the very first season is not one of
the most prized. It's not like the earliest stuff was
the best. Most fans tend to think they got a
little bit better over time.

Speaker 2 (28:38):
Yeah, I think there are only a couple of episodes
from season one that I've really watched, maybe two or
three maybe. However, all of this comes to the point too,
when you're looking around for streams of The Crawling Eye,
A lot of the streams that are going to pop
up for you on official channels are going to be
that nineteen eighty nine MST three K episode. And you know,
I love ms TH three K. I part of my

(29:01):
appreciation for weird and sometimes arguably bad films comes from
being a misty back in the day and through today
as well. However, I hate it when that's the only
version of a film that's officially available. I feel like, yes,
if we can get the MST three K version, we
should also have access to the unriffed.

Speaker 3 (29:20):
Version of it.

Speaker 2 (29:20):
And it seems a little harder to find official streams
or even official physical media of The Crawling Eye right now.

Speaker 3 (29:27):
I fully agree there. I used to think that I
had seen a movie because I had seen the Mystery
Science Theater episode on it, and now I don't feel
that way. That's just a different thing. I love Mystery
Science Theater. It's probably my favorite TV show of all time.
But I think when they do an episode on a movie,
that episode is really a quite different thing than the

(29:50):
experience of watching the movie. Even if your experience of
watching the movie on its own is primarily an ironic
or a comedy driven one, it's still going to be
different watching it by itself.

Speaker 2 (30:01):
Yeah, yeah, I like both experiences, but yeah, I need
the uncut version of it. That being said, the version
I ended up watching was an unofficial YouTube stream of
it that had been colorized. I don't know when it
was colorized, but I was like, well, I'm tired of
looking for the version I'm going to stream. I think
this is it, and I don't know. I like the

(30:22):
colorization in it. It seemed fine to me.

Speaker 3 (30:24):
Okay, the version I saw was streaming on AMC Plus,
so okay watch.

Speaker 2 (30:28):
Oh so you did find an official stream of it?
That was oh yeah, okay, that one eluded me. There's
so many places to look for these things. All right,
let's get into the people behind this picture. Starting with
the director. It's Quentin Lawrence, who of nineteen twenty through

(30:51):
nineteen seventy nine English TV and film director, best known
probably for this film, as well as nineteen sixty one's
Cash on Demand, sixty three is The Man Who Find
Died and sixty four is the Secret of Blood Island.
He also directed an episode of the Old Avengers TV
show and was originally a physicist.

Speaker 3 (31:09):
Oh that's interesting. I wonder how often people make that
career switch.

Speaker 2 (31:13):
Yeah, the IDB science is to B movie director. The
IMDb trivia regarding this guy says that he even worked
on the Manhattan Project, but I don't know. I didn't
find additional information to back that up. I don't know
if that's true. Sometimes some some myth making finds its
way into the IMDb trivia.

Speaker 3 (31:34):
This movie was directed by Nils Borr.

Speaker 2 (31:37):
Yeah, all right, I don't think I mentioned this earlier,
But one of the interesting things about this picture is
that it is actually a remake of an earlier British
TV serial titled The Trollnberg Terror, and a couple of
cast members return to play the same part in this
adaptation of that earlier work. Well, yeah, I'll mention those

(31:58):
as we get to them. But as for the writers,
there are some additional uncredited writers according to the different databases,
but I'm just going to mention the screenplay credit and
the story credit. Screenplay credit goes to Jimmy Sunster, who
lived nineteen twenty seven through twenty eleven, writer and producer,
best known for his influential work at Hammer Studios, including

(32:19):
writing on the screenplay for fifty sevens The Curse of Frankenstein,
fifty eight s Dracula, fifty nine's The Mummy, sixties The
Brides of Dracula, in many many more.

Speaker 3 (32:28):
Oh, he wrote the Mummy movie that I have the
poster for right next to me, the one with Peter
Cushing or Christopher Lee.

Speaker 2 (32:35):
Yeah, that's right. Like, this guy was a big deal
in Hammer Studio. So for any of you Hammer Studios
nerds out there, this is somebody you definitely know about.
On top of that, there's an individual by the name
of Peter Key that also has a story credit as
best I could tell, British TV writer. But dates are
unknown for this individual. All right, now getting into the cast,

(32:56):
let's come back to Forrest Tucker playing Alan Brooks, that
American un investigator here looking into mysterious mountaintop disappearances, strange
clouds and beheadings.

Speaker 3 (33:08):
The James Bond of the United Nations.

Speaker 2 (33:11):
Yes. He lived nineteen nineteen through nineteen eighty six. American actor,
best known for his time as Sergeant Morgan O'Rourke on
the long running f Troop TV series. His film work
consists of a kind of a mix of genres, notably
a bunch of war in westerns, but with some monster
films thrown in. So His films include nineteen forty two's

(33:31):
Keeper of the Flame, forty threes Sans of Yuojima, forty
six is the Yearling, fifty sevens The Abominable Snowman of
the Himalayas, nineteen seventies Chisholm, and nineteen eighty seven's Time Stalkers.

Speaker 3 (33:43):
Oh, Time Stalkers, Oh wait, I said that, But I
was thinking of the wrong movie. I was thinking of
Time Chasers, also famously featured on Mystery Science Theater. Times
Stalkers is the one with John Ratzenberger and Klaus Kinski. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (33:56):
Yeah, I haven't seen Time Stalkers either, But maybe that's
when we should come back to write in listeners if
you have an opinion on this now, Joe, I want
to drive home here that mister Forrest Tucker was thirty
nine years old at the oldest when this film was made.
There's a common in here where somebody describes him as
his character as being he looks about forty, and I

(34:18):
was thinking, this man does not look forty. This man
looks at least fifty, and sure enough, he was younger
than forty. As far as I can tell, people.

Speaker 3 (34:28):
Were living different back then. This man is this man
is he has had a life.

Speaker 2 (34:34):
Yeah. Yeah, it's a very rugged thirty nine that this
guy has, and we do see him hard drinking and
smoking throughout the picture. Maybe that's part of it. Maybe
it's the suits that everyone wore. I'm not sure. Maybe
i'd look that old if I was wearing a suit
and certainly throwing back that many spirits. But we were

(34:55):
talking about how we should feel about this character in
this performance. I'm going to say that ultimately I thought
he was really good.

Speaker 3 (35:02):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (35:02):
Granted, it is a square jawed American male protagonist from
a nineteen fifties film, so you know what to expect here,
But I don't know. I felt like the character felt
lived in. He didn't feel like a cardboard cutout.

Speaker 3 (35:16):
So he is a rectangular sheet tray of roast beef,
but he is also he's a good version of that.
He's a likable enough character for a character of this sort,
and he brings what is being asked of him, which
is a sense of authority and command.

Speaker 4 (35:34):
You know.

Speaker 3 (35:34):
He's the person who kind of rallies everybody together when
they need to take action to defend against the eye
monster is attacking the observatory. He really feels like he
knows what he's doing. Took all thirty nine years of
his life to get that experience.

Speaker 2 (35:50):
Yeah, all right, Up next, we have our secret journalist character,
Philip Truscott, played by Lawrence Payne, who lived nineteen nineteen
through two thousand and nine. British actor. He also appeared
in episodes of Doctor Who in the nineteen sixties and
the nineteen eighties different characters, and his other credits include
nineteen seventy two's Vampire Circus and nineteen eighty one Cy Warriors,

(36:13):
one of only two actors reprising their roles here from
the original Trollenberg TV serial.

Speaker 3 (36:19):
Wait, so this guy is in reality the same age
as Forrest Tucker, but he comes off as significantly younger.

Speaker 2 (36:28):
Yes, yeah, this guy feels more authentically thirty nine forty
and it is interesting you could kind of look at this.
I guess this was a film that was made with
the intention of being marketed to both the US and
of course to UK and Europe, and so his character
is kind of more in line with what you'd expect
from a British male lead in a picture from this

(36:51):
time period.

Speaker 3 (36:51):
I would imagine, yeah, exactly. I mean, he's handsome, mysterious,
you don't know exactly what his deal is for about
half the movie, but then he revealed himself to be
a good guy. Yeah, he's kind of sneaking around a
lot at the beginning.

Speaker 2 (37:05):
All right, Now, let's look at the Pilgrim Sisters. Beginning
with the non psychic Sarah Pilgrim. She's played by Jennifer Jane,
who lived nineteen thirty one through two thousand and six,
a British actress, perhaps best remembered for this film, but
her credit stretch from nineteen forty nine to nineteen eighty five,
and they include sixty seven's They Came from Beyond Space,
eighty three's The Jigsaw Man in nineteen eighty five's The

(37:26):
Doctor and the Devils.

Speaker 3 (37:28):
So not only the non psychic of the two Pilgrim sisters,
but also portrayed as the I think supposed to be
the older sister and the more kind of responsible managerial one.

Speaker 2 (37:39):
Yeah, yeah, the logical one, the one that's making the
real world choices here, and then playing the psychic Pilgrim
sister and Pilgrim. We have the incredible Janet Munroe who
lived nineteen thirty four through nineteen seventy two.

Speaker 3 (37:53):
She's really good in this, I think my favorite performance
in the movie. It's a tough job to do. She's
got two you know, like in multiple scenes sort of
go into a weird trance where like some kind of
cloud from a mountain nearby possesses her brain and starts
radioing messages to come out of her mouth. But she
delivers that with the with the real kind of urgency

(38:16):
and terror. And I thought all of her psychic trance
scenes were really good. There's a there's a kind of
danger that comes with her because when the mountain is
controlling her, you really feel like you don't know what
she's going to do. And at the same time, she's
a quite sympathetic character. I really really liked Monroe in this.

Speaker 2 (38:37):
Yeah, I feel like Anne Pilgrim really could be the
film central protagonist. And I think definitely would have been
in a later era. Oh yeah, her character feels the
most electric, the most mysterious, and I think in many
ways the most relatable, certainly to maybe to modern audience
is more than contemporary audiences. But I don't know. In
case could be made either way, and I would say

(39:01):
my only misgiving is that she ends up not playing
particularly strongly into the resolution. It would have been an
interesting choice had her psychic powers, which are deemed dangerous
by the aliens, would have actually been used to defeat.

Speaker 3 (39:17):
Them, Right, if the story had let her be as
dangerous as the alien thought she might be. Yeah, I
think that would have been great. I mean, I still
love her in this role.

Speaker 2 (39:28):
Yeah, absolutely still love the performance here, and it's still
the most entertaining character in the picture.

Speaker 3 (39:33):
But yeah, it's got those fifties drive in dynamics. She
mainly just needs rescuing.

Speaker 2 (39:38):
And so I grew up watching Janet Monroe in the
nineteen sixty Walt Disney live action fantasy romance film Darby
O'Gill and the Little People, in which she plays Katie O'Gill,
whose father is dead set on capturing the King of
e leprechauns and whose suitors include an Irish Sean Connery
and Estelle Wynwood's horrible son, Pony, played by Kieran Moore.

Speaker 3 (40:03):
I've never seen this, but you've mentioned it several times
on the show, so I looked it up and I
was I had the wrong idea of what this movie was.
I had been thinking of it as some kind of
weird throwaway made for TV thing, But it seems this
movie is widely is like, very well regarded. People think
it's great.

Speaker 2 (40:21):
It was a Lavish production, you know. I'm not sure
to what extent true Irish people in place that or not.
I don't know. Irish listeners write in and let us know.
But it's a film I grew up watching and I
always really enjoyed it. I rewatched it again just a
few years back, and it was still a lot of fun.

(40:41):
And she's a big part of its charm. Just a
very charismatic actress. She was a British actress who won
a Golden Globe Most Promising Newcomer Female for her role
in Darby Ogill and the Little People, and then she
went on to win a BAFTA Best British Actress nod
for her role in the nineteen sixty two drama Walk
in the Shadows. Her follow up Disney films included Third

(41:02):
Man on the Mountain from fifty nine, which I'm not
familiar with, and The Mountain Movie, Yeah, and then Swiss
Family Robinson from nineteen sixty which I definitely watched on
VHS back.

