Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hey you welcome to Weird House Cinema. This is Rob Lamb.
Speaker 3: And I am Joe McCormick, and today we're going to
Speaker 3: be discussing the nineteen fifty eight British sci fi horror
Speaker 3: film The Trollenberg Terror, which was released in the United
Speaker 3: States and probably better known overall as The Crawling Eye,
Speaker 3: a title that is in really bad taste because I
Speaker 3: think it flagrantly destroys the tension and mystery leading up
Speaker 3: to the revelation of the monster's true form in the
Speaker 3: final act. Rob, you and I were talking about this
Speaker 3: the other day. I love how careless titling and other
Speaker 3: movie meta used to be with just ruining all the
Speaker 3: surprises of the story. Here. I believe we have the
Speaker 3: Distributors Corporation of America to thank for this title. And
Speaker 3: I have to think like if Citizen Kane had been
Speaker 3: a foreign film and they had released it in America,
Speaker 3: they would have called it like Sled Problems or something.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I think we still do see trailers in our
Speaker 2: modern day that give away way too much and reveal
Speaker 2: like most of the plot. I've seen trailers where afterwards
Speaker 2: I'm like, okay, that's that's most of the movie. I
Speaker 2: could maybe just watch the last five minutes of the
Speaker 2: film to see how it wraps up, and I'd be
Speaker 2: good at this point instead of watching the whole two
Speaker 2: hour plus. But yeah, these films of this nature where
Speaker 2: it was it was something being released to the US
Speaker 2: market and then packaged in a different way, so as
Speaker 2: I guess, just try to maximize the eyeballs on it,
Speaker 2: and maybe too, there is the idea it's like, look,
Speaker 2: the American teenager just wants to know what they're going
Speaker 2: to be making out to. We're just going to go
Speaker 2: ahead and make sure the monster is mentioned in the.
Speaker 3: Title transparency and advertising.
Speaker 2: And also maybe leaning more on like the I don't know,
Speaker 2: like the drive and spectacle of the thing. You know,
Speaker 2: it's like crawling eye. Don't you want to see that
Speaker 2: as large as life? I don't know, that's my best bet.
Speaker 2: I think it's mostly though, just take this thing from
Speaker 2: the UK and just try and get the most attention
Speaker 2: gathered around it, and so yeah, go ahead and spoil everything.
Speaker 3: To be fair, Trollenberg is not a word that most
Speaker 3: people would recognize, and for good reason, because this is
Speaker 3: not a real place in the movie, like the movie
Speaker 3: makes up this mountain in Switzerland called Trollenberg.
Speaker 2: The Trolenberg Terror is a better title in many ways though,
Speaker 2: because I think the Trolenberg Terror gives you more of
Speaker 2: a taste of the slow build and a slow burn
Speaker 2: aspect of the picture. That the picture is more mysterious,
Speaker 2: and it is not really a giant monster movie except
Speaker 2: for you know, just like the last what fifteen minutes
Speaker 2: or so of the picture, but.
Speaker 3: Then it really goes whole hog on Giant Master movie.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's rather ambitious and its special effects towards the
Speaker 2: end with mixed result but also some great results.
Speaker 3: Yes. Yes, On the subject of sloppy marketing material, I
Speaker 3: would like to submit into evidence the poster for the
Speaker 3: US release of The Crawling Eye. Sometimes we talk about
Speaker 3: movie posters, I think, especially with movies from the fifties,
Speaker 3: this was just a golden age of posters and we've
Speaker 3: really got some meat to chew on here. So on
Speaker 3: the Crawling Eye poster, we have emerging from a black void,
Speaker 3: a giant, distinctly human eye, complete with tear ducts and
Speaker 3: lids and lashes highlighted by makeup. You can see mascara
Speaker 3: and eyeliner, so it does look a little freaky, but
Speaker 3: it does not suggest eyeball monsters from another planet. I
Speaker 3: think it implies instead a supernatural, disembodied human observer reaching
Speaker 3: out through some kind of dark space. Maybe you could
Speaker 3: say that the eye on the poster here connects more
Speaker 3: to the psychic and esp themes of the movie than
Speaker 3: to the giant physical eyeballs that we will be hurling
Speaker 3: firebombs at later in the film. But I think that
Speaker 3: that's kind of a stretch to say that's really what
Speaker 3: it's going for, especially since the psychic character is not
Speaker 3: threatening at all in the movie and this eyeball is
Speaker 3: clearly coming to get you. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that's a good read on it.
Speaker 3: Also, this human eye on the poster has translucent yellow
Speaker 3: and pink octopus arms, but only four of them, so
Speaker 3: I guess this would be a tetrapus arms, and the
Speaker 3: arms are wrapping around the body of a shrieking, recumbent
Speaker 3: woman in a yellow party dress and high heels, who
Speaker 3: I'm pretty confident does not appear in the movie unless
Speaker 3: this is supposed to be Janet Monroe, but it does
Speaker 3: not look like her. To me, and I don't think
Speaker 3: she ever wears an outfit like this.
Speaker 2: No, no, you know, liked we've talked about before on
Speaker 2: the show. If you could at all get the monster
Speaker 2: carrying a screaming woman on the poster, you absolutely did it.
Speaker 2: The monsters in this film, maybe it's a little more
Speaker 2: of a stretch to imagine them carrying a woman, and
Speaker 2: therefore this is just a rough approximation of what that
Speaker 2: might consist of.
Speaker 3: The only person we see them carrying in the movie
Speaker 3: is the newspaper guy. We see he gets grabbed up,
Speaker 3: but he has not even held horizontally like the woman
Speaker 3: shown in the poster. They're holding him firmly vertically. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and it implies that they usually pick people up vertically
Speaker 3: because they got to pop the head off, so they're
Speaker 3: going to be going around, you know, kinda like around
Speaker 3: the neck near the top. Anyway, nothing about this poster, also,
Speaker 3: I would point out, suggests that the movie has to
Speaker 3: do with mountains or mountain climbing, which it does. Next,
Speaker 3: there is the copy on the poster. It says, the
Speaker 3: nightmare Terror of the Slithering Eye that unleashed agonizing horror
Speaker 3: on a screaming world. Now On one hand, I'm hesitant
Speaker 3: to nitpick because I myself completely the ability to write
Speaker 3: with any style when what's needed is some kind of
Speaker 3: marketing or promotional copy like that. I just kind of
Speaker 3: freeze up mentally there. But this is too wordy. Not
Speaker 3: every now needs a modifier, but more to the substance
Speaker 3: of what they're trying to say with taglines like this
Speaker 3: that unleashes agonizing horror on a screaming world. This got
Speaker 3: me thinking about how titles and taglines and plot descriptions
Speaker 3: of horror and sci fi movies from the nineteen fifties
Speaker 3: display an incredibly strong trend of plot scope misrepresentation. By that,
Speaker 3: I mean like the actual plot and the events of
Speaker 3: the film are incredibly local and small ball, but the
Speaker 3: title and the description imply a feeling like the end
Speaker 3: of the movie Independence Day, where it's the alien Horde
Speaker 3: against a coordinated attack by the entire planet Earth. And
Speaker 3: usually in these movies, only a few characters are involved
Speaker 3: or presumably even aware of the events of the story.
Speaker 3: Probably the whole thing takes place within a five mile radius.
Speaker 3: That's usually the case with these Roger Korman movies and stuff,
Speaker 3: And yet the movie will be called the monster that
Speaker 3: conquered the planet Earth.
Speaker 2: Yeah, like it conquered the world. As a classic example
Speaker 2: of this, as we discussed in the show, it basically
Speaker 2: conquers the Tri County area.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but it's like bigger than just those few examples.
Speaker 3: It happens over and over again. The actual story is local,
Speaker 3: but the title suggests a world, world spanning events. And
Speaker 3: I'm kind of curious about this, Like, why did advertisers
Speaker 3: always want to make it seem like the plot had
Speaker 3: big implications involving millions of people. There's nothing wrong with
Speaker 3: small stories. Small stories that affect only a handful of
Speaker 3: characters can be just as thrilling. In fact, I would
Speaker 3: argue it's easier to make a small scale story thrilling.
Speaker 3: Was there actually any evidence to suggest that drive in
Speaker 3: audiences would always prefer the plot of an alien monster
Speaker 3: movie to involve the entire world?
Speaker 2: This is an interesting question. I imagine some folks have dug
Speaker 2: into this. There might be some sort of a Cold
Speaker 2: War read on the ramifications here. But yeah, but I
Speaker 2: do certainly agree with you that, like the lower stakes,
Speaker 2: the localized stakes can certainly be just as thrilling, And
Speaker 2: I think many of these movies are not merely like
Speaker 2: incidentally having like a low stakes, like small hometown invasion angle,
Speaker 2: Like that's the kind of thing that people can relate to,
Speaker 2: like the aliens are coming here, the zombies are coming here.
Speaker 3: It is actually what makes the story work in the
Speaker 3: cases where it does work. I mean not to say
Speaker 3: there are some movies from this period that there are
Speaker 3: more kind of world stage in terms of their actual mechanics.
Speaker 3: I think, you know, The Day the Earth Stood Still
Speaker 3: is more kind of a world stage movie involving those
Speaker 3: big stakes, but a lot of yeah, they're actually quite local,
Speaker 3: and when they work, they work because they're local. They
Speaker 3: set the scope of the plot correctly to the ambitions
Speaker 3: of the story they're going to tell. But then the
Speaker 3: other thing I was going to ask is I think
Speaker 3: the answer to this question is more clear. But I
Speaker 3: was thinking specifically with these lower budget movies, if they
Speaker 3: thought audiences wanted a huge story with global implications, why
Speaker 3: did they not actually write a story like that? Why
Speaker 3: did they make these local stories? I think the answer
Speaker 3: there is just got to be budget, right, Like the
Speaker 3: bigger story requires more actors, probably more sets, And so
Speaker 3: I think you sometimes see these movies trying to bridge
Speaker 3: the gap by having the direct plot be very local
Speaker 3: with a small number of characters, but like the well,
Speaker 3: they'll have a character like placing a phone call to
Speaker 3: a general in Washington, you know, to like relay the
Speaker 3: events or something, as if that that kind of gets
Speaker 3: you halfway to the feeling of world spanning events.
Speaker 2: Yeah, throwing a few phone call, throw in a little
Speaker 2: stock footage and you're good to go. News footage as well.
Speaker 3: Oh that's a good one, yes, yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Like, you know, a great example of this is
Speaker 2: Santa Claus Conguers the Martians, you know. Yeah, they actually
Speaker 2: pull a number of levers in that picture to really
Speaker 2: drive home the international scope of the of the threat.
Speaker 3: That's a really good point. Yeah. So anyway, I was
Speaker 3: thinking about this, and I did have another thought back
Speaker 3: on the other side, which is that with a lot
Speaker 3: of these movies, you could make the argument that, well,
Speaker 3: the direct plot doesn't really involve the whole world, there
Speaker 3: are a lot of downstream implications for the whole world.
Speaker 3: Like I was thinking about how many of these fifties
Speaker 3: alien monster movies essentially have the same basic plot situation,
Speaker 3: and it's that a small group of humans encounter a
Speaker 3: some sort of advance team or small contingent of alien invaders,
Speaker 3: usually just a single alien individual, with the idea that
Speaker 3: if this one a monster, is not defeated, it will
Speaker 3: pave the way for a full scale invasion and takeover
Speaker 3: of Earth. So even though the actual plot you're seeing
Speaker 3: in the movie is small and local, it presages a
Speaker 3: global conflict. And yet in this case, I've been promised
Speaker 3: by the poster that the world will be screaming, not
Speaker 3: just that a guy named Hans will be sam A
Speaker 3: couple of other great things about this poster. I love
Speaker 3: posters that try to make you feel like your life
Speaker 3: might be in physical danger by seeing the film. This
Speaker 3: one says warning, if you've ever been hypnotized, do not
Speaker 3: come alone.
Speaker 2: I like that, and that's that's some William Castle will
Speaker 2: be proud.
Speaker 3: Uh huh. Also we get the like a second tagline,
Speaker 3: as if the first one wasn't good enough. We see
Speaker 3: a man dissolves ellipsis, and out of the oozing mist
Speaker 3: comes the hungry eye, slave to the demon brain. How
Speaker 3: well does that describe the movie? That's interesting because it
Speaker 3: those are all words that would to describe things in
Speaker 3: the movie, but in this sentence they refer to the
Speaker 3: wrong things.
Speaker 2: This is back when they would employ poets to compose
Speaker 2: a short poem that could go on the poster that
Speaker 2: that speaks to, you know, some theme or a particular
Speaker 2: scene from the picture.
Speaker 3: That's right. And then final thing on the poster. We
Speaker 3: get a DCA release again, this Distributors Corporation of America,
Speaker 3: and it's it promises that this is the company that
Speaker 3: brought you rodin. I mean, come on, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2: And then then also star Forrest Tucker's name is in
Speaker 2: red letters. Uh really, you know, going after that F
Speaker 2: Troop audience, make sure they make it end for the picture.
Speaker 3: I don't even know what that refers to. What is
Speaker 3: F Troop?
Speaker 2: F Troop was a TV show that Forrest Tucker was on.
Speaker 3: Oh okay, I have questions about what you're supposed to
Speaker 3: get out of Forrest Tucker in this movie. He's not
Speaker 3: bad in it, but he is. He's such a roast beef,
Speaker 3: you know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, we'll definitely talk about his performance. But I
Speaker 2: think in general, it's the nineteen fifties, there's an interstellar threat.
Speaker 2: You need a tall, strong man to potentially lean your
Speaker 2: head on and that's where Forrest Ducker comes in.
Speaker 3: Yes, now, all of this said, I actually think The
Speaker 3: Crawling Eye is not bad. It is, in my opinion.
Speaker 3: I wonder if you agree, Rob, this is one of
Speaker 3: the better drive in sci fi monster movies of the era.
Speaker 3: I found it quite engrossing, not boring, with a lot
Speaker 3: of the same kind of goofy character tropes you often
Speaker 3: see in these films, but with some pretty good dialogue
Speaker 3: and some intrigue, some actually quite scary moments, especially with
Speaker 3: like the zombie assassins later on and the scenes in
Speaker 3: the cabin up on the mountain and stuff. There's some
Speaker 3: stuff that actually works his horror.
Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely, I think The Crawling Eye is a pretty
Speaker 2: solid picture. It works better as the trollingburg Terror though,
Speaker 2: again because yes, it's ultimately that sort of film. There's
Speaker 2: a lot of a lot of mystery. It gives you,
Speaker 2: gives you some things to think about leading up to
Speaker 2: the monster battles, which again is it's only going to
Speaker 2: be the last ten to fifteen minutes of the picture,
Speaker 2: and at that point they do attempt to pull out
Speaker 2: all the stops.
Speaker 3: Yes, and regarding pulling out the stops in terms of
Speaker 3: the visual effects, I want to say, also, this has
Speaker 3: got to be one of the glorioust films I have
Speaker 3: ever seen from the nineteen fifties, so actually rather shocking gristle.
Speaker 3: The scene I was thinking of is when they pull
Speaker 3: the geology professor Dewhurst out from under the bed and
Speaker 3: you just see a bloody stump on his neck. You
Speaker 3: don't see other fifties movies like this.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I thought that the gore was shocking, you know,
Speaker 2: certainly for the nineteen fifties.
Speaker 3: As for the monster design, this is one that has
Speaker 3: gone down through the ages as a as a widely
Speaker 3: mocked monster design, and I do the design is indeed hilarious,
Speaker 3: Like the effectively scary moments sort of dry up after
Speaker 3: the monster's true form is revealed. But also I really
Speaker 3: admire this monster. It's not hilarious in the attack of
Speaker 3: the the eye creatures way like that. It's hilarious in
Speaker 3: its shoddiness. This is hilarious in its exquisite detail. I
Speaker 3: really admire when movies of this era would commit to
Speaker 3: a fully realized, absolutely insane monster anatomy like we get here,
Speaker 3: rather than trying to like tone it down, make it
Speaker 3: maybe look more tasteful or plausible. Take less risks. No, no,
Speaker 3: you fools get weirder, risk more, and they absolutely did here.
Speaker 3: This is a swinging for the fence's monster design, and
Speaker 3: it looks weird, and yes, it looks funny, but it is.
Speaker 3: It makes the movie.
Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely, I really like the monster design here, and
Speaker 2: I agree that. I don't know. On one hand, I
Speaker 2: certainly agree that people have left at it over the years,
Speaker 2: and we'll get into some of the reasons why. And
Speaker 2: you know, I made sure to point it out to
Speaker 2: people in my household so that they could laugh at
Speaker 2: it as well. But I don't know. I don't that
Speaker 2: I didn't think it was that funny. I thought it
Speaker 2: was pretty effect like it looks real, like I feel
Speaker 2: like it's a real monster. And if I'm laughing at it,
Speaker 2: I'm not laughing at it because it's an effect, but
Speaker 2: I'm like mocking an alien life form.
Speaker 3: It's just funny that aliens look this way.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean it's some of it, to be clear,
Speaker 2: Some of the shots are shot here looking than others,
Speaker 2: But like that main shot of the crawling eye coming
Speaker 2: directly at you, I think that's pretty amazing looking.
Speaker 3: The smoke coming up around it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Yeah, I think that's a that's a solid sequence,
Speaker 2: and that's one of the reasons they use it several
Speaker 2: times like that.
Speaker 3: I also like how many different themes are thrown against
Speaker 3: the wall in this movie. I think it it keeps
Speaker 3: the plot feeling kind of fresh, the fact that it's
Speaker 3: not just an alien invasion movie. We get themes of mountaineering, mystify,
Speaker 3: curious fog, psychic powers, and esp international intrigue kind of espionage,
Speaker 3: like themes witchcraft and Resurrection of the Dead. There's there's
Speaker 3: a lot of stuff going into the stew Yeah.
Speaker 2: A lot of times in nineteen fifties films, there's this
Speaker 2: feeling of a very straight laced world and then there
Speaker 2: is the strange element that is the threat. And here
Speaker 2: there are enough of strange elements that kind of create
Speaker 2: a world itself that feels a little off kilter from
Speaker 2: the buttoned up world we might expect to encounter. The
Speaker 2: psychic aspects of the plot particularly interests me because while
Speaker 2: the sisters that we'll get into here, while they are entertainers,
Speaker 2: one of them does have psychic abilities, and the reality
Speaker 2: of psychic phenomena in the film feels widely accepted. I
Speaker 2: don't know to what extent this is just kind of
Speaker 2: an accident of the writing, or if this was a
Speaker 2: part of their vision for it, but this would seem
Speaker 2: to be a world where psychic phenomena is legitimate, but
Speaker 2: also perhaps not widely understood or certainly capitalized upon.
Speaker 3: I think in the nineteen fifties there were probably a
Speaker 3: lot of people who generally thought that among those in
Speaker 3: the know, parapsychology phenomena were widely accepted, that it was
Speaker 3: to some people thought of as a kind of a
Speaker 3: kind of thing that the elites were just aware of,
Speaker 3: that parapsychology really is onto something. There really is something
Speaker 3: strange going on. There are powers we don't quite understand,
Speaker 3: and that the people at the highest levels of society,
Speaker 3: the real operators out there, all know about and accept this.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think a pretty good read on it. And
Speaker 2: certainly we do have historical evidence for some of the
Speaker 2: things that were being researched, either in the military or
Speaker 2: by groups adjacent to the military at the time, just
Speaker 2: to at the very least see if there was anything
Speaker 2: to them. But yeah, but it's one of the things
Speaker 2: I did like about the picture this idea that like
Speaker 2: nobody was like, Oh, those silly psychics, what can they
Speaker 2: teach us about this this real world threat. They were like,
Speaker 2: I don't know, get the psychics in here, let's see
Speaker 2: what they can figure out.
Speaker 3: Well, yeah, and I would say also within the structure
Speaker 3: of the movie, there's no real way that the psychics,
Speaker 3: that the main one psychic character could be trying to
Speaker 3: like scam anybody. There's like nothing she's going to get
Speaker 3: out of trying to trick anybody into thinking she's psychic.
Speaker 3: She's just like clearly experiencing some kind of information download
Speaker 3: from extraterrestrial sources, and this is having an effect primarily
Speaker 3: on her more than on anybody else. And so the
Speaker 3: other characters are trying to be helpful, and yeah, you
Speaker 3: don't see any like undue hostility toward her or anything.
Speaker 3: But I also like the scene where they talk about
Speaker 3: how the sisters used to be tricksters, that they started
Speaker 3: off doing their psychic mind reading act by using a
Speaker 3: code where they would just be you know, sleight of
Speaker 3: hand type stuffy. They discovered through their career that oh,
Speaker 3: just so happens one of us actually is fully psychic
Speaker 3: and we don't need to use tricks anymore, which I
Speaker 3: thought that was interesting because that almost suggests it's not
Speaker 3: a that in the world of this movie, psychic powers
Speaker 3: are not something you're born with, but maybe something you
Speaker 3: develop through training that somehow by playing the part of
Speaker 3: a psychic that is how she actually developed the psychic powers.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Anyway, I thought maybe we should hear, just do
Speaker 3: a basic plot summary and then we can refer we
Speaker 3: can know what we're talking about when we refer back
Speaker 3: to things throughout the connections section and stuff. So the
Speaker 3: basic plot is that you've got the Trollenberg Mountain in Switzerland.
