Weirdhouse Cinema: The Crawling Eye
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Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema. This is Rob Lamb. And I am Joe McCormick. And today we're going to be discussing the 1958 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 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 he is.

titling and other movie meta used to be with just ruining all the surprises of the story. Here, I believe we have the 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. Yeah, I think we still do see trailers in our modern day that give away way too much.

and reveal most of the plot. I've seen trailers where afterwards I'm like, okay, 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 it was something being released to

to the U.S. market and then packaged in a different way so as to, 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. They're just going to go ahead and make sure the monster is mentioned in the title.

transparency and advertising. And also maybe leaning more on like the, I don't know, like the drive-in 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, uh, from, from, uh, from the UK and just try and get the most attention, uh, gathered around it. And so, yeah, go ahead and spoil everything. Why not? To

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. The Trollenberg Terror is a better title in many ways, though, because I think the Trollenberg Terror gives you more of a taste of

of the slow build and slow burn aspect of the picture. The picture is more mysterious, and it is not really a giant monster movie, except for just the last, what, 15 minutes or so of the picture. But then it really goes whole hog on giant monster movie. Yeah, it's rather ambitious in its special effects towards the end, with mixed results, but also some great results. Yes, yes.

On the subject of sloppy, sloppy marketing material, I would like to submit into evidence the poster for the U.S. release of The Crawling Eye. Sometimes we talk about movie posters, I think especially with movies from the 50s that this was just a golden age of posters. And we've really got some meat to chew on here. So.

On 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 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 firebombs at later in the film. Uh,

Uh, 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. Yeah. I think that's a good read on it. Uh, 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, uh,

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 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. No, no. You know, like we've talked, 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. Uh,

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. The only person we see them carrying in the movie is the newspaper guy. He gets grabbed up, but he is not even held horizontally like the woman shown in the poster. They're holding him firmly vertically. Yeah.

Uh, and it implies that they usually pick people up vertically cause they got to pop the head off. So they're going to be going around, you know, kind of like around the neck near the top. Uh, anyway, nothing about this poster. Also, I would point out suggests that the movie has to do with mountains or mountain climbing, which it does. Uh, 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 lose the ability to write with any style when what's needed is some kind of marketing or promotional copy. I just kind of freeze up mentally there. But this is too wordy. Not every noun 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 is

This got me thinking about how titles and taglines and plot descriptions of horror and sci-fi movies from the 1950s

Display an incredibly strong trend of plot scope misrepresentation by that I mean like the the actual plot and the events of 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.

And usually in these movies, only a few characters are involved or presumably even aware of the events of the story. Probably the whole thing takes place within a five-mile radius. That's usually the case with these Roger Corman movies and stuff. And yet the movie will be called The Monster That Conquered the Planet Earth. Yeah, like It Conquered the World is a classic example of this, as we discussed in the show. It basically conquers the Tri-County area. Yeah. 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, a 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 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 movie to involve the entire world? 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, I do certainly agree with you that the lower stakes, the localized stakes, can certainly be just as thrilling. And I think many of these movies...

are not merely like incidentally, uh, 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. 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, that are more kind of world stage in terms of their actual mechanics. I think, uh, you know, uh,

The Day the Earth Stood Still is more kind of a world stage movie involving those big stakes. But a lot of them, yeah, they're actually quite local. 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 yes.

More clear, but I was thinking specifically with these lower budget movies, if they thought audiences wanted a huge story with global implications, why 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. Yeah.

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, well, 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. Yeah. Throw in a few phone calls, throw in a little stock footage and you're good to go.

news footage as well oh that's a good one yes yeah yeah like a you know a great example this is santa claus conquers the martians you know uh yeah they actually pull a number of levers in that picture to really drive home the the international scope of the of the threat that's a really good point yeah uh so anyway i was thinking about this and 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 while the

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 alien monster movies essentially have the same basic plot situation. And it's that a small group of humans encounter a spook.

some sort of advanced team or small contingent of alien invaders usually just a single alien individual with the idea that that if this one alien monster is not defeated it will 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 screaming. Yeah.

A 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. I like that. William Castle would be proud. Also, we get 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 describe things in the movie, but in this sentence, they refer to the wrong things. This is back when they would employ poets to compose a short poem that could go on the poster that speaks to, you know, some theme or a particular scene from the picture.

That's right. And then final thing on the poster, we get a DCA release. Again, this Distributors Corporation of America. And it promises that this is the company that brought you Rodan. I mean, come on.

Yeah, yeah. And then also star Forrest Tucker's name is in red letters. Really, you know, going after that F Troop audience, make sure they make it in for the picture. I don't even know what that refers to. What is F Troop? F Troop was a TV show that Forrest Tucker was on. 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? Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. We'll definitely talk about his performance. But I think in general, it's the 1950s. 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. 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 crazy.

quite engrossing not boring uh with a lot of the same kind of goofy character tropes you often see in these films but with some pretty good dialogue and some intrigue some actually quite scary moments especially with like the uh the zombie assassins later on and the scenes in the cabin up on the mountain and stuff there's some stuff that actually works as horror

Yeah, absolutely. I think The Crawling Eye is a pretty solid picture. It works better as The Trollenberg Terror, though, again, because it's ultimately that sort of film. There's a lot of intrigue, a lot of mystery. It gives you some things to think about leading up to

the monster battles, which again is it's only going to be the last 10 to 15 minutes of the picture. And at that point they do attempt to pull out all the stops. 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 goriest films I have ever seen from the 1950s. Some actually rather shocking gristle, uh,

Uh, the scene I was thinking of is when they pull the, uh, the geology professor Dewhurst out from under the bed and you just see a bloody stump on his neck. You don't see other fifties movies like this. Yeah. Yeah. I thought that the, the, the gore was shocking, uh, you know, certainly for the 1950s. As for the monster design, uh, this is one that has gone down through the ages as a, uh,

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 admire this monster. It,

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 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 fences monster design. And it looks weird. And yes, it looks funny, but it makes the movie. 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 laughed 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 was pretty 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 a fact. But I'm like mocking an alien life form. It's just funny that aliens look this way. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, to be clear, some of the shots are shoddier looking than others, but like that main shot of the crawling eye coming directly at you, I think that's pretty amazing looking. The smoke coming up around it. Yeah, I think that's a solid sequence, and that's one of the reasons they use it several times like that.

I also like how many different themes are thrown against the wall in this movie. I think it keeps the plot feeling kind of fresh. The fact that it's not just an alien invasion movie. We get themes of mountaineering, mysterious fog, psychic powers and ESP.

uh international intrigue kind of espionage like themes uh witchcraft and resurrection of the dead there's a lot of there's a lot of stuff going into the stew yeah a lot of times in 1950s 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 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 interest me because while the sisters that we'll get into here, while they are...

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 to be a world where psychic phenomena is legitimate but also perhaps not widely understood or certainly capitalized upon

I think in the 1950s, 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 the there that parapsychology really is on to 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.

Yeah, I think that's 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 teach us about this?

real world threat. They were like, I don't know, get the psychics in here. Let's see what they can figure out. Well, yeah. And I would say also within the structure of the movie, there's no real way that the psychics, that the mentalists

main one psychic character could be trying to like scam anybody there's like nothing she's gonna get out of trying to trick anybody into thinking she's psychic she's just like clearly experiencing some kind of information download from extraterrestrial sources and this is having an effect primarily on her more than on anybody else and and so the other characters are trying to be helpful and 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 off doing their psychic mind reading act by using a code where they would just be, you know, sleight of hand type stuff. Yeah. But then 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. Yeah. Which I thought that was interesting because that almost suggests it's not a, uh, that it

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. Yeah. 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 mountainside observatory that you 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 weird has started happening here. Yeah, it's not something old that is that is threatening folks. It's something entirely new. Right. And what is that new thing? It is a series of grisly 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 a UN fixer, basically named Alan Brooks, who has been sent to meet with the observatory's lead scientists to investigate this phenomenon. Also.

Also visiting Trollenberg are a pair of sisters named Anne and Sarah Pilgrim, who perform a traveling mind-reading act. They were originally on their way to Geneva by train, but when passing under Trollenberg, the truly psychic sister of the two, Anne, 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. 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 with tentacles.

And that's the other half of the equation is they call this the crawling eye, but it could well have been called the crawling brain as well. Cause the, the main mass of the alien is basically a big, like house sized brain with tentacles coming off of it, big octopus arms reaching all over the place. And then one huge honking eye right in the middle.

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. Were you previously familiar with the Misfits song, The Crawling Eye?

This is not an era of the Misfits that I've heard as much from. So this is off the 1999 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 don't know if I should be listening to these. These are a bunch of bad boys. Later on, I got in. But at the same time, I got into Danzig. Like Danzig seemed appropriate. I don't know.

I don't know. Danzig was more available because there were music videos and it was on MTV. Somehow that feels backwards. Well, I mean, some of those Misfit songs are pretty rough. I got into them 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.

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.

Uh, but yeah, uh, it's, I mean, the lyrics are just a straight plot description of, uh, of the movie, but my favorite verse is, uh, one that has a great neologism in it. It's the verse that says all these men are dying.

Crawling Eye 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. Yeah, yeah. But then also Decapitizing. That's just it. That sings to my heart. Nice.

It reminds me of other, of course, misfits neologisms like myrtle Asian. Now, this one came off of your scouting list for Weird House Cinema. How did you become aware of the crawling eye? Was it the song?

Oh, no, no, no. Like I said, I heard this song for the first time ever today. I'm pretty sure. No, it may be the fact that it was featured on the first syndicated episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000, though I don't think I've ever seen that episode. I think it's just come up because I've looked at episodes lists.

Uh, that, that could be it, or it could be, I don't know. I might've, I really don't remember how I find some of these movies that I put on our list. I just, somehow I, I come across them. They look interesting to me and I, and I throw them up there to check out again later. All right. Well, elevator pitch for this one, I'd say the misfits lyrics, uh, pretty much captured it for us. Uh, so let's, let's move on to hearing just a little bit of the trailer audio.

This alarm fills the night with terror, for high on a mountainside, a mysterious 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 Trollenberg, it never moves. Freak of nature. A radioactive freak of nature?

It strikes without warning, wreaking death and destruction too horrible to behold. A force of evil that tortures its victims and hurls them mercilessly to the brink of murder and madness. What is it? And what does it crave? This creeping 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 its spell of destruction. A cold hypnotic stare striking fear into the hearts of all, creating a frenzied nightmare for those who behold it.

All right. So at this point, you might be wondering where you can watch The Crawling Eye or The Trollenberg Terror. Well, this one has benefited from various physical releases over the years and was the again, the first season one episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 on the Comedy Channel, which would this would have been 1989. And then the Comedy Channel became Comedy Central in 91.

So this was the first true season of MST following those KTMA episodes. And many of you will remember the titular monster from The Crawling Eye in the opening credits of MST3K during that early season. Though, like you, I don't think I ever watched this episode. For some reason or another, I never watched this film MST3K'd. So I'm not sure how good the riffs are or aren't.

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. 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 with a 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 1989 MST3K episode. And, you know, I love MST3K. Part of my 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 if we can get the MST3K version, we should also have access to the unriffed version of it. And it seems a little harder to find official streams or even official physical media of The Crawling Eye right now. I fully agree there. I used to think that I had seen a movie because I had seen the Mystery Science Theater trailer.

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

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 colorization in it. It seemed fine to me.

me. Okay. The version I saw was streaming on AMC plus. So, uh, you can watch it. Oh, so you did find an official stream of it. That was, um, Oh yeah. Okay. That one eluded me. There's so many places to look for these, these things.

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All right, let's get into the people behind this picture, starting with the director. It's Quentin Lawrence, who lived 1920 through 1979. English TV and film director, best known probably for this film, as well as 1961's Cash on Demand, 63's The Man Who Finally Died, and 64's The Secret of Blood Island. He also directed an episode of the old Avengers TV show and was originally a physicist. Oh, that's interesting. I wonder how often people make that career switch. Yeah.

The IMDb trivia regarding this guy says that he even worked on the Manhattan Project. But I didn't find additional information to back that up. I don't know if that's true. Sometimes some myth-making finds its way into the IMDb trivia. This movie was directed by Niels Bohr. 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 Trollenberg Terror. And a couple of cast members return to play the same part in this adaptation of that earlier work.

