Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema. Rewind. This is Rob
Speaker 1: Lamb and today we are rearing an episode that originally
Speaker 1: published five point thirty twenty twenty five. It is nineteen
Speaker 1: fifty eight, The Crawling Eye. This one has a pretty
Speaker 1: great monster in it, so dive into the discussion here
Speaker 1: with us.
Speaker 2: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1: 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 a 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 1: Yeah, I think we still do see trailers in our
Speaker 1: modern day that give away way too much and reveal
Speaker 1: like most of the plot. I've seen trailers where afterwards
Speaker 1: I'm like, Okay, that's most of the movie. I could
Speaker 1: maybe just watch the last five minutes of the film
Speaker 1: to see how it wraps up, and I'd be good
Speaker 1: at this point instead of watching the whole two hour plus.
Speaker 1: But yeah, these films of this nature where it was
Speaker 1: it was something being released to the US market and
Speaker 1: then packaged in a different way so as to I guess,
Speaker 1: just try to maximize the eyeballs on it, and maybe too,
Speaker 1: there is the idea it's like, look, the American teenager
Speaker 1: just wants to know what they're going to be making
Speaker 1: out to. We're just going to go ahead and make
Speaker 1: sure the monster is mentioned in the title.
Speaker 3: Transparency and advertising.
Speaker 1: And also maybe leaning more on like the I don't know,
Speaker 1: like the drive and spectacle of the thing. You know,
Speaker 1: it's like crawling eye. Don't you want to see that
Speaker 1: as large as life. I don't know that's my best bet.
Speaker 1: I think it's mostly though, just take this thing from
Speaker 1: the UK and just try and get the most attention
Speaker 1: 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 Trollenburg.
Speaker 1: The Trolenberg Terror is a better title in many ways though,
Speaker 1: because I think The Trollenberg Terror gives you more of
Speaker 1: a taste of the slow build and slow burn aspect
Speaker 1: of the picture. That the picture is more mysterious, and
Speaker 1: it is not really a giant monster movie except for
Speaker 1: you just like the last what fifteen minutes or so
Speaker 1: of the picture.
Speaker 3: But then it really goes whole hog on giant monster movie.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's rather ambitious and its special effects towards the
Speaker 1: end with mixed results 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: that this was just a golden age of posters and
Speaker 3: we've really got some meat to chew on here. So
Speaker 3: on the crawling Eye poster, we have emerging from a
Speaker 3: black void, a giant, distinctly human eye, complete with tear
Speaker 3: ducts and lids, and highlighted by makeup. You can see
Speaker 3: mascara and eyeliner. So it does look a little freaky,
Speaker 3: but it does not suggest eyeball monsters from another planet.
Speaker 3: I think it implies instead a supernatural, disembodied human observer
Speaker 3: reaching out through some kind of dark space. Maybe you
Speaker 3: could say that the eye on the poster here connects
Speaker 3: more to the psychic and esp themes of the movie
Speaker 3: than to the giant physical eyeballs that we will be
Speaker 3: hurling firebombs at later in the film. But I think
Speaker 3: that that's kind of a stretch to say that's really
Speaker 3: what'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.
Speaker 1: Yeah, 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 record
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 1: No, no, you know, like we've talked, we've talked about
Speaker 1: before on the show, if you could at all get
Speaker 1: the monster carrying a screaming woman on the poster, you
Speaker 1: absolutely did it. The monsters in this film, maybe it's
Speaker 1: a little more of a stretch to imagine them carrying
Speaker 1: a woman, and therefore this is just a rough approximation
Speaker 1: of what that 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, kind of like
Speaker 3: around the neck near the top anyway. Nothing about this
Speaker 3: poster also, I would point out, suggests that the movie
Speaker 3: has to 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 lose the ability to
Speaker 3: write with any style when what's needed is some kind
Speaker 3: of marketing or promotional copy. I just kind of freeze
Speaker 3: up mentally there. But this is too wordy. Not every
Speaker 3: now needs a modifier, but more to the substance of
Speaker 3: what they're trying to say with taglines like this that
Speaker 3: unleashes agonizing horror on a screaming world. This got me
Speaker 3: thinking about how titles and taglines and plot descriptions of
Speaker 3: horror and sci fi movies from the nineteen fifties display
Speaker 3: 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 1: Yeah, like it conquered the world. As a classic example
Speaker 1: of this, as we discussed in the show, it basically
Speaker 1: 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 cure curious about this, Like, why did
Speaker 3: advertisers always want to make it seem like the plot
Speaker 3: had big implications involving millions of people. There's nothing wrong
Speaker 3: with small stories. Small stories that affect only a handful
Speaker 3: of characters can be just as thrilling. In fact, I
Speaker 3: would 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 1: This is an interesting question. I imagine some folks have dug
Speaker 1: into this. There might be some sort of a Cold
Speaker 1: War read on the ramifications here. But yeah, but I
Speaker 1: do certainly agree with you that like the lower stakes,
Speaker 1: the localized stakes can certainly be just as thrilling. And
Speaker 1: I think many of these movies are not nearly like
Speaker 1: incidentally having like a low stakes, like small hometown invasion angle,
Speaker 1: like that's the kind of thing that people can relate to,
Speaker 1: 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 them, yeah, they're actually
Speaker 3: quite local, and when they work, they work because they're local.