Speaker 3: This has long been a popular destination for sightseers and
Speaker 3: mountain climbers. It's got a mountain side observatory that you
Speaker 3: can reach by suspended cable car, a selection of well
Speaker 3: established routes to the summit, and a cozy village in
Speaker 3: the foothills offering accommodations for travelers. They don't really play
Speaker 3: up anything in this movie like, ooh, you know there
Speaker 3: are legends about this mountain going back centuries that you
Speaker 3: know there's something evil afoot. It really is more like
Speaker 3: this is a beautiful, well known mountain and lately something
Speaker 3: weird has started happening here.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's not something old that is threatening, folks, it's
Speaker 2: something entirely.
Speaker 3: New, right, And what is that new thing? It is
Speaker 3: a series of grizzly accidents in which climbers have disappeared
Speaker 3: without a trace, or in a few cases, have been
Speaker 3: found with their heads torn off. So in the action
Speaker 3: sort of begins with an American agent of the United Nations.
Speaker 3: That's an interesting main character here, a guy who's like
Speaker 3: a U N fixer, basically named Alan Brooks, who has
Speaker 3: been sent to meet with the observatory's lead scientists to
Speaker 3: investigate this phenomenon. Also visiting Trollenberg are a pair of
Speaker 3: sisters named Anne and a pilgrim who perform a traveling
Speaker 3: mind reading act. They were originally on their way to
Speaker 3: Geneva by train, but when passing under Trollenberg, the truly
Speaker 3: psychic sister of the two and is overcome with a
Speaker 3: compulsion to get off the train at this stop. She
Speaker 3: has this esp feeling that there's something here she must do.
Speaker 3: So we meet an ensemble of characters, including a geologist,
Speaker 3: a covert newspaper reporter, a mountain guide, and an eccentric meteorologist.
Speaker 3: They all come together with other characters to experience a
Speaker 3: weird series of events involving radioactive fog, beheadings on a mountain,
Speaker 3: astral projection, psychic enslavement, zombie assassins, and an alien invasion,
Speaker 3: all culminating in this big showdown where our human characters
Speaker 3: gather inside a scientific facility besieged by giant cyclopean brains
Speaker 3: with tentacles. And that's the other half of the equation
Speaker 3: is they call this the crawling eye, but could well
Speaker 3: have been called the crawling brain as well, because the
Speaker 3: main mass of the alien is basically a big like
Speaker 3: house sized brain with tentacles coming off of a big
Speaker 3: octopus arms reaching all over the place, and then one
Speaker 3: huge honkin eye right in the middle.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it could have been the crawling brain as well
Speaker 2: as the crawling eye. It could have been the climbing
Speaker 2: eye or the climbing brain, because that's really what we
Speaker 2: see more of here.
Speaker 3: Were you previously familiar with the Misfits song the Crawling Eye.
Speaker 2: This is not an era of the Misfits that I've
Speaker 2: heard as much from. So this is off the nineteen
Speaker 2: ninety nine album Famous Monsters, which I Believe is the
Speaker 2: second album from the post Danzig era. I was never
Speaker 2: a Misfits listener growing up because the Misfits were like
Speaker 2: a little too obscure for me at the time and
Speaker 2: maybe a little too dangerous. I was like, Ooh, I
Speaker 2: don't know if I should be listening to you. These
Speaker 2: are a bunch of bad boys. Yeah, later on I
Speaker 2: got in, But at the same time I got into Danzig,
Speaker 2: like Danzig seemed appropriate. I don't know, Danzig was more
Speaker 2: available because there were music videos and it was on MTV.
Speaker 3: Somehow that feels backwards.
Speaker 2: I mean, some of those Misfit songs are pretty rough.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, A lot later and I enjoy a number
Speaker 2: of them, and I enjoy stuff from the different eras,
Speaker 2: so I wasn't as familiar with this one, but I
Speaker 2: am familiar with a few of the tracks off of
Speaker 2: Famous Monsters.
Speaker 3: I also didn't previously know this. I just found it
Speaker 3: while I was reading up before doing this episode, despite
Speaker 3: it not being in the Danzig era. I kind of
Speaker 3: like this song. I mean, the production feels a little clean.
Speaker 3: For the Misfits. I think I like their murkier sound
Speaker 3: on the earlier albums, but yeah, it's I mean, the
Speaker 3: lyrics are just a straight plot description of the movie.
Speaker 3: But my favorite verse is one that has a great
Speaker 3: neologism in it. It's the verse that says, all these
Speaker 3: men are dying crawling I decapitizing Fiends without a face,
Speaker 3: attack mankind. Two things are great there. One is the
Speaker 3: reference to a completely different crawling brain movie fiend without
Speaker 3: a Face, but then also decapitizing. That's just it that
Speaker 3: sings to my heart. Nice. It reminds me of other,
Speaker 3: of course, misfits neologism's like myrtilation.
Speaker 2: Now this one came off of your scouting list for
Speaker 2: weird House Cinema. How did you become aware of the
Speaker 2: Crawling Eye? Was it this song?
Speaker 3: Oh? No, no, no, Like I said, I heard this
Speaker 3: song for the first time ever today. I'm probably sure. No.
Speaker 3: It may be the fact that it was featured on
Speaker 3: the first syndicated episode of Mystery Science Theater three thousand,
Speaker 3: though I don't think I've ever seen that episode. I
Speaker 3: think it's just come up because I've looked at episodes
Speaker 3: lists that that could be it, or it could be
Speaker 3: I don't know, I might I really don't remember how
Speaker 3: I find some of these movies that I put on
Speaker 3: our list. I just somehow I come across them. They
Speaker 3: look interesting to me, and I throw them up there
Speaker 3: to check out again later.
Speaker 2: All right, well, elevator pitch for this one, I'd say
Speaker 2: the Misfits lyrics pretty much captured it for us. So
Speaker 2: let's move on to hearing just a little bit of
Speaker 2: the trailer idea.
Speaker 4: This alarm fills the knife with terror far high on
Speaker 4: the mountainside a, mysteriote fear such as no human being
Speaker 4: has ever seen before. Where there are mountains, there are
Speaker 4: always clouds. But this one remains static on the side
Speaker 4: of the trolling berg.
Speaker 3: It never moves. Freak of nature?
Speaker 4: Have they do?
Speaker 2: Active? Freak of nature?
Speaker 4: It strikes without warning, wreaking death and destruction, too horrible
Speaker 4: to behold, A force of evil that torches its victims
Speaker 4: and hurls them mercilessly to the brink of murder and madness.
Speaker 4: What is it and what does it crave? This creeping
Speaker 4: horror that hungers and thrives on human flesh while it
Speaker 4: inhabits its own silent world that no man can penetrate.
Speaker 4: No one is safe from expeller of destruction. A cold,
Speaker 4: hypnotic stare striking fear into the hearts of all, creating
Speaker 4: a frenzied nightmare for those who behold it.
Speaker 2: All Right, so at this point you might be wondering
Speaker 2: where you can watch the Crawling Eye or the Trolenberg Terror. Well,
Speaker 2: this one has benefited from various physical releases over the years,
Speaker 2: and was again the first season one episode of Mystery
Speaker 2: Science Theater three thousand on the Comedy Channel, which would
Speaker 2: this would have been nineteen eighty nine, and then the
Speaker 2: Comedy Channel became Comedy Central in ninety one, so this
Speaker 2: was the first true season of MST following those KTMA episodisodes,
Speaker 2: and many of you will remember the titular monster from
Speaker 2: the Crawling Eye in the opening credits of MST three
Speaker 2: K during that early season. Though, like you, I don't
Speaker 2: think I ever watched this episode for one for some
Speaker 2: reason or another, I never watched this film MST three K,
Speaker 2: so I'm not sure how good the riffs are or aren't.
Speaker 3: I was reading about it. Actually, I've seen a number
Speaker 3: of fans say it's not one of the best. I
Speaker 3: think generally the very first season is not one of
Speaker 3: the most prized. It's not like the earliest stuff was
Speaker 3: the best. Most fans tend to think they got a
Speaker 3: little bit better over time.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think there are only a couple of episodes
Speaker 2: from season one that I've really watched, maybe two or
Speaker 2: three maybe. However, all of this comes to the point too,
Speaker 2: when you're looking around for streams of The Crawling Eye,
Speaker 2: A lot of the streams that are going to pop
Speaker 2: up for you on official channels are going to be
Speaker 2: that nineteen eighty nine MST three K episode. And you know,
Speaker 2: I love ms TH three K. I part of my
Speaker 2: appreciation for weird and sometimes arguably bad films comes from
Speaker 2: being a misty back in the day and through today
Speaker 2: as well. However, I hate it when that's the only
Speaker 2: version of a film that's officially available. I feel like, yes,
Speaker 2: if we can get the MST three K version, we
Speaker 2: should also have access to the unriffed.
Speaker 3: Version of it.
Speaker 2: And it seems a little harder to find official streams
Speaker 2: or even official physical media of The Crawling Eye right now.
Speaker 3: I fully agree there. I used to think that I
Speaker 3: had seen a movie because I had seen the Mystery
Speaker 3: Science Theater episode on it, and now I don't feel
Speaker 3: that way. That's just a different thing. I love Mystery
Speaker 3: Science Theater. It's probably my favorite TV show of all time.
Speaker 3: But I think when they do an episode on a movie,
Speaker 3: that episode is really a quite different thing than the
Speaker 3: experience of watching the movie. Even if your experience of
Speaker 3: watching the movie on its own is primarily an ironic
Speaker 3: or a comedy driven one, it's still going to be
Speaker 3: different watching it by itself.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I like both experiences, but yeah, I need
Speaker 2: the uncut version of it. That being said, the version
Speaker 2: I ended up watching was an unofficial YouTube stream of
Speaker 2: it that had been colorized. I don't know when it
Speaker 2: was colorized, but I was like, well, I'm tired of
Speaker 2: looking for the version I'm going to stream. I think
Speaker 2: this is it, and I don't know. I like the
Speaker 2: colorization in it. It seemed fine to me.
Speaker 3: Okay, the version I saw was streaming on AMC Plus,
Speaker 3: so okay watch.
Speaker 2: Oh so you did find an official stream of it?
Speaker 2: That was oh yeah, okay, that one eluded me. There's
Speaker 2: so many places to look for these things. All right,
Speaker 2: let's get into the people behind this picture. Starting with
Speaker 2: the director. It's Quentin Lawrence, who of nineteen twenty through
Speaker 2: nineteen seventy nine English TV and film director, best known
Speaker 2: probably for this film, as well as nineteen sixty one's
Speaker 2: Cash on Demand, sixty three is The Man Who Find
Speaker 2: Died and sixty four is the Secret of Blood Island.
Speaker 2: He also directed an episode of the Old Avengers TV
Speaker 2: show and was originally a physicist.