Oh, that's odd as well.

including writing on the screenplay for 57's The Curse of Frankenstein, 58's Dracula, 59's The Mummy, 60's The Brides of Dracula, and many, many more. Oh, he wrote the Mummy movie that I have the poster for right next to me, the one with Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. Yeah, that's right. This guy was a big deal in Hammer Studios. 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, a British TV writer, but dates are unknown for this individual. All right, now getting into the cast, let's come back to Forrest Tucker playing Alan Brooks, that American UN investigator here looking into mysterious mountaintop disappearances, strange clouds, and beheadings. The James Bond of the United Nations. Yes. Yes.

He lived 1919 through 1986. 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 and westerns, but with some monster films thrown in. So his films include 1942's Keeper of the Flame, 43's Sands of Ujima, 46's The Yearling, 57's The Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas, 1970's Chisholm, and 1987's Time Stalkers. 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. Time Stalkers is the one with John Ratzenberger and Klaus Kinski. Yeah, yeah. I haven't seen Time Stalkers either, but maybe that's one we should come back to. Write in, listeners, if you have an opinion on this.

Now, Joe, I want to drive home here that Mr. Forrest Tucker was 39 years old at the oldest when this film was made. There's a comment in here where somebody describes him as his character as being, oh, he looks about 40. And I was thinking, this man does not look 40. This man looks at least 50. And...

sure enough, he was younger than 40, as far as I can tell. People were living different back then. This man is, this man is, he has had a life. Yeah. Yeah. It's a very rugged 39 that this guy has. Um,

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 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. Yeah. Granted, it is a square-jawed American male protagonist from a 1950s 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. 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. He's the person who kind of rallies everybody together when they need to take action to defend against the eye monsters attacking the observatory. He really feels like he knows what he's doing.

Took all 39 years of his life to get that experience. Yeah. Uh,

All right, up next, we have our secret journalist character, Philip Truscott, played by Lawrence Payne, who lived 1919 through 2009. British actor. He also appeared in episodes of Doctor Who in the 1960s and the 1980s. Different characters. And his other credits include 1972's Vampire Circus and 1981's Psy Warriors. One of only two actors reprising their roles here from the original Trollenberg TV serials.

Wait, so this guy is in reality the same age as Forrest Tucker, but he comes off as significantly younger. Yes. Yeah. This guy feels more authentically 39, 40. 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 U.S. and, of course, to U.K. 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 time period, 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 reveals himself to be a good guy. Yeah. Yeah.

He's kind of sneaking around a lot at the beginning. 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 1931 through 2006. A British actress perhaps best remembered for this film, but her credits stretch from 1949 to 1985, and they include 67's They Came from Beyond Space, 83's The Jigsaw Man, and 1985's The Doctor and the Devils.

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. 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 Monroe, who lived 1934 through 1972.

She's really good in this. I think my favorite performance in the movie, it's a tough job to do. She's got to, you know, like...

And 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, with a real kind of urgency 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 yeah,

And at the same time,

Uh, she's a quite sympathetic character. I, I really, really liked Monroe in this. Yeah, I feel like Ann Pilgrim really could be the film's central protagonist. And, 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 audiences more than contemporary audiences. But I don't know. The case could be made either way. Um, and, and,

I would say 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, changed.

by the aliens would have actually been used to defeat them. Right. If the story had let her be as dangerous as the alien thought she might be, I think that would have been great. I mean, I still love her in this role. Yeah, absolutely. Still love the performance here and is still the most entertaining character in the picture. But yeah, it's got those 50s drive-in dynamics. She mainly just needs rescuing in the end. Yeah.

So I grew up watching Janet Monroe in the 1960 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 the Leprechauns, and whose suitors include an Irish Sean Connery and Estelle Wynwood's horrible son Pony, played by Kieran Moore. 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 very well regarded. People think it's great. It was a lavish production. I'm not sure to what extent true Irish people embrace it or not. I don't know. Irish listeners, write in and let us know. But it's a film I grew up watching, and it's...

