Also released in the US as The Crawling Eye
Tagline: Partly cloudy, with a chance of eyeballs.
Why I Watched It
Confession time: I didn’t watch this one for the list. I’ve owned it for years, and it lives in that small, sacred stack of movies I put on when I just want to be happy. Ask me for my favorite B movie of all time and this one makes the shortlist every time. Some nights it tops it.
So this viewing was less discovery and more reunion. I sat down with my notes open to figure out what keeps pulling me back to a Swiss mountain wrapped in a radioactive cloud. The answer turned out to be a lot of things, and only some of them involve the monster.
A quick word on the title. In the US it went out as The Crawling Eye, which is a bit like publishing a mystery novel called The Butler Did It. The British title keeps its secrets, so I’m sticking with Trollenberg.
Plot in 60 Seconds
Climbers keep disappearing on the Trollenberg, a peak in the Swiss Alps, and a strange cloud refuses to budge from the summit. Alan Brooks (Forrest Tucker) arrives by train, and sharing his compartment are two sisters, Sarah and Anne, who perform a mind reading act. As the train passes the mountain, Anne gets a very bad feeling.
Everyone lands at the same mountain hotel, just below an observatory run by Professor Crevett (Warren Mitchell), who has been watching that cloud for a long time. Something is up there. It doesn’t want visitors, and it has taken a particular interest in Anne. I’ll leave the rest for you to discover, except to say the American title is a pretty big hint.
The Watch Experience
It opens with a British censor card, an X certificate, nobody under 16 admitted, which always reads to me like a marketing ploy to make it sound scarier than it is. Then it cuts straight to a decapitation. Well done. The X was earned on the spot.
Then comes one of my favorite edits of the decade: a hard cut from the mountain to a blaring train horn. It drops you straight onto the train, where Anne and Sarah meet Alan and nobody quite says what they’re thinking. The tension is building before anyone has unpacked.
This one plays out like a stage production in a handful of sets, with the train compartment as the opening act. After that, everyone keeps gathering in the same few places to act out the next scene: the hotel, the climbers’ cabin, the mountain, the cable car, and the lab. The world feels tight and sealed off, like a snow globe with a monster in it.
Even late in the film, when the village gets evacuated up to the lab, you never really feel connected to the town. It’s still just this small group trying to survive. The townspeople only start to feel real at the very end, crowded into the lab’s entry hall and waiting to see how this goes.
And then there’s the lab. In what crazy world does an observatory watching for avalanches get unlimited funding?! Banks of dials, blinking lights, cameras, all of it devoted to keeping an eye on one mountain. It’s an absurd plot hole, the kind everybody happily waves through, and it turns out to be the hilariously perfect setup for the finale, when that overbuilt little fortress becomes everyone’s last line of defense.
Those cameras deserve their own billing. The zoom is next level telescopic power. They flip one on to check on the climbers, and the screen fills with a perfectly framed, film quality close-up of actors climbing a mountain miles away.
The climbers’ hut set is fantastic, too, especially the crank phone that gets used several times. Few things build dread like a man who has to wind up a telephone before he’s allowed to call for help.
Forrest Tucker is solid from his first scene, the kind of leading man who makes you feel like the grownups have arrived. Warren Mitchell’s accent as the professor is hilariously bad, and somehow it makes his scenes even better. I wouldn’t trade it for anything.
But Janet Munro makes this movie. Her voice, her intensity, the way she sells every single scene. The high point is Anne’s mind reading act for the hotel guests, which turns into a full episode when she connects with whatever is on that mountain. She keeps saying “mountain” and “hut,” and then she ends on “paperweight.” Brilliant. Two ominous clues and one desk accessory, and somehow the paperweight is the one that gives me chills.
The movie never does explain the mental takeovers that hit various people, or why Anne in particular is so drawn to whatever is up there. Not knowing isn’t too distracting, but it is a thread left hanging in the mountain air.
The wardrobe deserves a round of applause as well. Dresses, suits, even the climbing gear. Watch how the costumes shift as things go wrong, from formal to informal, from dinner wear to calamity clothes by the end. Kudos to that department.
Minor spoilers for the finale ahead.
The climax is a gloriously cheap miniature battle. A random military plane shows up and firebombs the monsters, apparently following Alan’s orders without a single question asked. (Who is this man? Whose air force is this?) And the big showstopper is a tiny figure of the reporter dangling from a monster tentacle, which I love more than I can reasonably defend.
Then come two of my favorite moments in the whole movie. First, once the bombing stops, with burning monster carcasses still draped all over the building, Alan tells everyone it’s okay to go outside now. What?! Second, like a lot of movies on this list, it just… ends. Abruptly. It feels like they ran out of script, or maybe film.
Scene Stealers
Best Line: Anne’s freak out: “Mountain… hut… paperweight.”
Best Performance: Janet Munro as Anne. Not close.
Most Delightful Moment: The observatory camera that can zoom from miles away straight into a perfectly lit medium shot.
Behind the Reel
- It started as a 1956 ITV “Saturday Serial” written under the shared pen name Peter Key (really George F. Kerr, Jack Cross, and Giles Cooper). Hammer regular Jimmy Sangster wrote the screenplay.
- It was director Quentin Lawrence’s first feature, and Laurence Payne came over from the TV version to play Philip Truscott again.
- Anton Diffring was set to play Professor Crevett but dropped out at the last minute. Enter Warren Mitchell, and that accent. Mitchell later became a British TV legend as Alf Garnett in Till Death Us Do Part.
- America saw it first. The Crawling Eye opened in the US on July 7, 1958, and the UK got The Trollenberg Terror that October.
- Effects were by Les Bowie, and a Radio Times review joked that the cloudy peaks were a couple of bits of cotton wool stuck on a mountain photo.
- It was the movie on the first episode of MST3K’s national run in 1989, and John Carpenter has named it among the inspirations for The Fog (1980).
Radiation Level
2.5 RADS (Low Exposure)
A few times, the men take Anne by the arm and make her stay put, or treat her like she can’t take care of herself without them. It’s mild next to most of the films on this list, and the movie still puts her at the center of the story, but it’s worth naming.
Radiation Report: Low-level chaperone readings detected. The only psychic in the building keeps getting steered around like luggage.
Does It Entertain?
Without question. This is the one I’d hand to anybody who swears they don’t like old sci-fi. It’s tense when it means to be, funny when it doesn’t, and full of performances that make an evening in a mountain hotel feel like a getaway. It holds up to repeat viewings, too. I’ve owned it for years and still caught new things this time, like just how good that train horn cut really is.
Cheese Wedge Rating
🧀🧀🧀🧀🧀
Five wedges for one of my all-time favorites: real scares, a giant eyeball, and Janet Munro stealing every scene she’s in.
Final Thoughts
There’s something fitting about this being the movie that launched MST3K’s national run. The riffers needed a film worth talking back to, and this one hands them plenty: the bottomless lab budget, the miracle cameras, the accent, the go-ahead-and-step-outside finale. But the reason it holds up is that underneath all of it, the movie is actually good at being scary, and Janet Munro is terrific.
That’s a rare combination. It can make you laugh and spook you in the same scene, sometimes with the same tentacle. So pour something warm, dim the lights, and keep an eye on the mountain. Trust me, it’s already keeping one on you.
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