Speaker 3 (41:11):
In the day. Oh yeah, we had a tape of
that when I was growing up. I watched that a
bunch of times. I loved all the traps they made.
I was obsessed with the traps.

Speaker 2 (41:18):
She also appeared in the Day the Earth Caught Fire
nineteen sixty one, which is definitely one of those titles
that matches up with the themes we were talking about exactly. Yeah.
This was only her second feature film appearance, following nineteen
fifty to seven Small Hotel, and she was only active
from fifty seven through nineteen seventy two, so ultimately, you know,

(41:40):
not that long of a career, and her life was
cut significantly short. But very memorable screen presence here, just
tremendous acting presence. Tremendous screen presence.

Speaker 3 (41:51):
Agreed. As I said, this movie does stand out from
its genre, and Air appears in a number of ways,
and I think her performance is one of the main ones.

Speaker 2 (42:00):
All right, let's roll through some of the supporting performers. Here.
We have the character I believe it's Krevit, but they
mostly just call him the Professor, So I if they
ever said his name, I missed it.

Speaker 3 (42:12):
I don't remember what they called him. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (42:14):
Yeah. The Professor is played by Warren Mitchell, who lived
nineteen twenty six through twenty fifteen. British character actor of stage,
screen and TV, whose credits include sixty one's The Curse
of the Werewolf. That's the Hammer Studios picture with Oliver
Reed Is the Werewolf, nineteen sixty five's Help, That's the
Beatles movie, and nineteen seventy seven's Jabberwockie that was a
Terry Gilliam picture. I, however, know him best as the

(42:36):
villain from the Amazing Hammer Studios mod Space Western Moon
zero two from nineteen sixty nine, a film that was
also featured on a hisstory Science Theater three thousand, but
is also just a goofy good time in and of itself.

Speaker 3 (42:49):
Strange choice with this actor that, if this makes any sense,
Rob he is played as if he is supposed to
be an excess trick professor in terms of his the voice,
like the voice this actor does for him and stuff.
Kind of a one of those Einstein modeled eccentric, absent
minded professors. Except that's not really the way the character

(43:12):
is written. It's like it's there in the voice and
the way he looks. But the character is very straightforward
in terms of his role in the story.

Speaker 2 (43:21):
Yeah, it feels like this character should be arguing for
the return of Santa Claus from the planet Mars, but yeah,
he's a pretty straight life scientist. The accent I kept
puzzling over. The accent felt very Guido Sarducci, you know,
and I wasn't sure exactly where this guy was supposed
to be from. All Right, a couple of additional supporting
characters I want to mention really quickly here because they're

(43:42):
both pretty neat in their own right. We have Andrew
Folds playing Brett. This is a mountaineer, a doomed mountaineer
from early in the picture who then pops up later.
He lived nineteen twenty three through the year two thousand.
He was a British actor of stage and screen, whose
best known roles aside from this were sixty three's in
the Argonauts and Cleopatra, as well as nineteen seventy five's

(44:03):
Liths Somnia. He was also a British Labor Party politician
and served as a member of Parliament from nineteen sixty
six through nineteen ninety seven.

Speaker 3 (44:11):
Oh interesting, okay, so directed by a physicist and the
cast made their way into politics. I'm liking all the
connections here. I like Andrew Folds in this role because
he he's actually rather scary in some parts of the movie.
I mean, we'll talk more about the plot in just
a minute here, but he's a he's a kind of

(44:32):
man of few words, but as a kindly presence earlier
in the film, and then appears greatly changed later on,
and it works. It's a good shift, all right.

Speaker 2 (44:43):
And then accompanying him there on a doomed adventure up
into the mountains, we have the character Dehurst, played by
Stuart Saunders, who have nineteen oh nine through nineteen eighty eight,
another fun performance. This guy had a minor role in
nineteen eighty three. He's Octopusy the James Bond film. He
played Major Claw. This is a character who loses a
game of backgammon to the villain and then he's like,

(45:05):
you know, he gets up, and then who takes his
spot playing backgammon with the villain is, of course Roger Morris.

Speaker 3 (45:11):
James Bond OCTOPUSY is one of the Bond movies I
have the fewest memories of. I think I've only seen
it once or.

Speaker 2 (45:17):
So memorable in that it has an octopus in it
and Louis Jodan plays the villain. He was always a
lot of fun. But yes, anyway, Stuart Saunders, one of
is the second of the two actors reprising their roles
from the original Trolenberg TV series. All Right, a couple

(45:41):
of notes about the special effects here, because two of
the individuals here involved in the special effects are pretty
impressive names. Les Bowie, who lived nineteen thirteen through nineteen
seventy nine, has special effects credit credits here. Canadian born
special effects artists who worked mainly in the UK. A
legend in the field of Matt Paine, which we definitely
see a few of in this picture. This was not

(46:04):
filmed in the Alps or anything. It was filmed at
a UK studio. He's best known for his work on
various Hammer pictures, including nineteen fifty eight s Dracula, as
well as a handful of Ray Harryhausen films, including seventy
seven Sindbad and The Eye of the Tiger. No, we
were just talking about that, yeah, And he was also
on the Oscar winning team behind the effects of nineteen

(46:25):
seventy eight Superman.

Speaker 3 (46:27):
That's a good resume.

Speaker 2 (46:28):
Yeah. And then assisting him on this was Brian Johnson
born nineteen thirty nine. Johnson would go on to work
on the special effects teams for such films as nineteen
sixty eight, two thousand and one, A Space Odyssey, nineteen
seventy Nine's Alien, and nineteen eighties The Empire Strikes Back,
all three of which won Oscars for their special effects.

Speaker 3 (46:47):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (46:48):
He also served in the special effects teams for nineteen
eighty one's Dragonslayer and nineteen eighty four's The.

Speaker 3 (46:53):
Never Rittening Story Wow Again.