Speaker 3: Oh that's interesting. I wonder how often people make that
Speaker 3: career switch.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the IDB science is to B movie director. The
Speaker 2: IMDb trivia regarding this guy says that he even worked
Speaker 2: on the Manhattan Project, but I don't know. I didn't
Speaker 2: find additional information to back that up. I don't know
Speaker 2: if that's true. Sometimes some some myth making finds its
Speaker 2: way into the IMDb trivia.
Speaker 3: This movie was directed by Nils Borr.
Speaker 2: Yeah, all right, I don't think I mentioned this earlier,
Speaker 2: But one of the interesting things about this picture is
Speaker 2: that it is actually a remake of an earlier British
Speaker 2: TV serial titled The Trollnberg Terror, and a couple of
Speaker 2: cast members return to play the same part in this
Speaker 2: adaptation of that earlier work. Well, yeah, I'll mention those
Speaker 2: as we get to them. But as for the writers,
Speaker 2: there are some additional uncredited writers according to the different databases,
Speaker 2: but I'm just going to mention the screenplay credit and
Speaker 2: the story credit. Screenplay credit goes to Jimmy Sunster, who
Speaker 2: lived nineteen twenty seven through twenty eleven, writer and producer,
Speaker 2: best known for his influential work at Hammer Studios, including
Speaker 2: writing on the screenplay for fifty sevens The Curse of Frankenstein,
Speaker 2: fifty eight s Dracula, fifty nine's The Mummy, sixties The
Speaker 2: Brides of Dracula, in many many more.
Speaker 3: Oh, he wrote the Mummy movie that I have the
Speaker 3: poster for right next to me, the one with Peter
Speaker 3: Cushing or Christopher Lee.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's right. Like, this guy was a big deal
Speaker 2: in Hammer Studio. So for any of you Hammer Studios
Speaker 2: nerds out there, this is somebody you definitely know about.
Speaker 2: On top of that, there's an individual by the name
Speaker 2: of Peter Key that also has a story credit as
Speaker 2: best I could tell, British TV writer. But dates are
Speaker 2: unknown for this individual. All right, now getting into the cast,
Speaker 2: let's come back to Forrest Tucker playing Alan Brooks, that
Speaker 2: American un investigator here looking into mysterious mountaintop disappearances, strange
Speaker 2: clouds and beheadings.
Speaker 3: The James Bond of the United Nations.
Speaker 2: Yes. He lived nineteen nineteen through nineteen eighty six. American actor,
Speaker 2: best known for his time as Sergeant Morgan O'Rourke on
Speaker 2: the long running f Troop TV series. His film work
Speaker 2: consists of a kind of a mix of genres, notably
Speaker 2: a bunch of war in westerns, but with some monster
Speaker 2: films thrown in. So His films include nineteen forty two's
Speaker 2: Keeper of the Flame, forty threes Sans of Yuojima, forty
Speaker 2: six is the Yearling, fifty sevens The Abominable Snowman of
Speaker 2: the Himalayas, nineteen seventies Chisholm, and nineteen eighty seven's Time Stalkers.
Speaker 3: Oh, Time Stalkers, Oh wait, I said that, But I
Speaker 3: was thinking of the wrong movie. I was thinking of
Speaker 3: Time Chasers, also famously featured on Mystery Science Theater. Times
Speaker 3: Stalkers is the one with John Ratzenberger and Klaus Kinski. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I haven't seen Time Stalkers either, But maybe that's
Speaker 2: when we should come back to write in listeners if
Speaker 2: you have an opinion on this now, Joe, I want
Speaker 2: to drive home here that mister Forrest Tucker was thirty
Speaker 2: nine years old at the oldest when this film was made.
Speaker 2: There's a common in here where somebody describes him as
Speaker 2: his character as being he looks about forty, and I
Speaker 2: was thinking, this man does not look forty. This man
Speaker 2: looks at least fifty, and sure enough, he was younger
Speaker 2: than forty. As far as I can tell, people.
Speaker 3: Were living different back then. This man is this man
Speaker 3: is he has had a life.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, it's a very rugged thirty nine that this
Speaker 2: guy has, and we do see him hard drinking and
Speaker 2: smoking throughout the picture. Maybe that's part of it. Maybe
Speaker 2: it's the suits that everyone wore. I'm not sure. Maybe
Speaker 2: i'd look that old if I was wearing a suit
Speaker 2: and certainly throwing back that many spirits. But we were
Speaker 2: talking about how we should feel about this character in
Speaker 2: this performance. I'm going to say that ultimately I thought
Speaker 2: he was really good.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Granted, it is a square jawed American male protagonist from
Speaker 2: a nineteen fifties film, so you know what to expect here,
Speaker 2: But I don't know. I felt like the character felt
Speaker 2: lived in. He didn't feel like a cardboard cutout.
Speaker 3: So he is a rectangular sheet tray of roast beef,
Speaker 3: but he is also he's a good version of that.
Speaker 3: He's a likable enough character for a character of this sort,
Speaker 3: and he brings what is being asked of him, which
Speaker 3: is a sense of authority and command.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 3: He's the person who kind of rallies everybody together when
Speaker 3: they need to take action to defend against the eye
Speaker 3: monster is attacking the observatory. He really feels like he
Speaker 3: knows what he's doing. Took all thirty nine years of
Speaker 3: his life to get that experience.
Speaker 2: Yeah, all right, Up next, we have our secret journalist character,
Speaker 2: Philip Truscott, played by Lawrence Payne, who lived nineteen nineteen
Speaker 2: through two thousand and nine. British actor. He also appeared
Speaker 2: in episodes of Doctor Who in the nineteen sixties and
Speaker 2: the nineteen eighties different characters, and his other credits include
Speaker 2: nineteen seventy two's Vampire Circus and nineteen eighty one Cy Warriors,
Speaker 2: one of only two actors reprising their roles here from
Speaker 2: the original Trollenberg TV serial.
Speaker 3: Wait, so this guy is in reality the same age
Speaker 3: as Forrest Tucker, but he comes off as significantly younger.
Speaker 2: Yes, yeah, this guy feels more authentically thirty nine forty
Speaker 2: and it is interesting you could kind of look at this.
Speaker 2: I guess this was a film that was made with
Speaker 2: the intention of being marketed to both the US and
Speaker 2: of course to UK and Europe, and so his character
Speaker 2: is kind of more in line with what you'd expect
Speaker 2: from a British male lead in a picture from this
Speaker 2: time period.
Speaker 3: I would imagine, yeah, exactly. I mean, he's handsome, mysterious,
Speaker 3: you don't know exactly what his deal is for about
Speaker 3: half the movie, but then he revealed himself to be
Speaker 3: a good guy. Yeah, he's kind of sneaking around a
Speaker 3: lot at the beginning.
Speaker 2: All right, Now, let's look at the Pilgrim Sisters. Beginning
Speaker 2: with the non psychic Sarah Pilgrim. She's played by Jennifer Jane,
Speaker 2: who lived nineteen thirty one through two thousand and six,
Speaker 2: a British actress, perhaps best remembered for this film, but
Speaker 2: her credit stretch from nineteen forty nine to nineteen eighty five,
Speaker 2: and they include sixty seven's They Came from Beyond Space,
Speaker 2: eighty three's The Jigsaw Man in nineteen eighty five's The
Speaker 2: Doctor and the Devils.
Speaker 3: So not only the non psychic of the two Pilgrim sisters,
Speaker 3: but also portrayed as the I think supposed to be
Speaker 3: the older sister and the more kind of responsible managerial one.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, the logical one, the one that's making the
Speaker 2: real world choices here, and then playing the psychic Pilgrim
Speaker 2: sister and Pilgrim. We have the incredible Janet Munroe who
Speaker 2: lived nineteen thirty four through nineteen seventy two.
Speaker 3: She's really good in this, I think my favorite performance
Speaker 3: in the movie. It's a tough job to do. She's
Speaker 3: got two you know, like in multiple scenes sort of
Speaker 3: go into a weird trance where like some kind of
Speaker 3: cloud from a mountain nearby possesses her brain and starts
Speaker 3: radioing messages to come out of her mouth. But she
Speaker 3: delivers that with the with the real kind of urgency
Speaker 3: and terror. And I thought all of her psychic trance
Speaker 3: scenes were really good. There's a there's a kind of
Speaker 3: danger that comes with her because when the mountain is
Speaker 3: controlling her, you really feel like you don't know what
Speaker 3: she's going to do. And at the same time, she's
Speaker 3: a quite sympathetic character. I really really liked Monroe in this.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I feel like Anne Pilgrim really could be the
Speaker 2: film central protagonist. And I think definitely would have been
Speaker 2: in a later era. Oh yeah, her character feels the
Speaker 2: most electric, the most mysterious, and I think in many
Speaker 2: ways the most relatable, certainly to maybe to modern audience
Speaker 2: is more than contemporary audiences. But I don't know. In
Speaker 2: case could be made either way, and I would say
Speaker 2: my only misgiving is that she ends up not playing
Speaker 2: particularly strongly into the resolution. It would have been an
Speaker 2: interesting choice had her psychic powers, which are deemed dangerous
Speaker 2: by the aliens, would have actually been used to defeat.
Speaker 3: Them, Right, if the story had let her be as
Speaker 3: dangerous as the alien thought she might be. Yeah, I
Speaker 3: think that would have been great. I mean, I still
Speaker 3: love her in this role.
Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely still love the performance here, and it's still
Speaker 2: the most entertaining character in the picture.
Speaker 3: But yeah, it's got those fifties drive in dynamics. She
Speaker 3: mainly just needs rescuing.
Speaker 2: And so I grew up watching Janet Monroe in the
Speaker 2: nineteen sixty Walt Disney live action fantasy romance film Darby
Speaker 2: O'Gill and the Little People, in which she plays Katie O'Gill,
Speaker 2: whose father is dead set on capturing the King of
Speaker 2: e leprechauns and whose suitors include an Irish Sean Connery
Speaker 2: and Estelle Wynwood's horrible son, Pony, played by Kieran Moore.
Speaker 3: I've never seen this, but you've mentioned it several times
Speaker 3: on the show, so I looked it up and I
Speaker 3: was I had the wrong idea of what this movie was.
Speaker 3: I had been thinking of it as some kind of
Speaker 3: weird throwaway made for TV thing, But it seems this
Speaker 3: movie is widely is like, very well regarded. People think
Speaker 3: it's great.
Speaker 2: It was a Lavish production, you know. I'm not sure
Speaker 2: to what extent true Irish people in place that or not.
Speaker 2: I don't know. Irish listeners write in and let us know.
Speaker 2: But it's a film I grew up watching and I
Speaker 2: always really enjoyed it. I rewatched it again just a
Speaker 2: few years back, and it was still a lot of fun.
Speaker 2: And she's a big part of its charm. Just a
Speaker 2: very charismatic actress. She was a British actress who won
Speaker 2: a Golden Globe Most Promising Newcomer Female for her role
Speaker 2: in Darby Ogill and the Little People, and then she
Speaker 2: went on to win a BAFTA Best British Actress nod
Speaker 2: for her role in the nineteen sixty two drama Walk
Speaker 2: in the Shadows. Her follow up Disney films included Third
Speaker 2: Man on the Mountain from fifty nine, which I'm not
Speaker 2: familiar with, and The Mountain Movie, Yeah, and then Swiss
Speaker 2: Family Robinson from nineteen sixty which I definitely watched on
Speaker 2: VHS back.
Speaker 3: In the day. Oh yeah, we had a tape of
Speaker 3: that when I was growing up. I watched that a
Speaker 3: bunch of times. I loved all the traps they made.
Speaker 3: I was obsessed with the traps.
Speaker 2: She also appeared in the Day the Earth Caught Fire
Speaker 2: nineteen sixty one, which is definitely one of those titles
Speaker 2: that matches up with the themes we were talking about exactly. Yeah.
Speaker 2: This was only her second feature film appearance, following nineteen
Speaker 2: fifty to seven Small Hotel, and she was only active
Speaker 2: from fifty seven through nineteen seventy two, so ultimately, you know,
Speaker 2: not that long of a career, and her life was
Speaker 2: cut significantly short. But very memorable screen presence here, just
Speaker 2: tremendous acting presence. Tremendous screen presence.
Speaker 3: Agreed. As I said, this movie does stand out from
Speaker 3: its genre, and Air appears in a number of ways,
Speaker 3: and I think her performance is one of the main ones.
Speaker 2: All right, let's roll through some of the supporting performers. Here.
Speaker 2: We have the character I believe it's Krevit, but they
Speaker 2: mostly just call him the Professor, So I if they
Speaker 2: ever said his name, I missed it.
Speaker 3: I don't remember what they called him. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah. The Professor is played by Warren Mitchell, who lived
Speaker 2: nineteen twenty six through twenty fifteen. British character actor of stage,
Speaker 2: screen and TV, whose credits include sixty one's The Curse
Speaker 2: of the Werewolf. That's the Hammer Studios picture with Oliver
Speaker 2: Reed Is the Werewolf, nineteen sixty five's Help, That's the
Speaker 2: Beatles movie, and nineteen seventy seven's Jabberwockie that was a
Speaker 2: Terry Gilliam picture. I, however, know him best as the
Speaker 2: villain from the Amazing Hammer Studios mod Space Western Moon
Speaker 2: zero two from nineteen sixty nine, a film that was
Speaker 2: also featured on a hisstory Science Theater three thousand, but
Speaker 2: is also just a goofy good time in and of itself.
Speaker 3: Strange choice with this actor that, if this makes any sense,
Speaker 3: Rob he is played as if he is supposed to
Speaker 3: be an excess trick professor in terms of his the voice,
Speaker 3: like the voice this actor does for him and stuff.
Speaker 3: Kind of a one of those Einstein modeled eccentric, absent
Speaker 3: minded professors. Except that's not really the way the character
Speaker 3: is written. It's like it's there in the voice and
Speaker 3: the way he looks. But the character is very straightforward
Speaker 3: in terms of his role in the story.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it feels like this character should be arguing for
Speaker 2: the return of Santa Claus from the planet Mars, but yeah,
Speaker 2: he's a pretty straight life scientist. The accent I kept
Speaker 2: puzzling over. The accent felt very Guido Sarducci, you know,
Speaker 2: and I wasn't sure exactly where this guy was supposed
Speaker 2: to be from. All Right, a couple of additional supporting
Speaker 2: characters I want to mention really quickly here because they're
Speaker 2: both pretty neat in their own right. We have Andrew
Speaker 2: Folds playing Brett. This is a mountaineer, a doomed mountaineer
Speaker 2: from early in the picture who then pops up later.
Speaker 2: He lived nineteen twenty three through the year two thousand.
Speaker 2: He was a British actor of stage and screen, whose
Speaker 2: best known roles aside from this were sixty three's in
Speaker 2: the Argonauts and Cleopatra, as well as nineteen seventy five's
Speaker 2: Liths Somnia. He was also a British Labor Party politician
Speaker 2: and served as a member of Parliament from nineteen sixty
Speaker 2: six through nineteen ninety seven.
Speaker 3: Oh interesting, okay, so directed by a physicist and the
Speaker 3: cast made their way into politics. I'm liking all the
Speaker 3: connections here. I like Andrew Folds in this role because
Speaker 3: he he's actually rather scary in some parts of the movie.
Speaker 3: I mean, we'll talk more about the plot in just
Speaker 3: a minute here, but he's a he's a kind of
Speaker 3: man of few words, but as a kindly presence earlier
Speaker 3: in the film, and then appears greatly changed later on,
Speaker 3: and it works. It's a good shift, all right.
Speaker 2: And then accompanying him there on a doomed adventure up
Speaker 2: into the mountains, we have the character Dehurst, played by
Speaker 2: Stuart Saunders, who have nineteen oh nine through nineteen eighty eight,
Speaker 2: another fun performance. This guy had a minor role in
Speaker 2: nineteen eighty three. He's Octopusy the James Bond film. He
Speaker 2: played Major Claw. This is a character who loses a
Speaker 2: game of backgammon to the villain and then he's like,
Speaker 2: you know, he gets up, and then who takes his
Speaker 2: spot playing backgammon with the villain is, of course Roger Morris.
Speaker 3: James Bond OCTOPUSY is one of the Bond movies I
Speaker 3: have the fewest memories of. I think I've only seen
Speaker 3: it once or.
Speaker 2: So memorable in that it has an octopus in it
Speaker 2: and Louis Jodan plays the villain. He was always a
Speaker 2: lot of fun. But yes, anyway, Stuart Saunders, one of
Speaker 2: is the second of the two actors reprising their roles
Speaker 2: from the original Trolenberg TV series. All Right, a couple
Speaker 2: of notes about the special effects here, because two of
Speaker 2: the individuals here involved in the special effects are pretty
Speaker 2: impressive names. Les Bowie, who lived nineteen thirteen through nineteen
Speaker 2: seventy nine, has special effects credit credits here. Canadian born
Speaker 2: special effects artists who worked mainly in the UK. A
Speaker 2: legend in the field of Matt Paine, which we definitely
Speaker 2: see a few of in this picture. This was not
Speaker 2: filmed in the Alps or anything. It was filmed at
Speaker 2: a UK studio. He's best known for his work on
Speaker 2: various Hammer pictures, including nineteen fifty eight s Dracula, as
Speaker 2: well as a handful of Ray Harryhausen films, including seventy
Speaker 2: seven Sindbad and The Eye of the Tiger. No, we
Speaker 2: were just talking about that, yeah, And he was also
Speaker 2: on the Oscar winning team behind the effects of nineteen
Speaker 2: seventy eight Superman.
Speaker 3: That's a good resume.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And then assisting him on this was Brian Johnson
Speaker 2: born nineteen thirty nine. Johnson would go on to work
Speaker 2: on the special effects teams for such films as nineteen
Speaker 2: sixty eight, two thousand and one, A Space Odyssey, nineteen
Speaker 2: seventy Nine's Alien, and nineteen eighties The Empire Strikes Back,
Speaker 2: all three of which won Oscars for their special effects.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 2: He also served in the special effects teams for nineteen
Speaker 2: eighty one's Dragonslayer and nineteen eighty four's The.
Speaker 3: Never Rittening Story Wow Again.
Speaker 2: And then finally, the composer here is Stanley Black, who
Speaker 2: lived nineteen thirteen through two thousand and two. British film
Speaker 2: composer and bandleader, whose other credits include fifty eights, The
Speaker 2: Blood of the Vampire, nineteen sixties, The Flesh Fiends, sixty
Speaker 2: one's The Day the Earth Caught Fire, in nineteen sixty
Speaker 2: three's Maniac.
Speaker 3: I don't know if the music in this movie really
Speaker 3: made an impression on me.
Speaker 2: There are a few scenes where I thought it was
Speaker 2: fittingly creepy, but also, you know, it is definitely a
Speaker 2: nineteen fifty genre score sought. I thought it was quite good.
Speaker 2: You know, nothing that I'm going to listen to in isolation,
Speaker 2: but I thought it was pretty good.
Speaker 3: Okay, I'll keep an ear out next time. I mean,
Speaker 3: it certainly didn't strike me as bad. I just don't
Speaker 3: remember anything about it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's some creepy sequences where I feel like everybody's
Speaker 2: bringing there all to delivering that vibe, you know, from
Speaker 2: the camera work, the performances, the lighting and so forth.
Speaker 3: All right, you ready to talk about the plot.
Speaker 2: Yeah, let's head out to the Alps.
Speaker 3: So the film opens with a landscape showing a narrow
Speaker 3: valley in the Swiss Alps with massive mountains crowding on
Speaker 3: both sides. And this is one of the things were
Speaker 3: even in grainy black and white, it is a beautiful location.
Speaker 3: At the bottom of the valley, there's a little river
Speaker 3: and some farmland and a village, but the mountains are
Speaker 3: so steep and so close. It's one of those places
Speaker 3: where it would seem like the valley's got to be
Speaker 3: in shadow for like a lot of the day. And
Speaker 3: then the camera pulls back and then we pan up
Speaker 3: the side of the mountains, and there's this feeling of like, oh,
Speaker 3: it just keeps going up. Like first there's this big
Speaker 3: alpine meadow and a dark spruce forest where it's kind
Speaker 3: of flat halfway up the mountain, and you think this,
Speaker 3: You think you might be looking at the top of
Speaker 3: one of the mountains. But then you just keep panning
Speaker 3: up and you realize that what the mountain you were
Speaker 3: just looking at is like one of the lower slopes
Speaker 3: of the real mountain, which is thousands of feet further up,
Speaker 3: and that's sharp, bare rock covered in snow with mist
Speaker 3: hanging all around the peak. And this is the Trolenberg again,
Speaker 3: not a real mountain in Switzerland.
Speaker 2: And I think already the film is doing a good
Speaker 2: job we realize it or not at this point, because
Speaker 2: it is establishing the mountains as being these, you know,
Speaker 2: almost like mythic mountains that are reaching up not merely
Speaker 2: into the sky, but into the place where our world
Speaker 2: borders on the unknown.
Speaker 3: Hmmm. Yeah, that's a good point. So up near the
Speaker 3: summit we meet a couple of characters. There are two
Speaker 3: young British men squatting on a narrow rock shelf, surrounded
Speaker 3: by ropes, packs and climbing gear, and they're both looking
Speaker 3: up above. There's a rope dangling down beside them, suspended
Speaker 3: from an unseen upper figure. And one of the guys
Speaker 3: says to the other guy, what's he doing up there?
Speaker 3: And they call out, hey, Jimmy, and Jimmy calls back down,
Speaker 3: telling them to wait a minute. He says he can't
Speaker 3: see everything up where he is has gone foggy and cold.
