The Crawling Eye (AKA The Trollenberg Terror)

Dir: Quentin Lawrence

1958

****

I absolutely adore old low-budget sci-fi horrors and The Trollenberg Terror – now more commonly known as The Crawling Eye – is one of the best. It was the last film to be made at the wonderful but almost forgotten Southall Studios and the first to feature on the cult TV show Mystery Science Theater 3000. It is an adaptation of a TV series that first aired in 1956 and featured a little too much of the main story for such a short film in my opinion. It was wonderfully mysterious and full of glorious terror but ultimately let down by the story and the human element. The idea behind the monster is brilliant and the low-budget special effects are a thing of absolute beauty, indeed, it featured in Mystery Science Theater 3000 more for the performances, rather than the Crawling Eye (or the Ixodes as it was originally referred to). I’m not sure why the writers felt the need to include two performing mind-readers in the script when they had a perfectly good giant floating eyeball to cover the audiences science-fiction needs. Indeed, the ongoing story of people trying to kill said mind-readers purely for predicting the truth is a bit redundant and the last thing that would be on anybody’s mind having a massive pupil looking at you from the centre of a radioactive cloud. Okay, so the giant monsters made them do it but who listens to mind readers? I would have thought being a giant eye on the side of a mountain would have posed enough of a problem without being ousted by charlatans. Quite why the giant tentacled eyeball is hiding in a cloud on the edge of a Swiss mountain is unclear and somewhat unimportant; all that is important for our audience is to know that it has a tendency to cut of the head of anyone who dares venture near it. There is a lot of decapitation in this film and it is very much the better for it. Why the big octo-peeper enjoys the removal of human heads is unclear, all that matters is that we see it in all its gory detail. I’m not sure how the monster decapitates one particular mountaineer and puts his head in his own backpack, not with those massive tentacles, but I’m quite glad he did. It’s ridiculous, mysterious and terrifyingly brilliant, that is why people love it. The Crawling Eye even appears in Stephen King’s It in the 1958 segment of the story and horror film legend John Carpenter has stated that it was the main influence on his classic film The Fog. For all of the film’s faults, it does remember the important rule that it is what you don’t see that really scares the audience. Not only that, but it also remembers that a payoff is important, and that if you say the film is about a giant floating eyeball then you had better damn deliver a giant floating eyeball. Having it terrorise a hotel full of guests and go after a little girl on a cable car is just icing on an already delicious cake. It’s a shame that the monsters are defeated in the manner that they are and half of me really wanted them to win but the eight-year old me is still glad they didn’t. A decade of nightmares was quite enough. A truly wonderful 50s b-movie horror from the great Quentin Lawrence who not only directed the television series, but also directed the amazing ‘The Strange World of Planet X’.