Speaker 2 (46:56):
And then finally, the composer here is Stanley Black, who
lived nineteen thirteen through two thousand and two. British film
composer and bandleader, whose other credits include fifty eights, The
Blood of the Vampire, nineteen sixties, The Flesh Fiends, sixty
one's The Day the Earth Caught Fire, in nineteen sixty
three's Maniac.

Speaker 3 (47:11):
I don't know if the music in this movie really
made an impression on me.

Speaker 2 (47:15):
There are a few scenes where I thought it was
fittingly creepy, but also, you know, it is definitely a
nineteen fifty genre score sought. I thought it was quite good.
You know, nothing that I'm going to listen to in isolation,
but I thought it was pretty good.

Speaker 3 (47:30):
Okay, I'll keep an ear out next time. I mean,
it certainly didn't strike me as bad. I just don't
remember anything about it.

Speaker 2 (47:36):
Yeah, there's some creepy sequences where I feel like everybody's
bringing there all to delivering that vibe, you know, from
the camera work, the performances, the lighting and so forth.

Speaker 3 (47:47):
All right, you ready to talk about the plot.

Speaker 2 (47:48):
Yeah, let's head out to the Alps.

Speaker 3 (47:50):
So the film opens with a landscape showing a narrow
valley in the Swiss Alps with massive mountains crowding on
both sides. And this is one of the things were
even in grainy black and white, it is a beautiful location.
At the bottom of the valley, there's a little river
and some farmland and a village, but the mountains are

(48:11):
so steep and so close. It's one of those places
where it would seem like the valley's got to be
in shadow for like a lot of the day. And
then the camera pulls back and then we pan up
the side of the mountains, and there's this feeling of like, oh,
it just keeps going up. Like first there's this big
alpine meadow and a dark spruce forest where it's kind

(48:31):
of flat halfway up the mountain, and you think this,
You think you might be looking at the top of
one of the mountains. But then you just keep panning
up and you realize that what the mountain you were
just looking at is like one of the lower slopes
of the real mountain, which is thousands of feet further up,
and that's sharp, bare rock covered in snow with mist

(48:51):
hanging all around the peak. And this is the Trolenberg again,
not a real mountain in Switzerland.

Speaker 2 (48:57):
And I think already the film is doing a good
job we realize it or not at this point, because
it is establishing the mountains as being these, you know,
almost like mythic mountains that are reaching up not merely
into the sky, but into the place where our world
borders on the unknown.

Speaker 3 (49:13):
Hmmm. Yeah, that's a good point. So up near the
summit we meet a couple of characters. There are two
young British men squatting on a narrow rock shelf, surrounded
by ropes, packs and climbing gear, and they're both looking
up above. There's a rope dangling down beside them, suspended
from an unseen upper figure. And one of the guys

(49:34):
says to the other guy, what's he doing up there?
And they call out, hey, Jimmy, and Jimmy calls back down,
telling them to wait a minute. He says he can't
see everything up where he is has gone foggy and cold.
He describes there's a cloud of something falling over him,
and then suddenly he says, hold on a second, there's
someone coming. His friends below are incredulous. They're like, what,

(49:57):
somebody's coming at the top of this mountain. One says,
who is it? Jim the abominable snow Man. And then
we hear some very odd noises from the fog above.
There is a high pitched hum that is swelling in volume,
kind of like an emergency broadcast tone. Also a repeating
chirp with delay, like some kind of radar system signaling

(50:18):
a ping, and the ping gets louder, as if something
is closing in, and suddenly Jim screams, and then from
the ledge above we see a body fall tied with
the rope. The body falls below the shelf with the
other two climbers, and the rope goes taut and they
struggle to pull their friend back up over the edge,
thinking Jim may still be alive. As they're hauling, they

(50:41):
actually say heave ho. And then as the body comes
into view, one of the climbers sees it, but the
other doesn't, and the one who sees it screams and
lets go of the rope, and this allows the body
to plunge down the side of the mountain, and the
other climber says to him, you idiot, we almost had him,
And the first says, did you see his head? It
was torn off, And the scream of torn off bleeds

(51:04):
into the sound of a locomotive horn, and suddenly we're
on a train somewhere else, rushing across the country, going
through these ravines and then black tunnels, and here we
get a title screen for The Crawling Eye. At least
in the US release, I don't know what the credits
look like in the British release. But a little observation
on my second viewing, the credit sequence here uses these

(51:28):
high contrast arrow designs. These like bold arrows going across
the black background and pointing to things, kind of similar
to the clean arrow motif you see in the Soul
Bass credit sequence for Alfred Hitchcock's north By Northwest, which
came out a year after this. Now, I am not
saying that Saul Bass and Hitchcock borrowed from the Crawling Eye,

(51:49):
but I'm saying I like these arrows. They're very classy, modern.
They feel kind of like the credit design equivalent of
an Emes chair.

Speaker 2 (51:57):
According to artofthetitle dot com, this the credit sequence is
is uncredited. We don't know who the title was. Who
did the title design here? So okay it wasn't Soul Baths.

Speaker 3 (52:07):
But no, it's not as elegant, I want to be clear.
It's not as elegant and elaborate as the Cell Bass designs,
but it's still I like the little arrow theme. It's cool.
So after the credits, we join our three main characters
in a train card. They don't know each other yet though,
so we're in a passenger compartment and we have Forrest
Tucker as Alan Brooks, looking all of thirty nine. He's

(52:31):
a handsome, early middle aged man reading a newspaper, minding
his own business. And then on the other side of
the car, we have Jennifer Jane and Janet Monroe as
Sarah and and Pilgrim, who are sisters traveling together. When
we first see them, Anne is sleeping curled up against Sarah,
and though the two sisters seem to be fairly close

(52:54):
in age, there is kind of a feeling of Anne
being being like a child like snuggled up against a parent.
When she's leaning on Sarah here and she's having a
bad dream and she kind of groans and startles herself awake.
Sarah asks if she was dreaming, and Anne denies it,
and then as Anne slowly becomes more awake, they joke

(53:14):
about whether she was talking about men in her sleep.
I think we're supposed to get the idea here that
both of these ladies are single and ready to mingle.
I think all of the characters are single. Probably, yeah, yeah,
I think so. There's not that nobody's discussing their home
life all that much. You wouldn't have a movie otherwise.
All these adults are ready to mingle anyway. Sarah points
out that they can now see the mountains out out

(53:37):
of the train window, and Ann gets up to look,
and at first she seems enraptured by the natural beauty.
We see this kind of angelic light fall over her face.
But then as she gazes up the slope of the
Trollenberg and her eyes kind of meet the snowy peak,
eerie music starts to play, and her smile fades, and

(54:01):
you think maybe she's going to start frowning or looking unhappy,
but it doesn't turn into a frown. Instead, it turns
into a blank, slackened expression, like she has lost control
of her mind. Anne's eyes roll back and she sort
of takes a step toward the door and then just
suddenly collapses, falling across the lap of the man across

(54:22):
from them. After a moment, she comes around and all
is well again, and they all introduce themselves to each other.
They become acquainted. Brooks offers and a flask to help
her recover from her fainting episode. I love how in
these old movies people seem to believe that hard liquor
just has general medicinal qualities and it treats everything from

(54:43):
the common cold to alien mind control. So he gives
her the flask and she's like, oh great, thanks. It
takes a big gulp and then her eyes bug out
of her head a bit.

Speaker 2 (54:51):
Yeah, they hit the spirits really hard in this movie.
Seemingly the drop of a hat, they'll just suddenly have
drinks and it's like, maybe like ten in the morning.

Speaker 3 (54:59):
Nobody really questions that it's good to just have a
good bel to liquor before you go mountain climbing. So
Sarah explains to Brooks that they're on the way to Geneva.
Brooks is getting off at the next stop, this sleepy
mountain village of Trollenberg. But suddenly something comes over Anne
and she tells her sister that they have to get

(55:20):
off at Trollenburg as well. And Sarah's like, no, no, no,
what do you mean, We're going to Geneva. But Anne
will not agree. She says she cannot travel any further today.
They've got to get off at the next stop and
stay at the Hotel Europa. And again Sarah is confused.
They've never been to this place. How does Anne know
what hotel to go to? And Anne says she doesn't

(55:41):
know how she knows, She just knows, and she is
insistent they've got to get off at Trollenberg. No debating this,
so fortunately enough, the Hotel Europa is also where Brooks
is going, so they're kind of all just traveling together.
So at the train station, our three characters meet up
with Hair Klein, the proprietor of the Hotel Europa and
also the mayor of Trollenberg. He is kind enough to

(56:04):
put them up at the hotel even though they don't
have reservations. Apparently there are very few tourists at the moment.
And on the car ride to the hotel, Anne is
staring intently out the window at the mountain. Brooks is
in the middle of like trying to get everybody to
smoke cigarettes, and Ann starts babbling about mountain climbers. She's
saying they shouldn't have tried to go all the way

(56:25):
up the mountain. The three English students, one of them
was killed. She says, peasants are leaving the mountain. They
say it's bad luck, and Klein seems to confirm that
what Anne is saying is true, though he doesn't share
the evaluation like He says that the superstitious worries of
the mountain people should be ignored. But how does Anne

(56:45):
know all this stuff? Curious now. Upon arriving at the
hotel bar, we meet several more characters. We meet Hans
played by Colin Douglas, the German speaking bartender. Hans at
several points kind of clams up when people start asking
questions about the accidents. He's kind of untrusting. We meet
Philip Truscatt played by Lawrence Payne. This is the guy

(57:08):
we mentioned earlier who was in the TV adaptation playing
the same character. This is our darkly handsome and mysterious man.
He's having a drink and a smoke at the bar
when our heroes arrive. He will later be revealed as
a newspaper reporter here on deep cover investigating the mountain
missed tragedies. And then to go ahead and round out

(57:28):
the rest of the main cast list, we will also
later meet Dewhurst. This is the rotund geology professor here
to study the mountain. Brett, who is a wiry, laconic
mountain guide who will be climbing the mountain with Dewhurst
and also the professor. Again, we think his name is Krevit,
at least that's what the wiki says. I don't remember

(57:48):
what they call him. The Professor a scientist who is
again superficially resembling a kind of standard caricature of Einstein,
but he's running the lab at the observatory on the
mountain side. So here I think I'm gonna maybe speak

(58:12):
about the rest of the movie in a more summary way,
and then we'll see if there's anything we want to
come back and focus on in more detail. So from here,
some of the main plot threads are that we see
Alan Brooks. He goes up to the observatory by way
of cable car up the side of the mountain to
visit his old colleague, the Professor, and they discuss the

(58:32):
disturbing incidents on the mountain, like climbers keep disappearing without
a trace. Plus there's the recent beheading of the English
student on the mountain. Also, Krevit explains to Brooks that
there is a strange cloud which hovers on one side
of the mountaintop, occasionally moving around, and the cloud they
have figured out is radioactive. This is another hallmark of

(58:57):
the nineteen fifties movie You Gotta Work our radio app
active something in there. So there's some backstory between these two.
We learned that Brooks was also involved in investigating a
similar incident in the Andes of South America several years before,
which had some of the same features. There was a
weird radioactive bank of fog around a mountaintop, and there

(59:22):
were disappearances of climbers, but that case also had other
features not yet seen here in Switzerland. Brooks mentions mental compulsion.
Also in this meeting, the professor proudly shows off the
observatory's defensive measures, including a lot of like Chekhov's blast
doors in the scene. So they've got like metal plates

(59:44):
that you can roll down over the windows to shield
themselves allegedly against an avalanche. Also, they have somehow got
closed circuit TV cameras that can show you anywhere on
the mountain at infinitely high resolution. I'm a little skeptical
of some of these features, but the point is this, Yes, yeah,

(01:00:05):
this observatory is basically a fortress. They also argue there's
some funny stuff here where they're talking about his funding.
The professors like, oh, yeah, the government, they just give
me money to do whatever I want as long as
I what are they arguing about. He's saying like, they
won't give me money if I report that there's something
weird happening here, but they will give me money for

(01:00:26):
anything else. We also have these characters do Hurst and Brett. Again,
Dohurst is the geologist and Brett is his mountain guide.
They're they're gonna ascend the mountains so that Dohurst I
believe he wants to collect samples for research. He's a
geologist and he thinks maybe you can find something weird
in the minerals up on the mountain that could explain something.

