Translate

Tuesday, July 13, 2010

The Crawling Eye: Attack of The Giant One-Eyed Creatures

 By Steve D. Stones Released in 1958, The Crawling Eye was also entitled The Trollenberg Terror in many European markets. The film was a companion feature with another British film – The Cosmic Monsters. Both films cast American actor Forrest Tucker in the leading role. While traveling on a train in route to Mt. Tollenberg in the Swiss Alps, Tucker meets two young sisters who are part of a clairvoyant stage act. One of the sisters, played by Janet Munroe, has ESP and insists on getting off the train at the Trollenberg Station. She senses strange activities happening on the mountain. Tucker accompanies the two sisters to their hotel and later travels up to the mountaintop to meet a scientist friend who is conducting experiments in a bomb proof laboratory. Scientists in the laboratory conclude that a strange radioactive force is causing clouds to move in unnatural ways around the mountaintop. Meanwhile, climbers on the Trollenberg Mountain are turning up missing and some are found decapitated. Munro is able to see their fate before it happens. The climax of the film shows the radioactive clouds covering the hotel at the bottom of the mountain, and then the clouds quickly travel up the mountain to the laboratory. The hotel occupants and scientists hide out in the laboratory as giant one-eyed creatures with long tentacles attack them. Tucker radios in jet fighters with bombs to destroy the creatures. Although this film is a much more technically superior film than the Cosmic Monsters, I recommend viewing The Crawling Eye with its companion film - The Cosmic Monsters. Tucker also starred in another great monster movie that same year in 1958 – The Abominable Snowman of The Himalayas, which was produced by Hammer Studios of England. This time Tucker teams up with the great British actor Peter Cushing. The punk rock band The Misfits recorded a song in 1999 inspired by The Crawling Eye. Watch out for those Crawling Eye creatures!

No comments: