The Crawling Eye [The Trollenberg Terror]

Creepy wind-blowing shots of the Trollenberg Mountain in Switzerland, with a strange apparition hovering, appearing like fog but not quite, as we cut to two college mountain-climbers on the mountain’s edge. A companion, Jimmy, is connected by rope to a higher peak, but he can’t see because it is so foggy. Through the dense muck, Jimmy sees somebody coming. Jimmy starts screaming, and the others see his body fling itself into the air. The two men hold the rope attached to him and attempt to pull him up. As the two climbers slowly pull him in, one man sees his body. That man releases the rope, which soon breaks, sending Jimmy to his apparent death. The one man asks the second why he let go of the rope when they had him. That man in a panic says to the first man, “Didn’t you see him … his head was torn off!”

Cut to a train blowing its whistle and speeding along, entering a tunnel as the credits roll. The train pulls out of the tunnel as the credits finish. Cut to a compartment inside the train; we see Alan Brooks (Forrest Tucker) reading a newspaper. Two young women are sitting across from him — one is sleeping — and the sleeping woman awakens when the second woman asks if she is all right. Anne Pilgrim (Janet Munro), the woman who was sleeping, watches the mountain until her eyes turn upward; she nearly faints and has to walk away. She finally faints right into Alan Brooks’s arms. As she lies there, revived, Anne introduces him to her sister, Sarah (Jennifer Jayne). Anne and Sarah are traveling to Geneva, but when the next stop is announced as Trollenberg, Alan’s stop, Anne says, almost in a trance, "We are going to Trollenberg.” Anne states they’ll stay at the Hotel Europa, although she’s never been to Trollenberg to see its hotels.

Exiting the train at Trollenberg, Alan is soon welcomed by a friend, Herr Klein (Frederick Schiller), who asks if he can put the sisters up at the Europa, as he is the proprietor. He says he can and takes their bags. Looking to the side of the car, Anne starts talking about a skiing expedition that never should have gone up. Three college students, one was killed. Klein confirms the accident, while Anne comments on people leaving the mountain. Klein, obviously avoiding the actual reason people are leaving, states that the mountain people are a superstitious bunch. He smiles and says, “All these stories are nonsense!” Anne comments about people disappearing into the mist and are never seen again. Klein has his assistant, Hans (Colin Douglas), grab their bags from the car.

Immediately upon entering the hotel, a guest in the lobby introduces himself to Brooks as Philip Truscott (Laurence Payne). The sisters ask to be excused to go to their rooms to unpack. Anne, staring outside her window at the mountain with fog surrounding, says, “It’s all there,” referring to specific things she sees at the hotel and mountain, as if a dream were coming to life. Anne asks her sister Sarah, “Why did I want to come here? What is there about this place? Why do I feel I’ve seen it all before? Sarah tells her sister not to worry, lots of people get a feeling like you have.

Philip enters Alan’s room, asking if he can lend a hand with unpacking, but he’s actually here for more information. Philip vividly remembers the sisters, having seen them perform at the Palladium about a month earlier: “They're a mind-reading act.” Philip smiles and says he’ll buy Alan a drink later before leaving. Shortly after leaving his room, Alan overhears Philip making a phone call to check on him. Deep in thought as he walks downstairs to the lab, Alan is greeted by two mountain climbers, Dewhurst (Stuart Saunders) and Brett (Andrew Faulds). The men are headed for a climb on the Trollenberg but first want to offer Brooks a drink. Philip and Sarah enter, and the climbers also offer them drinks. Although Brett is an experienced climber, this is Dewhurst's first climb. The men discuss the college student who was killed last week, Brooks, mentioning that he wasn’t roped properly and that the rope tore off his head. But Klein interrupts, saying friends of his claim the rope was still around his stomach. According to Philip, the beheading happened before he fell.

Alan, Dewhurst, and Brett take the cable car up to the observatory. There, the observatory is a structure built into the side of the mountain that seems quite secure. One man contacts the professor, who yells that he does not wish to be disturbed until the man is announced as Alan Brooks. Professor Crevett (Warren Mitchell) will see him into the lab himself. The professor is very proud to show off his observatory to Alan. They even have television cameras on the roof to monitor the flow of people on the mountain. The room has only one giant window, which is protected by a steel barrier. Crevett invites Alan into his private office. Alan refers to a letter the professor wrote, in which he must see him right away. Alan asks, “What’s so urgent?” The professor answers, “How long have you been in Trollenberg? You haven’t heard about the accidents, then?” Alan replies that he has heard about them. He mentions the students, but Crevett says there have been others—many others! The bodies always disappear, he adds, and says, “And then there’s the cloud… the cloud where there should be no cloud! But this one remains static on the Trollenberg side. It never moves!” Alan calls it a freak of nature, but the professor adds, “A radioactive freak of nature?” He goes to the window to point out the cloud. And Alan sees the same strange cloud that audiences saw in the opening credits. Suddenly, the scanners pick up two mountain climbers ascending the Trollenberg, and the professor thinks the “accidents” have scared climbers away. He wants Alan to contact the authorities, but Alan says we have no proof. He remembers getting into trouble before for reporting things in the Andes that never panned out, and he refuses to stick his neck out again.

Meanwhile, Dewhurst and Brett have arrived at an old wooden hut, a spot to stay overnight before the long climb starts in the morning. Brett calls the hotel, telling Klein they've reached their first destination, the hut. Klein feels greatly relieved. Night falls as they read maps and take measurements. Brett looks up at the mountain and notices the poor visibility caused by thick fog.

The others sit around the hotel lobby, talking and drinking. The pilgrim sisters also demonstrate Anne’s mind-reading ability to the others. Suddenly, Anne’s mood shifts from pleasant revelations to visions of the hut, the mountain, and the two climbers, and she appears distressed. She describes what the men in the hut are doing and how Brett leaves and goes outside. As things worsen for Brett, Anne faints again. Back at the cabin, Dewhurst wakes up as the phone rings. It’s Alan, calling to warn the two and asking Dewhurst where Brett is. When he checks the bed, he sees Brett is gone. Dewhurst wants to search for Brett, but Alan tells him to stay inside. A man from the observatory calls Crevett to say the radioactive cloud is moving about 6 degrees and the radioactivity is increasing. After hanging up, the Professor says the cloud is heading toward the hut. Alan calls Dewhurst to warn him, and when Dewhurst opens the door to look outside, he sees dense fog. As Dewhurst pauses to shut the door, what he sees outside terrifies him enough to barricade it. Dewhurst screams.

The other phone rings, and it's the observatory calling for Professor Crevett. It appears the cloud has moved away from the hut and is now back over Trollenberg. The men at the hotel are preparing to climb the mountain to the hut to help any survivors. Anne is restless, semi-awake in her bed. She yells as men approach the hut … “Keep them away!”

The men arrive at the hut, which seems as usual. The front door is locked from inside, and one man reports the hut as deserted. The men break inside, and Alan sees that the blankets are frozen stiff. They find Dewhurst’s body on the cabin floor, and his head has been torn off. While drinking a hot beverage, Sarah informs Anne that they are leaving Trollenberg today. Anne, of course, wishes to remain.

Later, Sarah checks on Anne in her room, but she's gone. Sarah watches the cable car go up the mountain, with Anne inside. Wilde (Derek Sydney), one of Crevett’s main assistants, meets her as the cable car reaches the observatory. Anne thinks she should keep going up the mountain, but Wilde persuades her to stay.

Two villagers working with a small private plane pilot spot Barrett waving for help on a remote part of the mountain. When the two villagers investigate, they find a knapsack alone, containing a severed head. Brent, who appears suddenly, looks wild-eyed with a pack-axe, killing the first villager.

Anne, who is sitting and watching the men at the observatory work, opens the door to let Alan and some villagers into the complex. She tells Alan she must go further up the Trollenberg, but Alan smiles and scoops her in. Alan asks Hans from the hotel to take her down the next cable car and watch her carefully. Crevett announces the cloud is moving again, and Philip comes clean about being a newspaper reporter assigned to cover these Trollenberg incidents. The same incidents that occurred in the Andes are repeating on the Trollenberg, and Alan reveals he is a United Nations investigator. Philip asks if the Professor still holds to his theory that these incidents are caused by visitors from outer space. And the Professor answers, ‘What else!“ Philip asks why these creatures wind up on mountain-tops?” Crevett answers, "It must be the atmosphere; it gets much thinner higher up, and the creatures need this.” Their little cloud creates the perfect environment for them. Each time the cloud moves, Crevett says, they go further down the mountain, and the Europa might be their next target.

A door is pushed open, and a disheveled Brent enters. Looking almost as if in a trance, Brent says he is tired but all right. Brent admits to being lost on the mountain and asks if Dewhurst is okay. Sweating, rubbing his head, he claims it’s rather hot in here. Sitting at the bar for a drink, Brent is pouring the bottle, and his aim is terrible. He appears just as bad at getting the drink to his mouth. Brent asks Sarah about her sister —exactly where she is —but Alan interrupts him by offering him a cigarette. And Brent experiences difficulty striking a match from a box of them and lighting his cigarette. Suddenly, Anne enters the lobby, still at the observatory, and Brent pulls a large knife from his pocket. Anne is horrified. Alan punches him, and he falls on the couch, splitting his forehead wide open, but there’s no blood. Crevett treats him, knowing he is under alien control. And in a similar case from the Andes, he has been dead for hours. Alan tells Philip that those creatures sent Brent back down here to expressively kill her. “Anne is a threat to their security.”

Brent awakens in his locked room in the middle of the night. As Klein checks on him, Brent chokes him through the door, grabbing his keys before he collapses. Sarah stirs in her bedroom as Brent pulls a sharp weapon from a woodpile and stalks through the observatory. Climbing the staircase, Sarah sees Brent from the upper floor, panic visible on her face. She yells for Alan at his bedroom door as Brent approaches. Entering Anne’s room, Alan finally arrives and shoots Brent in the back, causing him to fall. On a slab, Crevett notices his flesh looks crystallized, soon melting off the bone. Philip interrupts to say that the cloud is moving again, this time toward the village. Alan states that everyone must go to the observatory, which is built like a fortress. He says we will have a chance there. The villagers are carefully transported by cable car. Hans, in quiet panic, uses his car to escape the hotel, possibly straight into alien hands. As Sarah and Crevett are being transported, they see the cloud moving toward the village.

A small ball lies near the door in the Europa as the mist seeps underneath, creeping inside. The door collapses, revealing a giant creature with a penetrable eye scanning the hotel. Its probing tentacle slowly moves inside. The little girl has escaped from her mother to retrieve the doll, walking carefully into danger. When she picks up her ball, the creature’s tentacle wraps around her legs, just as Alan arrives behind her at the hotel. Spotting the eye creature, he approaches the girl, using an axe to cut away many of its tentacles, then escapes. Alan takes the girl back to her mother at the cable car station. They all escape just in time as the cloud infiltrates the station, freezing the cables. Luckily, they make it to the other side. Soon, Hans returns to the compound, claiming he escaped from the aliens but complains of feeling hot. Shortly after, he grabs Anne, choking the life out of her. Alan intervenes. He plans to call the UN team in Bern and ask to be firebombed, since everywhere the alien cloud appears, it is deadly cold.

Before the fire bomb raid can happen, he wants the people in the observatory to make Molotov cocktails to use for defense. Meanwhile, the alien cloud climbs up the Trollenberg toward the observatory. Inside the radioactive cloud, we see giant eye creatures using tendons to climb. Alan supervises the making of the firebombs. Crevett captures the enormous creatures on the video screens. Alan tests one bottle bomb by throwing it at a creature. The explosion surrounds the creature, which emits a strange electronic scream and quickly moves aside. Philip wants to try one, but a creature behind him on the roof wraps a tendon around his throat and pulls him upward. Alan goes outside again and throws a firebomb, causing the creature to drop Philip. A radio broadcast from the armed plane reports it is five minutes away. The pilot is instructed to bomb the observatory's roof and the cloud itself.