(01:00:48):
So they're going to go up the mountain. Their plan
is to camp the first night of the ascent in
a hut halfway up the mountain. They're doing a lot
of drinking, like they drink before they leave in the morning.
The characters all gather around for just some Scotch or
whatever before they go up the mountain. They're also drinking
a lot along the way and in the hut.

Speaker 2 (01:01:07):
But they do explain at least in passing, that this
will keep them warm.

Speaker 3 (01:01:13):
Folks that ain't how it works. Also, there's a decent
amount made of how Dohurst he's very exuberant at the beginning,
but like he's not cut out for mountain climbing, so
when they make it up to the hut, he's really
like not happy. Meanwhile, Anne continues to receive strange visions
and inexplicable downloads of knowledge and information from the mountain,

(01:01:35):
like she knows about all these things she should not.
She knows about the climber's hut, she knows about the
incidents of the previous weeks. At one point in the
middle of the movie, after Dohurst and Brett have gone
up to the hut to spend the night there, Sarah
and Anne put on a demonstration of their mind reading
act for the other guests at the hotel. Basically, Anne

(01:01:58):
is the mind reader and Sarah her assistant, and successfully
guesses a bunch of hidden objects. They do their standard
tricks as we talked about earlier. Sarah explains to Brooks
that they that they do not use any tricks or
secret codes. They used to, but then they discovered that
Anne actually is a mind reader, so they don't need

(01:02:19):
to use any sleight of hand anyway. In the middle
of this mind reading demonstration, Anne has another one of
these mountain mind control episodes where she begins to see
what is happening somehow to do Hurst and Brett in
the climber's hut up on the mountain. And weirdly, she's
almost talking as if from the perspective of a sort

(01:02:42):
of a threatened third being up on the mountain that
does not like their presence. So I think we're getting
some channeling of the crawling eye's mindset, eye mindset coming
through the ann mind reader.

Speaker 2 (01:02:56):
Yeah, and this scene and many like it in the
picture a legitimately unsettling. I think these really held up.

Speaker 3 (01:03:05):
Yeah. So in this scene, Brett, the climber, for some
inexplicable reason, decides to open up the cabin door and
walk outside, and he disappears into the night, and then
the cloud of radioactive myst comes down to surround the
hut with Dewhurst still in it. The minute at the hotel,
after hearing AND's channeling of what's going on up there,

(01:03:28):
they telephone the hut. There is a telephone up there,
it's connected by phone line, and Dohurst answers, not knowing
where Brett disappeared to, Dohurst becomes frightened and then he
screams at as something seems to be entering the cabin
door and then they lose the call. So it's time
for a search party. Got to have a search party
in a good mountain movie. The remaining characters organize into

(01:03:50):
a couple of parties to scour the mountain and find
out what happened to Dohurst and Brett. Dohurst is found
in the cabin without a head, and this is one
of the scenes of shocking Gore.

Speaker 2 (01:04:02):
I thought, yeah, absolutely, yeah, the gross, gross sing it's wet.

Speaker 3 (01:04:07):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:04:07):
Uh.

Speaker 3 (01:04:08):
Brett is spotted somewhere elsewhere on the mountain with the
aid of an airplane. But when a couple of the
mountaineers make it to his location, first of all, they
discover that his backpack has a human head in it.

Speaker 2 (01:04:22):
And then and you know that backpack is going to
have a human head, like the West. They're just sitting
there ominously and they're they're stalking up to it, and yeah,
it was. It was. This was also a highly effective
I thought.

Speaker 3 (01:04:34):
Well, the way it shot, it's like the camera's on
the backpack and he's reaching up to peel away the flap.
It's like, what were we going to see in there?

Speaker 2 (01:04:43):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (01:04:43):
But then after this, uh, Brett appears and attacks the
rescuers with a climbing axe. So something has happened to Brett.
Brett was not like this before. In the middle of
the movie, there's also this thing where Anne is she's
sort of losing con of herself and she is being
compelled by this outside force to try to ascend the

(01:05:06):
mountain alone as she goes into a kind of trance
like state, and she takes the cable car up to
the observatory, and she tries to go up further, presumably
up to the cloud, but she is intercepted by other
characters and guided back to the hotel. Then at the
hotel we get the return of Brett. So we're at
the bar and unexpectedly, Brett, the lost mountaineer, staggers in

(01:05:30):
from the cold. He seems dazed and uncoordinated, just saying
that he got lost and he just now was able
to make it back. And as everyone watches, Brett tries
to pour himself a drink and light a cigarette, but
he can't do it without assistance to steady his hands.
In the middle of this interaction, Anne Pilgrim comes down
to the lobby to join the group. And as soon

(01:05:51):
as Brett sees her, he turns violent and he tries
to lunge at her with a knife. Fortunately, he is
subdued and knocked unconscious by Brooks and trust it and
they lock him up in some kind of dungeon in
the basement of the hotel. Maybe it's supposed to be
a wine cellar.

Speaker 2 (01:06:07):
Yeah, yeah, maybe, so the your standard issue dungeon.

Speaker 3 (01:06:10):
Strangely, despite the fact that Brett is cut in the scuffle,
or I don't know if he was already cut. I
think he's supposed to be cut in the scuffle, he
does not bleed at all. And Brooks ends up relating
this to what happened during the previous incidents in the Andes.
They say there was a man when there was this
cloud in the Andes, there was a man who was

(01:06:31):
presumed dead and then reappeared to murder a local witch
in the mountains there who had psychic powers. And then
it turns out that they do an autopsy of the
man and they find out he had already been dead
for days before he appeared to do the murder. So
this is some plan nine from outer space stuff. It

(01:06:51):
is reanimation of the dead, as zombie assassins, and they
are going after Earth's precious psychics.