I always really enjoyed it. I rewatched it again just a few years back and it was still a lot of fun. 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 O'Gill and the Little People. And then she went on to win a BAFTA, Best British Actress nod, for her role in the 1962 drama Walk in the Shadows. Her

Her follow-up Disney films included Third Man on the Mountain from 59, which I'm not familiar with. Another mountain movie. Yeah. And then Swiss Family Robinson from 1960, which I definitely watched on VHS back 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. She also appeared in The Day the Earth Caught Fire in 1961, 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 1957's Small Hotel. And she was only active from 57 through 1972. So ultimately, you know, not that long of a career. And her life was cut significantly short. But very memorable screen presence here. Just phenomenal.

tremendous acting presence, tremendous screen presence. Agreed. As I said, this movie does stand out from its genre and era peers in a number of ways, and I think her performance is one of the main ones. All right, let's roll through some of the supporting performers here. We have the character, I believe it's Crevett, but they mostly just call him The Professor. So I...

If they ever said his name, I missed it. I don't remember what they called him. Yeah. The Professor is played by Warren Mitchell, who lived 1926 through 2015. British character actor of stage screen and TV. His credits include 61's The Curse of the Werewolf. That's the Hammer Studios picture with Oliver Reed as the werewolf.

1965's Help, that's the Beatles movie, and 1977's Jabberwocky, that was a Terry Gilliam picture. I, however, know him best as the villain from the amazing Hammer Studios mod space western Moon Zero Two from 1969, a film that was also featured on a Mystery Science Theater 3000, but is also just a goofy good time in and of itself. Strange choice with this actor that, uh,

If this makes any sense, Rob, he is played as if he is supposed to be an eccentric 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 is written. It's like it's there in the voice and the way he looks, right?

But the character is very straightforward in terms of his role in the story. 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-laced scientist. The accent I kept puzzling over. The accent felt very Guido Sarducci, you know. 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 both pretty neat in their own right. We have Andrew Fouds playing Brett. This is a mountaineer, a doomed mountaineer from early in the picture who then pops up later. He lived 1923 through the year 2000. He was a British actor of stage and screen whose best-known roles, aside from this, were 63's Jason and the Argonauts and Cleopatra, as well as 1975's Lithsomania.

He was also a British labor party politician and served as a member of parliament from 1966 through 1997. Oh, interesting. Okay. So directed by a physicist and the cast made their way into politics. I'm liking all the connections here. Uh, I like Andrew folds in this role because he, he's actually rather scary in some parts of the movie. Uh, the,

I mean, we'll talk more about the plot in just a minute here, but he's a kind of man of few words, but is a kindly presence earlier in the film and then appears greatly changed later on. And it works. It's a good shift.

Alright, and then accompanying him on a doomed adventure up into the mountains, we have the character Dewhurst, played by Stuart Saunders, who lived 1909 through 1988. Another fun performance. This guy had a minor role in 1983's Octopussy, the James Bond film. He played Major Clive. This is a character who loses a game of backgammon to the villain. And then he's like, you know, he gets up and then who takes his spot playing backgammon with the villain is, of course, Roger Morris James Bond.

Octopussy is one of the Bond movies I have the fewest memories of. I think I've only seen it once or so. Memorable in that it has an octopus in it and Louis Jourdan plays the villain. He was always a lot of fun. Yes. Anyway, Stuart Saunders, he's the second of the two actors reprising their roles from the original Trollenberg TV serial.

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The team, made up of experienced scientists and engineers, is literally digging into the unknown to get to the bottom of a mysterious material discovered inside the mesa. This goes far beyond folklore. We're talking actual physical evidence that defies everything we know about geology, physics, maybe even reality itself.

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All right, a couple 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 1913 through 1979, has special effects credits here. Canadian-born special effects artists who worked mainly in the UK. A legend in the field of matte paintings, which we definitely see a few of in this picture. This was not filmed in

you know, in the Alps or anything. It was filmed at a UK studio. He's best known for his work on various Hammer pictures, including 1958's Dracula, as well as a handful of Ray Harryhausen films, including 77's Sinbad and The Eye of the Tiger. I thought we were just talking about that. Yeah. And he was also on the Oscar-winning team behind the effects of 1978's Superman.

That's a good resume. Yeah. And then assisting him on this was Brian Johnson. Born 1939, Johnson would go on to work on the special effects teams for such films as 1968's 2001 A Space Odyssey, 1979's Alien, and 1980's The Empire Strikes Back, all three of which won Oscars for their special effects. Wow. He also served in the special effects teams for 1981's Dragon Slayer and 1984's The NeverEnding Story. Wowie-an.

And then finally, the composer here is Stanley Black, who lived 1913 through 2002, British film composer and band leader, whose other credits include 58's The Blood of the Vampire, 1960's The Flesh Fiends, 61's The Day the Earth Caught Fire, and 1963's Maniac.

I don't know if the music in this movie really made an impression on me. There are a few scenes where I thought it was fittingly creepy, but also, you know, it is definitely a 1950s genre score. So I thought that it was quite good. You know, nothing that I'm going to listen to in isolation, but I thought it was pretty good. 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.

Yeah, there's some creepy sequences where I feel like everybody's bringing their all to delivering that vibe, you know, from the camera work, the performances, the lighting and so forth. All right, you ready to talk about the plot? Yeah, let's head out to the Alps. So the film opens with a landscape showing a narrow valley in the Swiss Alps with massive mountains crowding on both sides and eastwards.

This is one of those things where 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 so steep and so close. It's one of those places where it would seem like the valley has 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 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 hanging all around the peak. And this is the Trollenberg. Again, not a real mountain in Switzerland.

And I think already the film's doing a good job, whether 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. 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 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. 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. He

His friends below are incredulous. They're like, what? Somebody's coming at the top of this mountain. One says, who is it, Jim? The abominable snowman. 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 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 a 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 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.

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 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 U.S. 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 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 Saul 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 were

borrowed from The Crawling Eye, but I'm saying I like these arrows. They're very classy, modern. They feel kind of like the credit design equivalent of an Eames chair. According to artofthetitle.com, this credit sequence is uncredited. We don't know who did the title design here. Okay.

Wasn't Saul Bass. No, it's not as elegant. I want to be clear. It's not as elegant and elaborate as the Saul Bass designs, but I like the little arrow theme. It's cool.

So after the credits, we join our three main characters in a train car. 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 39. He's 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 Ann 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 in age, there is kind of a feeling of Anne 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 and denies it. And then as and slowly becomes more awake, they joke 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 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 of the train window and Anne 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

And 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 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 Anne a flask to help her recover from her fainting episode. God, I love how in these old movies,

People seem to believe that hard liquor just has general medicinal qualities and it treats everything from 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. Yeah, they hit the spirits really hard in this movie. Seemingly at the drop of a hat. They'll just suddenly have drinks and it's like maybe like 10 in the morning. Nobody really questions that it's good to just have a good bell to liquor before you go mountain climbing. Yeah.

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 off at Trollenberg 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 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 Herr Klein, the proprietor of the Hotel Europa and also the mayor of Trollenberg. He is kind enough to 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, Ann 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 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 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 Truscott, played by Lawrence Payne.

Pain this is the guy 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 mist tragedies.

And then to go ahead and round out 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 Crevett. At least that's what the wiki says. I don't remember 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 mountainside.

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In the newest season of the History Channel's The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch, the team, made up of experienced scientists and engineers, is literally digging into the unknown to get to the bottom of a mysterious material discovered inside the mesa. This goes far beyond folklore. We're talking actual physical evidence that defies everything we know about geology, physics, maybe even reality itself.

If you're drawn to the edges of scientific discovery beyond the world of what we think we know, this season is going to fascinate you. Just how deep does the truth lie? Find out on The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch. New season premieres tomorrow at 8, 7 central, only on the History Channel. Today's episode is brought to you by USPS.

Business owners and shipping managers, let me ask you something. How confident are you in your shipping process? If you're not using USPS Ground Advantage service, you might not be as in the know as you could be. Here's the deal. With USPS Ground Advantage service, staying informed isn't just an option, it's the standard. Imagine this. When your shipment leaves the dock, you know about it. It's in transit, boom, you know. And when it reaches your customer, you guessed it, you're in the know again.

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So here I think I'm going to maybe speak 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 disturbing incidents on the mountain.

climbers keep disappearing without a trace. Plus there's the recent beheading of the English student on the mountain. Also, Crevett 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 the 1950s movie. You gotta work a radioactive something in there. So, the

There's some backstory between these two. We learn 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 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 this scene. So they've got like metal plates 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 observatory. It helps move the plot along. Yes. Yeah. This observatory is basically a fortress. Mm-hmm.