While Sarah is attending to the unconscious Anne, the wall behind her cracks open, displaying one of the eye creatures in the hole in the collapsed wall. It soon grabs Alan by the throat until Philip fetches one of the fire bombs, which causes the creature to release Alan. The U.N. airplane approaches, bombing the top of the observatory, causing the creatures to shriek and frail within the fires. The plane continues to bomb the compound. Within the infernal, creatures lie still, dead, or dying. As the fires die down, melted aliens lie amid the debris. Philip takes a liking to Anne and takes her outside for fresh air. The villagers are safe to return home. For the first time in weeks, the Trollenberg is safe from clouds,” Crevett smiles. And against a shot of the mountain, end credits appear.

The best of the horror and science fiction films released in Great Britain, especially during the 1950s and 1960s, were superior to many of their American counterparts: X, The Unknown, Quatermass, Quatermass 2, The Abominable Snowman, City of the Dead, and Burn, Witch, Burn are superior genre pictures. Nigel Kneale was the king of British horror/science fiction, and here, Hammer screenwriter Jimmy Sangster takes a crack at concocting a Kneale-like script and succeeds admirably. Science meets aliens and monsters in the typical Nigel Kneale script.

Most science fiction horror films revolve around one major trope, but here Sangster (His screenplay was based upon an original story from the television serial so others must receive credit also) weaves several together: the two strange sisters—one of whom is paranormal and can read minds—finds Anne haunted and chased by aliens; a radioactive cloud creates the ideal environment for the aliens to inhabit, moving about to cause chaos; the aliens kill humans and then revive their dead bodies and return them to civilization in an attempt to kill other humans; and innovative eye/brain creatures living within the cloud attempt an invasion bearing gripping tentacles that can kill. They must be one of the most creative monsters from space since Fiend Without a Face. The closest creature is the alien from The Atomic Submarine.

Just one of these concepts is usually enough for most movies, but having so many working together is incredible. It allows the film to move in different directions and then connect all these threads later. The film is mainly an interplanetary mystery that keeps viewers captivated, but near the end, it turns into a special-effects-filled alien-versus-human fight to the death. It features many threads that captivate the audience. True, low-budget films use cheap special effects, but remember that Quatermass features a stationary blob creature. Even though they are clearly miniatures, the eye creatures are unique monsters and always impressed me with their imaginative design.

Director Quinton Lawrence (who directed six episodes of the episodic TV serial) does a fine job of generating suspense and mystery, never letting his audience get bored in this jam-packed science fiction thriller. The action or suspense never lets up, and his payoff is always worth the price of admission.

Even though The Trollenberg Terror is not a Hammer film (it’s began as a British multi-chapter serial on British television, much the same as the British TV serials on Quatermass began), it is actually a Tempean Production produced by the team of Monty Berman and Robert S Baker, whose other production credits include Blood of the Vampire (1958), Jack the Ripper (1959), The Flesh and Fiends (1960), The Hellfire Club (1961), and No Place Like Homicide! (1961) before moving into the television arena.

When rating my top-ten science fiction horror thrillers, The Trollenberg Terror ranks among the bottom among my top-ten genre entries for the 1950s. Even the first time I saw it at the Carling Drive-In with my father, this film always enamored me. And I enjoy watching it again and again, regularly. Unlike other chillers of the 1950s, this film pays off often in so many ways. It is truly one of a kind, trying hard to expand the genre, and it does so admirably.

THE ALIEN EYE CREATURE KNOCKS THE HOTEL DOOR OPEN AND WAITS FOT THE LITTLE GIRL TO FETCH HER BALL.

ALAN (FORREST TUCKER) IS CAUGHT BY ROAMING CREATURE TENTACLES WHILE PHILIP (LAURENCE PAYNE) THROWS A FIRE BOMB AT THE CREATURE.