Speaker 3: He describes there's a cloud of something falling over him,
Speaker 3: and then suddenly he says, hold on a second, there's
Speaker 3: someone coming. His friends below are incredulous. They're like, what,
Speaker 3: somebody's coming at the top of this mountain. One says,
Speaker 3: who is it? Jim the abominable snow Man. And then
Speaker 3: we hear some very odd noises from the fog above.
Speaker 3: There is a high pitched hum that is swelling in volume,
Speaker 3: kind of like an emergency broadcast tone. Also a repeating
Speaker 3: chirp with delay, like some kind of radar system signaling
Speaker 3: a ping, and the ping gets louder, as if something
Speaker 3: is closing in, and suddenly Jim screams, and then from
Speaker 3: the ledge above we see a body fall tied with
Speaker 3: the rope. The body falls below the shelf with the
Speaker 3: other two climbers, and the rope goes taut and they
Speaker 3: struggle to pull their friend back up over the edge,
Speaker 3: thinking Jim may still be alive. As they're hauling, they
Speaker 3: actually say heave ho. And then as the body comes
Speaker 3: into view, one of the climbers sees it, but the
Speaker 3: other doesn't, and the one who sees it screams and
Speaker 3: lets go of the rope, and this allows the body
Speaker 3: to plunge down the side of the mountain, and the
Speaker 3: other climber says to him, you idiot, we almost had him,
Speaker 3: And the first says, did you see his head? It
Speaker 3: was torn off, And the scream of torn off bleeds
Speaker 3: into the sound of a locomotive horn, and suddenly we're
Speaker 3: on a train somewhere else, rushing across the country, going
Speaker 3: through these ravines and then black tunnels, and here we
Speaker 3: get a title screen for The Crawling Eye. At least
Speaker 3: in the US release, I don't know what the credits
Speaker 3: look like in the British release. But a little observation
Speaker 3: on my second viewing, the credit sequence here uses these
Speaker 3: high contrast arrow designs. These like bold arrows going across
Speaker 3: the black background and pointing to things, kind of similar
Speaker 3: to the clean arrow motif you see in the Soul
Speaker 3: Bass credit sequence for Alfred Hitchcock's north By Northwest, which
Speaker 3: came out a year after this. Now, I am not
Speaker 3: saying that Saul Bass and Hitchcock borrowed from the Crawling Eye,
Speaker 3: but I'm saying I like these arrows. They're very classy, modern.
Speaker 3: They feel kind of like the credit design equivalent of
Speaker 3: an Emes chair.
Speaker 2: According to artofthetitle dot com, this the credit sequence is
Speaker 2: is uncredited. We don't know who the title was. Who
Speaker 2: did the title design here? So okay it wasn't Soul Baths.
Speaker 3: But no, it's not as elegant, I want to be clear.
Speaker 3: It's not as elegant and elaborate as the Cell Bass designs,
Speaker 3: but it's still I like the little arrow theme. It's cool.
Speaker 3: So after the credits, we join our three main characters
Speaker 3: in a train card. They don't know each other yet though,
Speaker 3: so we're in a passenger compartment and we have Forrest
Speaker 3: Tucker as Alan Brooks, looking all of thirty nine. He's
Speaker 3: a handsome, early middle aged man reading a newspaper, minding
Speaker 3: his own business. And then on the other side of
Speaker 3: the car, we have Jennifer Jane and Janet Monroe as
Speaker 3: Sarah and and Pilgrim, who are sisters traveling together. When
Speaker 3: we first see them, Anne is sleeping curled up against Sarah,
Speaker 3: and though the two sisters seem to be fairly close
Speaker 3: in age, there is kind of a feeling of Anne
Speaker 3: being being like a child like snuggled up against a parent.
Speaker 3: When she's leaning on Sarah here and she's having a
Speaker 3: bad dream and she kind of groans and startles herself awake.
Speaker 3: Sarah asks if she was dreaming, and Anne denies it,
Speaker 3: and then as Anne slowly becomes more awake, they joke
Speaker 3: about whether she was talking about men in her sleep.
Speaker 3: I think we're supposed to get the idea here that
Speaker 3: both of these ladies are single and ready to mingle.
Speaker 3: I think all of the characters are single. Probably, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: I think so. There's not that nobody's discussing their home
Speaker 3: life all that much. You wouldn't have a movie otherwise.
Speaker 3: All these adults are ready to mingle anyway. Sarah points
Speaker 3: out that they can now see the mountains out out
Speaker 3: of the train window, and Ann gets up to look,
Speaker 3: and at first she seems enraptured by the natural beauty.
Speaker 3: We see this kind of angelic light fall over her face.
Speaker 3: But then as she gazes up the slope of the
Speaker 3: Trollenberg and her eyes kind of meet the snowy peak,
Speaker 3: eerie music starts to play, and her smile fades, and
Speaker 3: you think maybe she's going to start frowning or looking unhappy,
Speaker 3: but it doesn't turn into a frown. Instead, it turns
Speaker 3: into a blank, slackened expression, like she has lost control
Speaker 3: of her mind. Anne's eyes roll back and she sort
Speaker 3: of takes a step toward the door and then just
Speaker 3: suddenly collapses, falling across the lap of the man across
Speaker 3: from them. After a moment, she comes around and all
Speaker 3: is well again, and they all introduce themselves to each other.
Speaker 3: They become acquainted. Brooks offers and a flask to help
Speaker 3: her recover from her fainting episode. I love how in
Speaker 3: these old movies people seem to believe that hard liquor
Speaker 3: just has general medicinal qualities and it treats everything from
Speaker 3: the common cold to alien mind control. So he gives
Speaker 3: her the flask and she's like, oh great, thanks. It
Speaker 3: takes a big gulp and then her eyes bug out
Speaker 3: of her head a bit.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they hit the spirits really hard in this movie.
Speaker 2: Seemingly the drop of a hat, they'll just suddenly have
Speaker 2: drinks and it's like, maybe like ten in the morning.
Speaker 3: Nobody really questions that it's good to just have a
Speaker 3: good bel to liquor before you go mountain climbing. So
Speaker 3: Sarah explains to Brooks that they're on the way to Geneva.
Speaker 3: Brooks is getting off at the next stop, this sleepy
Speaker 3: mountain village of Trollenberg. But suddenly something comes over Anne
Speaker 3: and she tells her sister that they have to get
Speaker 3: off at Trollenburg as well. And Sarah's like, no, no, no,
Speaker 3: what do you mean, We're going to Geneva. But Anne
Speaker 3: will not agree. She says she cannot travel any further today.
Speaker 3: They've got to get off at the next stop and
Speaker 3: stay at the Hotel Europa. And again Sarah is confused.
Speaker 3: They've never been to this place. How does Anne know
Speaker 3: what hotel to go to? And Anne says she doesn't
Speaker 3: know how she knows, She just knows, and she is
Speaker 3: insistent they've got to get off at Trollenberg. No debating this,
Speaker 3: so fortunately enough, the Hotel Europa is also where Brooks
Speaker 3: is going, so they're kind of all just traveling together.
Speaker 3: So at the train station, our three characters meet up
Speaker 3: with Hair Klein, the proprietor of the Hotel Europa and
Speaker 3: also the mayor of Trollenberg. He is kind enough to
Speaker 3: put them up at the hotel even though they don't
Speaker 3: have reservations. Apparently there are very few tourists at the moment.
Speaker 3: And on the car ride to the hotel, Anne is
Speaker 3: staring intently out the window at the mountain. Brooks is
Speaker 3: in the middle of like trying to get everybody to
Speaker 3: smoke cigarettes, and Ann starts babbling about mountain climbers. She's
Speaker 3: saying they shouldn't have tried to go all the way
Speaker 3: up the mountain. The three English students, one of them
Speaker 3: was killed. She says, peasants are leaving the mountain. They
Speaker 3: say it's bad luck, and Klein seems to confirm that
Speaker 3: what Anne is saying is true, though he doesn't share
Speaker 3: the evaluation like He says that the superstitious worries of
Speaker 3: the mountain people should be ignored. But how does Anne
Speaker 3: know all this stuff? Curious now. Upon arriving at the
Speaker 3: hotel bar, we meet several more characters. We meet Hans
Speaker 3: played by Colin Douglas, the German speaking bartender. Hans at
Speaker 3: several points kind of clams up when people start asking
Speaker 3: questions about the accidents. He's kind of untrusting. We meet
Speaker 3: Philip Truscatt played by Lawrence Payne. This is the guy
Speaker 3: we mentioned earlier who was in the TV adaptation playing
Speaker 3: the same character. This is our darkly handsome and mysterious man.
Speaker 3: He's having a drink and a smoke at the bar
Speaker 3: when our heroes arrive. He will later be revealed as
Speaker 3: a newspaper reporter here on deep cover investigating the mountain
Speaker 3: missed tragedies. And then to go ahead and round out
Speaker 3: the rest of the main cast list, we will also
Speaker 3: later meet Dewhurst. This is the rotund geology professor here
Speaker 3: to study the mountain. Brett, who is a wiry, laconic
Speaker 3: mountain guide who will be climbing the mountain with Dewhurst
Speaker 3: and also the professor. Again, we think his name is Krevit,
Speaker 3: at least that's what the wiki says. I don't remember
Speaker 3: what they call him. The Professor a scientist who is
Speaker 3: again superficially resembling a kind of standard caricature of Einstein,
Speaker 3: but he's running the lab at the observatory on the
Speaker 3: mountain side. So here I think I'm gonna maybe speak
Speaker 3: about the rest of the movie in a more summary way,
Speaker 3: and then we'll see if there's anything we want to
Speaker 3: come back and focus on in more detail. So from here,
Speaker 3: some of the main plot threads are that we see
Speaker 3: Alan Brooks. He goes up to the observatory by way
Speaker 3: of cable car up the side of the mountain to
Speaker 3: visit his old colleague, the Professor, and they discuss the
Speaker 3: disturbing incidents on the mountain, like climbers keep disappearing without
Speaker 3: a trace. Plus there's the recent beheading of the English
Speaker 3: student on the mountain. Also, Krevit explains to Brooks that
Speaker 3: there is a strange cloud which hovers on one side
Speaker 3: of the mountaintop, occasionally moving around, and the cloud they
Speaker 3: have figured out is radioactive. This is another hallmark of
Speaker 3: the nineteen fifties movie You Gotta Work our radio app
Speaker 3: active something in there. So there's some backstory between these two.
Speaker 3: We learned that Brooks was also involved in investigating a
Speaker 3: similar incident in the Andes of South America several years before,
Speaker 3: which had some of the same features. There was a
Speaker 3: weird radioactive bank of fog around a mountaintop, and there
Speaker 3: were disappearances of climbers, but that case also had other
Speaker 3: features not yet seen here in Switzerland. Brooks mentions mental compulsion.