Speaker 3: They set the scope of the plot correctly to the
Speaker 3: ambitions of the story they're going to tell. But then
Speaker 3: the other thing I was going to ask is I
Speaker 3: think the answer to this question is more clear, But
Speaker 3: I was thinking specifically with these lower budget movies. If
Speaker 3: they thought audiences wanted a huge story with global implications,
Speaker 3: why did they not actually write a story like that?
Speaker 3: Why did they make these local stories? I think the
Speaker 3: answer there is just got to be budget, right, Like
Speaker 3: the bigger story requires more actors, probably more sets. And
Speaker 3: so I think you sometimes see these movies trying to
Speaker 3: bridge the gap by having the direct plot be very
Speaker 3: local 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 1: Yeah, throwing a few phone call, throw in a little
Speaker 1: stock footage, and you're good to go. News footage as well.
Speaker 3: Oh that's a good one, yes, yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Like you know, a great example of this is
Speaker 1: Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, you know. Yeah, they actually
Speaker 1: pull a number of levers in that picture to really
Speaker 1: 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 alien 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 a couple
Speaker 3: of other great things about this poster. I love posters
Speaker 3: that try to make you feel like your life might
Speaker 3: be in physical danger by seeing the film. This one
Speaker 3: says warning, if you've ever been hypnotized, do not come alone.
Speaker 1: I like that, and that's that's that's some William Castle
Speaker 1: will 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 describe things in the movie,
Speaker 3: but in this sentence they refer to the wrong things.
Speaker 1: This is back when they would employ poets to compose
Speaker 1: a short poem that could go on the poster that
Speaker 1: that speaks to, you know, some theme or a particular
Speaker 1: 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 uh, it promises that this is the company
Speaker 3: that brought you rodin.
Speaker 1: I mean, come on, yeah yeah. And then then also
Speaker 1: star Forrest Tucker's name is in red letters. Really, you know,
Speaker 1: going after that F Troop audience, make sure they make
Speaker 1: it in for the picture.
Speaker 3: I don't even know what that refers to. What is
Speaker 3: F Troop?
Speaker 1: 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 1: Yeah, Yeah, we'll definitely talk about his performance. But I
Speaker 1: think in general, it's the nineteen fifties, there's an interstellar threat.
Speaker 1: You need a tall, strong man to potentially lean your
Speaker 1: head on, and that's where Forrest s Tucker 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 as horror.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Absolutely, I think The Crawling Eye is a pretty
Speaker 1: solid picture. It works better as the trollingberg terror though
Speaker 1: again because it's ultimately that sort of film. There's a
Speaker 1: lot of intrigue, a lot of mystery. It gives you
Speaker 1: some things to think about leading up to the monster battles,
Speaker 1: which again is it's only going to be the last
Speaker 1: ten to fifteen minutes of the picture, and at that
Speaker 1: point they do attempt to pull out 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, some actually rather shocking gristle.
Speaker 3: The scene I was thinking of is when they pull
Speaker 3: the geology professor Douhurst 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 1: Yeah, yeah, I thought that the gore was shocking, you know,
Speaker 1: 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 widely mocked monster design,
Speaker 3: and I do the design is indeed hilarious, like the
Speaker 3: effectively scary moments sort of dry up after the monster's
Speaker 3: true form is revealed. But also I really admire this monster.
Speaker 3: It's not hilarious in the attack of the the eye
Speaker 3: creatures way like that. It's hilarious in its shoddiness. This
Speaker 3: is hilarious in its exquisite detail. I really admire when
Speaker 3: movies of this era would commit to a fully realized,
Speaker 3: absolutely insane monster anatomy like we get here, rather than
Speaker 3: trying to like tone it down, make it maybe look
Speaker 3: more tasteful or plausible, take less risks. No, no, you fool,
Speaker 3: get weirder, risk more, And they absolutely did here. This
Speaker 3: is a this is a swinging for the fence's monster design,
Speaker 3: and it looks weird, and yes, it looks funny, but
Speaker 3: it is it makes the movie.
Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely, I really like the monster design here, and
Speaker 1: I agree that. I don't know. On one hand, I
Speaker 1: certainly agree that people have laughed at it over the years,
Speaker 1: and we'll get into some of the reasons why. And
Speaker 1: you know, I made sure to point it out to
Speaker 1: people in my household so that they could laugh at
Speaker 1: it as well. But I don't know. I don't that
Speaker 1: I didn't think it was that funny. I thought it
Speaker 1: was pretty effect like. It looks real, like I feel
Speaker 1: like it's a real monster. And if I'm laughing at it,
Speaker 1: I'm not laughing at it because it's an effect, but
Speaker 1: I'm like mocking an alien life form.
Speaker 3: It's just funny that aliens look this way.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean it's some of it, to be clear.
Speaker 1: Some of the shots are shot here looking than others.
Speaker 1: But like that main shot of the crawling eye coming
Speaker 1: directly at you, I think it's pretty amazing looking.
Speaker 3: The smoke coming up around it.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, I think that's a solid sequence, and that's
Speaker 1: one of the reasons they use it several 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 keeps the
Speaker 3: plot feeling kind of fresh, the fact that it's not
Speaker 3: just an alien invasion movie. We get themes of mountaineering,
Speaker 3: mysterious fog, psychic powers in 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 1: A lot of times in nineteen fifties films, there's this
Speaker 1: feeling of a very straight laced world and then there
Speaker 1: is the strange element that is the threat. And here
Speaker 1: there are enough of strange elements that kind of create
Speaker 1: a world itself that feels a little off kilter from
Speaker 1: the buttoned up world we might expect to encounter. The
Speaker 1: psychic aspects of the plot particularly interest me because while
Speaker 1: the sisters that will get into here while they are entertainers,
Speaker 1: one of them does have psychic abilities, and the reality
Speaker 1: of psychic phenomena in the film feels widely accepted. I
Speaker 1: don't know to what extent this is just kind of
Speaker 1: an accident of the writing, or if this was a
Speaker 1: part of their vision for it, but this would seem
Speaker 1: to be a world where psychic phenomena is legitimate, but
Speaker 1: 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 there, all know about and accept this.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I think a pretty good read on it,
Speaker 1: and certainly we do have historical evidence for some of
Speaker 1: the things that were being researched, either in the military
Speaker 1: or by groups adjacent to the military at the time,
Speaker 1: just to at the very least see if there was
Speaker 1: anything to them. But yeah, but it's one of the
Speaker 1: things I did like about the picture, this idea that
Speaker 1: like nobody was like, Oh, those silly psychics, what can
Speaker 1: they teach us about this this real world threat. They
Speaker 1: were like, I don't know, get the psychics in here,
Speaker 1: let's see 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 stuff.
Speaker 1: Ye.
Speaker 3: But then they discovered through their career that oh, just
Speaker 3: so happens one of us actually is fully psychic and
Speaker 3: we don't need to use tricks anymore. Yeah, 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 1: 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, oh, 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 1: Yeah, it's not something old that is threatening the folks.
Speaker 1: It's something entirely new.
Speaker 3: Right, And what is that new thing? It is a
Speaker 3: series of grizzly accidents in which climbers have disappeared without
Speaker 3: a trace, or in a few cases, have been found
Speaker 3: with their heads torn off. So in the action sort
Speaker 3: of be 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 un fixer, basically named Alan Brooks, who has been
Speaker 3: sent to meet with the observatory's lead scientists to investigate
Speaker 3: this phenomenon. Also visiting Trollenberg are a pair of sisters
Speaker 3: named Anne and Sarah Pilgrim who perform a traveling mind
Speaker 3: reading act. They were originally on their way to Geneva
Speaker 3: by train, but when passing under Trollenberg, the truly psychic
Speaker 3: sister of the two, Anne is overcome with a compulsion
Speaker 3: to get off the train at this stop. She has
Speaker 3: 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 it could
Speaker 3: well have been called the crawling brain as well, because
Speaker 3: the main mass of the alien is basically a big
Speaker 3: like house sized brain with tentacles coming off of it,
Speaker 3: big octopus arms reaching all over the place, and then
Speaker 3: one huge honkin eye right in the middle.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it could have been the crawling brain as well
Speaker 1: as the crawling eye. It could have been the climbing eye.
Speaker 1: Or the Climbing Brain, because that's really what we see
Speaker 1: more of here.
Speaker 3: Were you previously familiar with the Misfits song the Crawling Eye?
Speaker 1: This is not an era of the Misfits that I've
Speaker 1: heard as much from. So this is off the nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety nine album Famous Monsters, which I believe it's the
Speaker 1: second album from the post Danzig era. I was never
Speaker 1: a Misfits listener growing up, because the Misfits were like
Speaker 1: a little too obscure for me at the time and
Speaker 1: maybe a little too dangerous. I was like, Oh, I
Speaker 1: don't know if I should be listening to you. These
Speaker 1: are a bunch of bad boys. Yeah. Later on I
Speaker 1: got in, But at the same time I got into Danzig,
Speaker 1: like Danzig seemed appropriate. Don't know, it was more Danzig
Speaker 1: was more available because there were music videos and it
Speaker 1: was on MTV.