They also argue, there's some funny stuff here where they're talking about his funding. The professor is 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 anything else. Yeah.

We also have these characters Dewhurst and Brett again Dewhurst is the geologist and Brett is his mountain guide they're they're going to ascend the mountain so that Dewhurst 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.

Uh, 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, some scotch or whatever, before they, they go up the mountain. They're also drinking a lot along the way and in the hut. Well, they, they do explain at least in passing that this will keep them warm. Uh, folks, that ain't how it works.

Also, there's a decent amount made of how Dewhurst, 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. Like she knows about all these things she should not. She knows about the climbers hut. She knows about the incidents of the previous weeks.

At one point in the middle of the movie, after Dewhurst 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 is the mind reader and Sarah is her assistant.

And, and successfully guesses a bunch of hidden objects. They do their standard tricks. Uh, 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 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 Dewhurst 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 of a threatened third being up on the mountain that does not like their presence. Yeah.

So I think we're getting some channeling of the crawling eyes mindset, eye mindset coming through the Anne mind reader. Yeah. And this scene, and many like it in the picture, are legitimately unsettling. Yeah. I think these really held up. 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 mist comes down to surround the hut with Dewhurst still in it. The men at the hotel, after hearing Anne's channeling of what's going on up there, they telephone the hut. There is a telephone up there. It's connected by phone line. And Dewhurst answers, not knowing where Brett disappeared to. Dewhurst becomes frightened and then he screams that 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 and a good mountain movie. The remaining characters organize into a couple of parties to scour the mountain and find out what happened to Dewhurst and Brett. Dewhurst is found in the cabin without a head. And this is one of the scenes of shocking gore, I thought. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Gross, gross scene. It's wet. Yeah. Brett is spotted naked.

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.

And then you know that backpack is going to have a human head like it's just sitting there ominously and they're they're stalking up to it. And yeah, it was it was this was also highly effective, I thought. Well, the way it's shot, it's like the cameras on the backpack and he's reaching up to peel away the flap. It's like, what what were we going to see in there? Nothing good is in that backpack. Yeah.

But then after this, 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 control of herself and she is being compelled by this outside force to try to ascend the mountain alone. And 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 from the cold. He seems dazed and uncoordinated, just saying that he got lost and he's 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, Ann Pilgrim comes down to the lobby to join the group. And as soon 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 Truscott.

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. Yeah, yeah, maybe so. Just your standard issue dungeon. 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 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 9 from outer space stuff. It is reanimation of the dead as zombie assassins, and they are going after Earth's precious psychics. Yeah. And it's this is such an interesting thread in this picture that is not fully explored. Like, why? 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. Otherwise, they seem happy to live about in high altitude clouds and just kill the occasional mountaineer and so forth.

at least for now, who knows what their long-term plans are. Well, the explanation the characters eventually land on is that the psychics, because they can connect mentally to the aliens in the clouds are able to provide information to the humans that would potentially stop the aliens from succeeding in their invasion. Because otherwise the, the, the earthlings are going to be, you know, caught by surprise, but the psychics can give them advance warning and,

So ultimately it's a privacy issue. 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 like reaches out through a hole in the door and strangles the guy. And then he tries to kill Anne in the middle of the night, but she's rescued when Brooks shoots him before he can hurt her.

And then there's a there's a cool effect where there's like a rapid decomp effect on Brett's arm I think caused by like after the the mind control thing is broken on his zombie corpse he like rapidly breaks down in the heat of the hotel. Yeah. 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 there and now it is coming down here.

And so our characters who are in the know develop a theory. Basically, they think it's got to be aliens. At one point, they say, what else could it be? Yeah, yeah. OK, so it's aliens. And they figure out maybe the aliens have to adapt themselves to our atmosphere on mountaintops where the air is thinner. And then as they gradually acclimate to our atmosphere, they can move on down and attack us where we live and

I thought that was kind of cool because that's an inversion of like the, you know, the mountaintop acclimation. 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 it and allow your body to adjust. And so they're imagining the aliens are doing the exact opposite thing. Yeah. Yeah. I like this idea.

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 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 deduce that the child has gone back to the hotel because she left her ball in the lobby. Yeah.

Uh-oh, child in peril. So Brooks runs to the rescue and here we get 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. It goes right to the front door and blows it open.