Speaker 2 (01:06:59):
Yeah, and it's this is such an interesting threat in
this picture that is not fully explored, like why are
the psychics considered such a threat? In fact, they seem
to be the only for the most part, they're the
only thing deemed a threat by the aliens. They're otherwise otherwise,
they seem happy to live about in high altitude clouds
and just kill the occasional mountaineer and so forth, at

(01:07:21):
least for now. Who knows what their long term plans are.

Speaker 4 (01:07:23):
Well.

Speaker 3 (01:07:23):
The explanation the characters eventually land on is that the psychics,
because they can connect mentally to the aliens and the clouds,
are able to provide information to the humans that would
potentially stop the Aliens from succeeding in their invasion, because
otherwise the Earthlings are going to be caught by surprise,

(01:07:45):
but the psychics can give them advance.

Speaker 2 (01:07:47):
Warning, so ultimately, as a privacy issue.

Speaker 3 (01:07:50):
Yes, yeah, But anyway, in the middle of the night,
Brett wakes up and he escapes the Wine Dungeon. There's
a creepy thing where he reaches out through a hole
in the door strangles the guy and then he tries
to kill Ann in the middle of the night, but
she's rescued when Brooks shoots him before he can hurt her.
And then there's a cool effect where there's like a

(01:08:12):
rapid decomp effect on Brett's arm I think caused by
like after the mind control thing is broken on his
zombie corpse, he like rapidly breaks down in the heat
of the hotel. Anyway, we move on to the final
act where in the final act they discovered that the
cloud is now descending the mountain. It has been up

(01:08:32):
there and now it is coming down here, and so
our characters who are in the no develop a theory. Basically,
they think it's got to be aliens. At one point
they say, what else could it be? Yeah, yeah, okay,
so it's aliens, and they figure out maybe the aliens
have to adapt themselves to our atmosphere on mountaintops where

(01:08:54):
the air is thinner, and then as they gradually acclimate
to our atmosphe, they can move on down and attack
us where we live. I thought that was kind of
cool because that's an inversion of like the you know,
the mountaintop acclamation that like if you're going up to
a very high altitude. You need to spend some time
at a kind of middle altitude to get used to

(01:09:15):
it and allow your body to adjust. And so they're
imagining the aliens are doing the exact opposite thing.

Speaker 2 (01:09:22):
Yeah, yeah, I like this idea.

Speaker 3 (01:09:25):
So, knowing that the aliens are coming down to the hotel,
the characters organize a retreat to the only defensible position,
the fortress observatory with the blast doors. Yeah. So there's
an evacuation scene at the hotel where Brooks is organizing
everybody to get in the cable cars and go up
to the fortress. I think one group of people goes

(01:09:46):
up first, and then Brooks is staying behind and realizes
that there's like a mother with a little girl there
and they were supposed to be part of the evacuation,
but the mother can't find her child, and they deduced
that the child has gone back to the hotel because
she left her ball in the lobby. Oh, child in peril.
So Brooks runs to the rescue, and here we get

(01:10:08):
the reveal of a great eyeball monster mounted on a
brain chassis coming in with tentacles waving all over the
place and smoke billowing out around it, and it attacks
basically the front door of the hotel. That goes right
to the front door and blows it open, and the
kids there trying to get the ball and the alien
I guess it's going to eat her or whatever. But

(01:10:29):
then Brooks arrives just in the nick of time and
hacks off one of the tentacles and rescues the child.

Speaker 2 (01:10:35):
Yeah, the eyeball especially is very convincing. It just feel
it does feel to me anyway, very organic, very real,
like I'm looking at some sort of a bizarre living creature.
The tentacles are maybe a little less convincing and verius,
but still still as far as tentacle effects go for
the nineteen fifties, is still pretty soft.

Speaker 3 (01:10:56):
There was a scene where I thought the suspense kind
of works pretty good good where they're in the cable
car trying to make it up to the observatory and
the fog bank makes it up to the bottom station
where the car comes in. And they've established earlier that
these creatures can freeze like telephone wires and cause them
to crystallize and shatter, and you can tell they're trying

(01:11:18):
to freeze out the cable that's guiding the car to
cause it to break and really looks like it's going
to happen, but they do manage to make it up
to the observatory and up there they basically agree that Okay,
heat is their weakness. We know that they don't like heat,
so let's get them with fire. You got to make
them alltt cocktails.

Speaker 2 (01:11:39):
That's right. This is where they learned that, yes, we
can defeat the alien menace by just lobbing flames at them.
And this is pretty much how it goes from there
on out, throwing Molotov cocktails at the enemy and then
realizing what we should probably bring the military in on
this as well. Let's have them fire bomb the observatory

(01:12:02):
that we are in in order to destroy the alien threat.

Speaker 3 (01:12:06):
The walls are thick enough that we'll be safe.

Speaker 2 (01:12:08):
Yes, they do establish that, but it's still it's a
little calling the air strike what location right here? Also
the cloud, there's some arguing back and forth with the pilot.
He's like, you want me to bomb a cloud and
they're like, yes, bomb the cloud.

Speaker 3 (01:12:21):
He's giving orders on the radio to the pilot bomb
the cloud. Yeah, And it's kind of like Tarantula There
were a bunch of movies like this in the fifties
where there's this monster they're debating like, how can we
possibly beat in the discover In the end, the answer
is bombs.

Speaker 2 (01:12:38):
Yeah, yeah, calling the military air strike just takes care
of it, cleans it all up. At the end, you
are safe, You are protected. But I do think it
would have been interesting, and I think in another era
you would have seen this, let's see and defeat the
aliens with those psychic powers, which I guess they've established
that psychic powers are only a threat to them, like

(01:13:00):
you said, because they reveal the alien secrets. It's a
privacy issue. But what if there was more to that?
What if what if there was a possibility there that
human psychics didn't even realize that they could just like,
with a particularly potent thought, you know, explode the large
brains of these creatures, you know, the psychander yah scanners

(01:13:21):
them to death.