Speaker 3: Also in this meeting, the professor proudly shows off the
Speaker 3: observatory's defensive measures, including a lot of like Chekhov's blast
Speaker 3: doors in the scene. So they've got like metal plates
Speaker 3: that you can roll down over the windows to shield
Speaker 3: themselves allegedly against an avalanche. Also, they have somehow got
Speaker 3: closed circuit TV cameras that can show you anywhere on
Speaker 3: the mountain at infinitely high resolution. I'm a little skeptical
Speaker 3: of some of these features, but the point is this, Yes, yeah,
Speaker 3: this observatory is basically a fortress. They also argue there's
Speaker 3: some funny stuff here where they're talking about his funding.
Speaker 3: The professors like, oh, yeah, the government, they just give
Speaker 3: me money to do whatever I want as long as
Speaker 3: I what are they arguing about. He's saying like, they
Speaker 3: won't give me money if I report that there's something
Speaker 3: weird happening here, but they will give me money for
Speaker 3: anything else. We also have these characters do Hurst and Brett. Again,
Speaker 3: Dohurst is the geologist and Brett is his mountain guide.
Speaker 3: They're they're gonna ascend the mountains so that Dohurst I
Speaker 3: believe he wants to collect samples for research. He's a
Speaker 3: geologist and he thinks maybe you can find something weird
Speaker 3: in the minerals up on the mountain that could explain something.
Speaker 3: So they're going to go up the mountain. Their plan
Speaker 3: is to camp the first night of the ascent in
Speaker 3: a hut halfway up the mountain. They're doing a lot
Speaker 3: of drinking, like they drink before they leave in the morning.
Speaker 3: The characters all gather around for just some Scotch or
Speaker 3: whatever before they go up the mountain. They're also drinking
Speaker 3: a lot along the way and in the hut.
Speaker 2: But they do explain at least in passing, that this
Speaker 2: will keep them warm.
Speaker 3: Folks that ain't how it works. Also, there's a decent
Speaker 3: amount made of how Dohurst he's very exuberant at the beginning,
Speaker 3: but like he's not cut out for mountain climbing, so
Speaker 3: when they make it up to the hut, he's really
Speaker 3: like not happy. Meanwhile, Anne continues to receive strange visions
Speaker 3: and inexplicable downloads of knowledge and information from the mountain,
Speaker 3: like she knows about all these things she should not.
Speaker 3: She knows about the climber's hut, she knows about the
Speaker 3: incidents of the previous weeks. At one point in the
Speaker 3: middle of the movie, after Dohurst and Brett have gone
Speaker 3: up to the hut to spend the night there, Sarah
Speaker 3: and Anne put on a demonstration of their mind reading
Speaker 3: act for the other guests at the hotel. Basically, Anne
Speaker 3: is the mind reader and Sarah her assistant, and successfully
Speaker 3: guesses a bunch of hidden objects. They do their standard
Speaker 3: tricks as we talked about earlier. Sarah explains to Brooks
Speaker 3: that they that they do not use any tricks or
Speaker 3: secret codes. They used to, but then they discovered that
Speaker 3: Anne actually is a mind reader, so they don't need
Speaker 3: to use any sleight of hand anyway. In the middle
Speaker 3: of this mind reading demonstration, Anne has another one of
Speaker 3: these mountain mind control episodes where she begins to see
Speaker 3: what is happening somehow to do Hurst and Brett in
Speaker 3: the climber's hut up on the mountain. And weirdly, she's
Speaker 3: almost talking as if from the perspective of a sort
Speaker 3: of a threatened third being up on the mountain that
Speaker 3: does not like their presence. So I think we're getting
Speaker 3: some channeling of the crawling eye's mindset, eye mindset coming
Speaker 3: through the ann mind reader.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and this scene and many like it in the
Speaker 2: picture a legitimately unsettling. I think these really held up.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So in this scene, Brett, the climber, for some
Speaker 3: inexplicable reason, decides to open up the cabin door and
Speaker 3: walk outside, and he disappears into the night, and then
Speaker 3: the cloud of radioactive myst comes down to surround the
Speaker 3: hut with Dewhurst still in it. The minute at the hotel,
Speaker 3: after hearing AND's channeling of what's going on up there,
Speaker 3: they telephone the hut. There is a telephone up there,
Speaker 3: it's connected by phone line, and Dohurst answers, not knowing
Speaker 3: where Brett disappeared to, Dohurst becomes frightened and then he
Speaker 3: screams at as something seems to be entering the cabin
Speaker 3: door and then they lose the call. So it's time
Speaker 3: for a search party. Got to have a search party
Speaker 3: in a good mountain movie. The remaining characters organize into
Speaker 3: a couple of parties to scour the mountain and find
Speaker 3: out what happened to Dohurst and Brett. Dohurst is found
Speaker 3: in the cabin without a head, and this is one
Speaker 3: of the scenes of shocking Gore.
Speaker 2: I thought, yeah, absolutely, yeah, the gross, gross sing it's wet.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Uh.
Speaker 3: Brett is spotted somewhere elsewhere on the mountain with the
Speaker 3: aid of an airplane. But when a couple of the
Speaker 3: mountaineers make it to his location, first of all, they
Speaker 3: discover that his backpack has a human head in it.
Speaker 2: And then and you know that backpack is going to
Speaker 2: have a human head, like the West. They're just sitting
Speaker 2: there ominously and they're they're stalking up to it, and yeah,
Speaker 2: it was. It was. This was also a highly effective
Speaker 2: I thought.
Speaker 3: Well, the way it shot, it's like the camera's on
Speaker 3: the backpack and he's reaching up to peel away the flap.
Speaker 3: It's like, what were we going to see in there?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 3: But then after this, uh, Brett appears and attacks the
Speaker 3: rescuers with a climbing axe. So something has happened to Brett.
Speaker 3: Brett was not like this before. In the middle of
Speaker 3: the movie, there's also this thing where Anne is she's
Speaker 3: sort of losing con of herself and she is being
Speaker 3: compelled by this outside force to try to ascend the
Speaker 3: mountain alone as she goes into a kind of trance
Speaker 3: like state, and she takes the cable car up to
Speaker 3: the observatory, and she tries to go up further, presumably
Speaker 3: up to the cloud, but she is intercepted by other
Speaker 3: characters and guided back to the hotel. Then at the
Speaker 3: hotel we get the return of Brett. So we're at
Speaker 3: the bar and unexpectedly, Brett, the lost mountaineer, staggers in
Speaker 3: from the cold. He seems dazed and uncoordinated, just saying
Speaker 3: that he got lost and he just now was able
Speaker 3: to make it back. And as everyone watches, Brett tries
Speaker 3: to pour himself a drink and light a cigarette, but
Speaker 3: he can't do it without assistance to steady his hands.
Speaker 3: In the middle of this interaction, Anne Pilgrim comes down
Speaker 3: to the lobby to join the group. And as soon
Speaker 3: as Brett sees her, he turns violent and he tries
Speaker 3: to lunge at her with a knife. Fortunately, he is
Speaker 3: subdued and knocked unconscious by Brooks and trust it and
Speaker 3: they lock him up in some kind of dungeon in
Speaker 3: the basement of the hotel. Maybe it's supposed to be
Speaker 3: a wine cellar.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, maybe, so the your standard issue dungeon.
Speaker 3: Strangely, despite the fact that Brett is cut in the scuffle,
Speaker 3: or I don't know if he was already cut. I
Speaker 3: think he's supposed to be cut in the scuffle, he
Speaker 3: does not bleed at all. And Brooks ends up relating
Speaker 3: this to what happened during the previous incidents in the Andes.
Speaker 3: They say there was a man when there was this
Speaker 3: cloud in the Andes, there was a man who was
Speaker 3: presumed dead and then reappeared to murder a local witch
Speaker 3: in the mountains there who had psychic powers. And then
Speaker 3: it turns out that they do an autopsy of the
Speaker 3: man and they find out he had already been dead
Speaker 3: for days before he appeared to do the murder. So
Speaker 3: this is some plan nine from outer space stuff. It
Speaker 3: is reanimation of the dead, as zombie assassins, and they
Speaker 3: are going after Earth's precious psychics.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it's this is such an interesting threat in
Speaker 2: this picture that is not fully explored, like why are
Speaker 2: the psychics considered such a threat? In fact, they seem
Speaker 2: to be the only for the most part, they're the
Speaker 2: only thing deemed a threat by the aliens. They're otherwise otherwise,
Speaker 2: they seem happy to live about in high altitude clouds
Speaker 2: and just kill the occasional mountaineer and so forth, at
Speaker 2: least for now. Who knows what their long term plans are.
Speaker 4: Well.
Speaker 3: The explanation the characters eventually land on is that the psychics,
Speaker 3: because they can connect mentally to the aliens and the clouds,
Speaker 3: are able to provide information to the humans that would
Speaker 3: potentially stop the Aliens from succeeding in their invasion, because
Speaker 3: otherwise the Earthlings are going to be caught by surprise,
Speaker 3: but the psychics can give them advance.
Speaker 2: Warning, so ultimately, as a privacy issue.
Speaker 3: Yes, yeah, But anyway, in the middle of the night,
Speaker 3: Brett wakes up and he escapes the Wine Dungeon. There's
Speaker 3: a creepy thing where he reaches out through a hole
Speaker 3: in the door strangles the guy and then he tries
Speaker 3: to kill Ann in the middle of the night, but
Speaker 3: she's rescued when Brooks shoots him before he can hurt her.
Speaker 3: And then there's a cool effect where there's like a
Speaker 3: rapid decomp effect on Brett's arm I think caused by
Speaker 3: like after the mind control thing is broken on his
Speaker 3: zombie corpse, he like rapidly breaks down in the heat
Speaker 3: of the hotel. Anyway, we move on to the final
Speaker 3: act where in the final act they discovered that the
Speaker 3: cloud is now descending the mountain. It has been up
Speaker 3: there and now it is coming down here, and so
Speaker 3: our characters who are in the no develop a theory. Basically,
Speaker 3: they think it's got to be aliens. At one point
Speaker 3: they say, what else could it be? Yeah, yeah, okay,
Speaker 3: so it's aliens, and they figure out maybe the aliens
Speaker 3: have to adapt themselves to our atmosphere on mountaintops where
Speaker 3: the air is thinner, and then as they gradually acclimate
Speaker 3: to our atmosphe, they can move on down and attack
Speaker 3: us where we live. I thought that was kind of
Speaker 3: cool because that's an inversion of like the you know,
Speaker 3: the mountaintop acclamation that like if you're going up to
Speaker 3: a very high altitude. You need to spend some time
Speaker 3: at a kind of middle altitude to get used to
Speaker 3: it and allow your body to adjust. And so they're
Speaker 3: imagining the aliens are doing the exact opposite thing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I like this idea.