And the kid's there trying to get the ball and the alien, I guess it's going to eat her or whatever. But then Brooks arrives just in the nick of time and hacks off one of the tentacles and rescues the child. Yeah, the eyeball especially is very convincing. It just feels, it does feel to me anyway, very organic, very real. Like I'm looking at some sort of a bizarre living creature, um,

The tentacles are maybe a little less convincing in various sense, but, but still, still as far as tentacle effects go for the 1950s, it's still pretty soft. There was a scene where I thought the suspense kind of worked pretty good where they're in the cable car trying to make it up to the observatory and the

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 to freeze out the cable that's guiding the car to cause it to break. And it 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 Molotov cocktails. That's right. This is where they learned that, yes, we can defeat the alien menace by just lobbing flames at them. Yes.

And this is pretty much how it goes from there on out. Throwing Molotov cocktails at the enemy and then realizing, well, we should probably bring the military in on this as well. Let's have them firebomb the observatory that we are in

in order to destroy the alien threat. The walls are thick enough that we'll be safe. Yes, they do establish that. But it's still, it's a little... It's like calling the airstrike. 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. He's giving orders on the radio to the pilot. Bomb the cloud! Yeah.

Oh, and it's kind of like Tarantula. It's there were a bunch of movies like this in the 50s where there's this monster they're debating, like, how how can we possibly beat it? And they discover in the end the answer is bombs. Yeah. Yeah. I call it the military. Military airstrike 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 Anne defeat the aliens with those psychic powers, which I guess they've established that psychic powers are only a threat to them, like you said, because they reveal the alien secrets. It's a privacy issue. But what if there was more to that? 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 psychic feedback would be too much. Yeah, scanners them to death. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Or what if the mind control went two ways? What if Anne Pilgrim could make the aliens like launch themselves off the mountainside or something? Yeah. Yeah. That would have been interesting. But instead we get the airstrike, which is, you know, fitting of the era, I guess.

There's one more cool thing 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 hightail 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's at the observatory. He's like, I'm fine, actually. Where's Anne? I'm looking for her. Yeah.

Yeah. So we get one more psychic assassin attempt by the aliens. And this one is also pretty tense and effective. Yeah. He, he almost gets her, but then she is rescued once again by, uh, by Brooks and Trescott. Um,

And then so after they defeat the eye creatures in the end, I don't know, is it kind of implied that maybe Anne Pilgrim and Philip Truscott are going to be an item and maybe Sarah Pilgrim and Alan Brooks are going to be an item too? I think so. Implied romance. Yeah. We're left to do the assumed matchmaking on our own. But it's like, all right, these kids are all young.

They should get together. Settle down. The alien threat is defeated. Now it's time to start a family.

They'll become part of the UN investigative psychic mind reading team. Yeah, because I think, you know, based on what they've established, like the threat's not over. There are other mountainous regions of the world where these creatures may be taking up residence 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 airstrikes to deal with them. 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. 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 in it, you know. So, it stood the test of time for a reason. Though there's a thing that I think works better in this movie than it does in The Fog, actually. This is always...

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. And 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, the radio announcer character played by Adrian Barbeau, who's like calling out to the, to the,

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 and

that, that kind of reads better, I think, than the like street to street, uh, fog navigation, uh, assistance. Yeah. That's a good point. Yeah. John Carpenter is the fog of film that I think I only ever saw once. And I liked the music and I liked the, the, the, the fog pirate effects. Yeah. Uh, but, but I, I've just, I've never gone back to rewatch it. 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. Yeah.

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. You know, fog monsters, mist monsters, there's overlap there. Maybe we should do an episode on the fog at some point. That could be a good Halloween season one. 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 movie. What is Pirate Day? Is that different from Talk Like a Pirate Day? That is what I'm thinking of, Talk Like a Pirate Day. I don't know when that is either. No, I don't either. Well, yeah. R, matey, are we done here? I believe we are. R, are 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. MSD3K fans, definitely write in about The Crawling Eye.

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 on Weird House Cinema. You can find a full list of all the episodes we've covered over the years at Letterboxd. Our username 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 that we're experimenting with. Huge 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 stufftoblowyourmind.com. ♪♪♪

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