Speaker 3 (01:13:22):
Yeah yeah yeah. Or what if the mind control went
two ways? What if Ann Pilgrim could make the aliens
like launch themselves off the mountain side or something.

Speaker 2 (01:13:31):
Yeah, yeah, that would have been interesting. But instead we
get the airstrike, which is you know, fitting of the air.

Speaker 3 (01:13:37):
I guess there's one more cool thing in the in
the final scene, which is remember the character Hans the bartender.
They say he takes one of the cars and he's
trying to At first he's like, no, I'm not going
up to the observatory. He's trying to high tail it
out of the valley and they see him drive into
the fog bank and like whoops, okay, no more Hans.
But then he reappears later he said the observatory, where

(01:14:00):
he's like, I'm fine, Actually, can I Where's Anne? I'm
looking for her.

Speaker 2 (01:14:05):
Yeah, So we give one more psychic assassin attempt by
the aliens, and this one is also pretty tense and effective.

Speaker 3 (01:14:11):
Yeah, he almost gets her, but then she is rescued
once again by by Brooks and Truscot, and then so
after they defeat the the Eye creatures in the end.
I don't know, is it kind of implied that that
maybe Anne Pilgrim and Philip Truscott are going to be
an item and maybe be maybe Sarah Pilgrim and Alan
Brooks are gonna be an item too. I think so

(01:14:33):
I implied romance.

Speaker 2 (01:14:35):
Yeah, we're left to do the assumed matchmaking on our
own but it's like, oh, these these kids are all young,
let's uh, they should they should get together, settled down.
The alien threat is defeated. Now it's time to start
a family.

Speaker 3 (01:14:51):
They'll they'll become part of the U N Investigative Psychic
Mind Reading Team.

Speaker 2 (01:14:57):
Yeah, because I think, you know, based on what they've established,
like the the threat's not over. There are other mountainous
regions of the world where these creatures may be taking
up residents and they need to be defeated. We need
somebody out there with psychic abilities to figure out where
they are, and then someone else to call in the
air strikes to deal with them.

Speaker 3 (01:15:14):
Did you read the same trivia claim I did that.
John Carpenter said he was inspired to do the movie
The Fog by this movie.

Speaker 2 (01:15:22):
Oh I didn't run across that, but it's not surprising
because again, this is a highly effective film, and I
know a lot of people loved it back in the day.
I did read. I don't remember this from my reading
of the novel, but in Stephen King's it there is
a reference to the crawling eye. I think one of
the kids is frightened by one of the sequences, and
you know, so it stood the test of time for

(01:15:46):
a reason.

Speaker 3 (01:15:47):
Though, there's a thing that I think works better in
this movie than it does in The Fog. Actually, this
is always so. I've always had a love hate relationship
with John Carpenter's The Fog. I really really like a
lot of things about it. The ghost story told at
the beginning is fantastic, and a lot of the atmospherics
in it are just wonderful, as the FOG's rolling through
town and we see all the kind of poltergeist effects,

(01:16:09):
and yeah, there's so much about it that works really well.
But on the other hand, I felt like it it
feels like it never quite comes together as a story
all that much. There's something kind of lacking in terms of, like,
I don't know, maybe it needs more of a main
character with more of a struggle or something, and so
I've thought about that before. But another thing in it
that never quite worked for me is the radio announcer

(01:16:33):
character played by Adrian Barbo, who's like calling out to
the characters over the radio where the fog is in town.
Something about the mechanics of that just never made sense, like,
oh the fog is there now, Oh it's there now.
It makes more sense in this movie when you're like
you have an observatory that's watching where the fog is going,
like on a mountaintop versus going down in the valley.

(01:16:55):
That kind of reads better, I think than the street
to street fog navigation and assistance.

Speaker 2 (01:17:01):
Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah, John Carpenter's the Fog
of film that I think I only ever saw once.
And I like the music and I like the fog
pirate effects. Yeah, but but I just have never gone
back to rewatch it.

Speaker 3 (01:17:13):
Yeah, mixed feelings about it, but the strong elements are
really strong. I can't believe I didn't mention the music obviously, Yes,
the music is fantastic.

Speaker 2 (01:17:21):
Yeah. Yeah, the fog monsters are great. And you know,
having mentioned Stephen King, I can only imagine that this film,
at least in some small way, helped inspire his novella
The Mist Fog Monsters, Missed Monsters. There's there's overlap there.

Speaker 3 (01:17:35):
Maybe we should do an episode on the fog at
some point, and that could be a good Halloween season one.

Speaker 2 (01:17:40):
Yeah. Yeah, Pirate Day. I don't know, I forget what
day Pirate Day falls, but I don't think we've done
a proper pirate is a pirate day?

Speaker 3 (01:17:46):
Is that different from talk like a pirate day?

Speaker 2 (01:17:48):
That that is what I'm thinking of, talk like a pirate.

Speaker 3 (01:17:52):
I don't know when that is either.

Speaker 2 (01:17:54):
No, I don't either.

Speaker 3 (01:17:55):
Well, uh yeah, R Maybe are we done here?

Speaker 2 (01:17:59):
I believe we are, but we done. We'd love to
hear from everyone out there if you have thoughts on
this film. At what point you were introduced to it?
MSD three K fans definitely right in about the crawling.
I just a reminder that Stuff to Blow Your Mind
is primarily a science and culture podcast with core episodes
on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but on Fridays we set aside
most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film

(01:18:20):
on Weird House Cinema. You can find a full list
of all the episodes we've covered over the years at letterboxed.
Our user name there is weird House, and you can
also look up weird House as its own playlist. Wherever
you get your podcasts. You can subscribe to it, you
can rate it there. You know, we'd ask that you
still subscribe and rate the core Stuff to Blow your
Mind podcast feed as well, but it's an additional tool

(01:18:42):
that we're experimenting with.

Speaker 3 (01:18:44):
Here's thanks, as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com.

Speaker 1 (01:19:04):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
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