Speaker 3: So, knowing that the aliens are coming down to the hotel,
Speaker 3: the characters organize a retreat to the only defensible position,
Speaker 3: the fortress observatory with the blast doors. Yeah. So there's
Speaker 3: an evacuation scene at the hotel where Brooks is organizing
Speaker 3: everybody to get in the cable cars and go up
Speaker 3: to the fortress. I think one group of people goes
Speaker 3: up first, and then Brooks is staying behind and realizes
Speaker 3: that there's like a mother with a little girl there
Speaker 3: and they were supposed to be part of the evacuation,
Speaker 3: but the mother can't find her child, and they deduced
Speaker 3: that the child has gone back to the hotel because
Speaker 3: she left her ball in the lobby. Oh, child in peril.
Speaker 3: So Brooks runs to the rescue, and here we get
Speaker 3: the reveal of a great eyeball monster mounted on a
Speaker 3: brain chassis coming in with tentacles waving all over the
Speaker 3: place and smoke billowing out around it, and it attacks
Speaker 3: basically the front door of the hotel. That goes right
Speaker 3: to the front door and blows it open, and the
Speaker 3: kids there trying to get the ball and the alien
Speaker 3: I guess it's going to eat her or whatever. But
Speaker 3: then Brooks arrives just in the nick of time and
Speaker 3: hacks off one of the tentacles and rescues the child.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the eyeball especially is very convincing. It just feel
Speaker 2: it does feel to me anyway, very organic, very real,
Speaker 2: like I'm looking at some sort of a bizarre living creature.
Speaker 2: The tentacles are maybe a little less convincing and verius,
Speaker 2: but still still as far as tentacle effects go for
Speaker 2: the nineteen fifties, is still pretty soft.
Speaker 3: There was a scene where I thought the suspense kind
Speaker 3: of works pretty good good where they're in the cable
Speaker 3: car trying to make it up to the observatory and
Speaker 3: the fog bank makes it up to the bottom station
Speaker 3: where the car comes in. And they've established earlier that
Speaker 3: these creatures can freeze like telephone wires and cause them
Speaker 3: to crystallize and shatter, and you can tell they're trying
Speaker 3: to freeze out the cable that's guiding the car to
Speaker 3: cause it to break and really looks like it's going
Speaker 3: to happen, but they do manage to make it up
Speaker 3: to the observatory and up there they basically agree that Okay,
Speaker 3: heat is their weakness. We know that they don't like heat,
Speaker 3: so let's get them with fire. You got to make
Speaker 3: them alltt cocktails.
Speaker 2: That's right. This is where they learned that, yes, we
Speaker 2: can defeat the alien menace by just lobbing flames at them.
Speaker 2: And this is pretty much how it goes from there
Speaker 2: on out, throwing Molotov cocktails at the enemy and then
Speaker 2: realizing what we should probably bring the military in on
Speaker 2: this as well. Let's have them fire bomb the observatory
Speaker 2: that we are in in order to destroy the alien threat.
Speaker 3: The walls are thick enough that we'll be safe.
Speaker 2: Yes, they do establish that, but it's still it's a
Speaker 2: little calling the air strike what location right here? Also
Speaker 2: the cloud, there's some arguing back and forth with the pilot.
Speaker 2: He's like, you want me to bomb a cloud and
Speaker 2: they're like, yes, bomb the cloud.
Speaker 3: He's giving orders on the radio to the pilot bomb
Speaker 3: the cloud. Yeah, And it's kind of like Tarantula There
Speaker 3: were a bunch of movies like this in the fifties
Speaker 3: where there's this monster they're debating like, how can we
Speaker 3: possibly beat in the discover In the end, the answer
Speaker 3: is bombs.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, calling the military air strike just takes care
Speaker 2: of it, cleans it all up. At the end, you
Speaker 2: are safe, You are protected. But I do think it
Speaker 2: would have been interesting, and I think in another era
Speaker 2: you would have seen this, let's see and defeat the
Speaker 2: aliens with those psychic powers, which I guess they've established
Speaker 2: that psychic powers are only a threat to them, like
Speaker 2: you said, because they reveal the alien secrets. It's a
Speaker 2: privacy issue. But what if there was more to that?
Speaker 2: What if what if there was a possibility there that
Speaker 2: human psychics didn't even realize that they could just like,
Speaker 2: with a particularly potent thought, you know, explode the large
Speaker 2: brains of these creatures, you know, the psychander yah scanners
Speaker 2: them to death.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah yeah. Or what if the mind control went
Speaker 3: two ways? What if Ann Pilgrim could make the aliens
Speaker 3: like launch themselves off the mountain side or something.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, that would have been interesting. But instead we
Speaker 2: get the airstrike, which is you know, fitting of the air.
Speaker 3: I guess there's one more cool thing in the in
Speaker 3: the final scene, which is remember the character Hans the bartender.
Speaker 3: They say he takes one of the cars and he's
Speaker 3: trying to At first he's like, no, I'm not going
Speaker 3: up to the observatory. He's trying to high tail it
Speaker 3: out of the valley and they see him drive into
Speaker 3: the fog bank and like whoops, okay, no more Hans.
Speaker 3: But then he reappears later he said the observatory, where
Speaker 3: he's like, I'm fine, Actually, can I Where's Anne? I'm
Speaker 3: looking for her.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So we give one more psychic assassin attempt by
Speaker 2: the aliens, and this one is also pretty tense and effective.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he almost gets her, but then she is rescued
Speaker 3: once again by by Brooks and Truscot, and then so
Speaker 3: after they defeat the the Eye creatures in the end.
Speaker 3: I don't know, is it kind of implied that that
Speaker 3: maybe Anne Pilgrim and Philip Truscott are going to be
Speaker 3: an item and maybe be maybe Sarah Pilgrim and Alan
Speaker 3: Brooks are gonna be an item too. I think so
Speaker 3: I implied romance.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we're left to do the assumed matchmaking on our
Speaker 2: own but it's like, oh, these these kids are all young,
Speaker 2: let's uh, they should they should get together, settled down.
Speaker 2: The alien threat is defeated. Now it's time to start
Speaker 2: a family.
Speaker 3: They'll they'll become part of the U N Investigative Psychic
Speaker 3: Mind Reading Team.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because I think, you know, based on what they've established,
Speaker 2: like the the threat's not over. There are other mountainous
Speaker 2: regions of the world where these creatures may be taking
Speaker 2: up residents and they need to be defeated. We need
Speaker 2: somebody out there with psychic abilities to figure out where
Speaker 2: they are, and then someone else to call in the
Speaker 2: air strikes to deal with them.
Speaker 3: Did you read the same trivia claim I did that.
Speaker 3: John Carpenter said he was inspired to do the movie
Speaker 3: The Fog by this movie.
Speaker 2: Oh I didn't run across that, but it's not surprising
Speaker 2: because again, this is a highly effective film, and I
Speaker 2: know a lot of people loved it back in the day.
Speaker 2: I did read. I don't remember this from my reading
Speaker 2: of the novel, but in Stephen King's it there is
Speaker 2: a reference to the crawling eye. I think one of
Speaker 2: the kids is frightened by one of the sequences, and
Speaker 2: you know, so it stood the test of time for
Speaker 2: a reason.
Speaker 3: Though, there's a thing that I think works better in
Speaker 3: this movie than it does in The Fog. Actually, this
Speaker 3: is always so. I've always had a love hate relationship
Speaker 3: with John Carpenter's The Fog. I really really like a
Speaker 3: lot of things about it. The ghost story told at
Speaker 3: the beginning is fantastic, and a lot of the atmospherics
Speaker 3: in it are just wonderful, as the FOG's rolling through
Speaker 3: town and we see all the kind of poltergeist effects,
Speaker 3: and yeah, there's so much about it that works really well.
Speaker 3: But on the other hand, I felt like it it
Speaker 3: feels like it never quite comes together as a story
Speaker 3: all that much. There's something kind of lacking in terms of, like,
Speaker 3: I don't know, maybe it needs more of a main
Speaker 3: character with more of a struggle or something, and so
Speaker 3: I've thought about that before. But another thing in it
Speaker 3: that never quite worked for me is the radio announcer
Speaker 3: character played by Adrian Barbo, who's like calling out to
Speaker 3: the characters over the radio where the fog is in town.
Speaker 3: Something about the mechanics of that just never made sense, like,
Speaker 3: oh the fog is there now, Oh it's there now.
Speaker 3: It makes more sense in this movie when you're like
Speaker 3: you have an observatory that's watching where the fog is going,
Speaker 3: like on a mountaintop versus going down in the valley.
Speaker 3: That kind of reads better, I think than the street
Speaker 3: to street fog navigation and assistance.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah, John Carpenter's the Fog
Speaker 2: of film that I think I only ever saw once.
Speaker 2: And I like the music and I like the fog
Speaker 2: pirate effects. Yeah, but but I just have never gone
Speaker 2: back to rewatch it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, mixed feelings about it, but the strong elements are
Speaker 3: really strong. I can't believe I didn't mention the music obviously, Yes,
Speaker 3: the music is fantastic.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, the fog monsters are great. And you know,
Speaker 2: having mentioned Stephen King, I can only imagine that this film,
Speaker 2: at least in some small way, helped inspire his novella
Speaker 2: The Mist Fog Monsters, Missed Monsters. There's there's overlap there.
Speaker 3: Maybe we should do an episode on the fog at
Speaker 3: some point, and that could be a good Halloween season one.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, Pirate Day. I don't know, I forget what
Speaker 2: day Pirate Day falls, but I don't think we've done
Speaker 2: a proper pirate is a pirate day?
Speaker 3: Is that different from talk like a pirate day?
Speaker 2: That that is what I'm thinking of, talk like a pirate.
Speaker 3: I don't know when that is either.
Speaker 2: No, I don't either.
Speaker 3: Well, uh yeah, R Maybe are we done here?
Speaker 2: I believe we are, but we done. We'd love to
Speaker 2: hear from everyone out there if you have thoughts on
Speaker 2: this film. At what point you were introduced to it?
Speaker 2: MSD three K fans definitely right in about the crawling.
Speaker 2: I just a reminder that Stuff to Blow Your Mind
Speaker 2: is primarily a science and culture podcast with core episodes
Speaker 2: on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but on Fridays we set aside
Speaker 2: most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film
Speaker 2: on Weird House Cinema. You can find a full list
Speaker 2: of all the episodes we've covered over the years at letterboxed.
Speaker 2: Our user name there is weird House, and you can
Speaker 2: also look up weird House as its own playlist. Wherever
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Speaker 2: can rate it there. You know, we'd ask that you
Speaker 2: still subscribe and rate the core Stuff to Blow your
Speaker 2: Mind podcast feed as well, but it's an additional tool
Speaker 2: that we're experimenting with.
Speaker 3: Here's thanks, as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
Speaker 3: If you would like to get in touch with us
Speaker 3: with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
Speaker 3: a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
Speaker 3: you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
Speaker 3: your Mind dot com.
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