Speaker 3: Somehow that feels backwards.
Speaker 1: I mean, some of those Misfits songs are pretty rough.
Speaker 1: I got a lot later and I enjoy a number
Speaker 1: of them, and I enjoy stuff from the different eras.
Speaker 1: So I wasn't as familiar with this one, but I
Speaker 1: am familiar with a few of the tracks off of
Speaker 1: Famous Monsters.
Speaker 3: I also didn't previously know this. I just found it
Speaker 3: while I was, you know, reading up before doing this episode. Uh,
Speaker 3: despite it not being in the Danzig era, I kind
Speaker 3: of like this song. I mean, the production feels a
Speaker 3: little clean for the Misfits. I think I like their
Speaker 3: murkier sound on the earlier albums. But yeah, it's I mean,
Speaker 3: the 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 Eye, 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.
Speaker 1: Nice.
Speaker 3: It reminds me of other of course, Misfits neologism's like myrtilation.
Speaker 1: Now, this one came off of your scouting list for
Speaker 1: Weird House Cinema. How did you become aware of the
Speaker 1: Crawling Eye? Was it the song?
Speaker 3: Oh no, no, no, Like I said, I heard the
Speaker 3: song for the first time ever today, I'm no. It
Speaker 3: may be the fact that it was featured on the
Speaker 3: first syndicated episode of Mystery Science Theater three thousand, though
Speaker 3: I don't think I've ever seen that episode. I think
Speaker 3: it's just come up because I've looked at episodes lists
Speaker 3: that that could be it, or it could be I
Speaker 3: don't know. I really don't remember how I find some
Speaker 3: of these movies that I put on our list. I
Speaker 3: just somehow I come across them. They look interesting to me,
Speaker 3: and I throw them up there to check out again later.
Speaker 1: All right, well, elevator pitch for this one, I'd say
Speaker 1: the Misfits lyrics pretty much captured it for us. So
Speaker 1: let's move on to hearing just a little bit of
Speaker 1: the trailer audio.
Speaker 4: This alarm fills the night with terror far high on
Speaker 4: a mountainside, a mystereoid fear such as no human being
Speaker 4: has ever seen before. Where there are mountains, there are
Speaker 4: always cloud But this one remains static on the side
Speaker 4: of the Kronberg.
Speaker 1: It never moves. Streak of nature that they do. Active
Speaker 1: freak of nature.
Speaker 4: It strikes without warning, wreaking death and destruction, too horrible
Speaker 4: to behold, a force of evil that tortures 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 its spell of destruction. A
Speaker 4: cold hypnotic stare striking fear into the hearts of all,
Speaker 4: creating a frenzied nightmare for those who behold it.
Speaker 1: All Right, so at this point you might be wondering
Speaker 1: where you can watch the Crawling Eye or the Trollnberg
Speaker 1: care well. This one has benefited from various physical releases
Speaker 1: over the years and was the again the first season
Speaker 1: one episode of Mystery Science Theater three thousand on the
Speaker 1: Comedy Channel, which would this would have been nineteen eighty nine,
Speaker 1: and then the Comedy Channel became Comedy Central in ninety one,
Speaker 1: so this was the first true season of MST following
Speaker 1: those KTMA episodes, and many of you will remember the
Speaker 1: titular monster from the Crawling Eye in the opening credits
Speaker 1: of MST three k during that early season, though, like you,
Speaker 1: I don't think I ever watched this episode. For one
Speaker 1: for some reason or another, I never watched this film
Speaker 1: MST three K, So I'm not sure how good the
Speaker 1: 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 1: Yeah, I think there are only a couple of episodes
Speaker 1: from season one that I've really watched, maybe two or
Speaker 1: three maybe. However, all of this comes to the point too,
Speaker 1: when you're looking around for streams of The Crawling Eye,
Speaker 1: a lot of the streams that are going to pop
Speaker 1: up for you on official channels are going to be
Speaker 1: that nineteen eighty nine MST three K episode. And you know,
Speaker 1: I love MST three K. I part of my appreciation
Speaker 1: for weird and sometimes arguably bad films comes from being
Speaker 1: a misty back in the day and through today as well. However,
Speaker 1: I hate it when that's the only version of a
Speaker 1: film that's officially available. I feel like, yes, if we
Speaker 1: can get the MST three K version, we should also
Speaker 1: have access to the unriffed.
Speaker 3: Version of it.
Speaker 1: And it seems a little harder to find official streams
Speaker 1: 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 1: Yeah, yeah, I like both experiences, but yeah, I need
Speaker 1: the uncut version of it. That being said, the version
Speaker 1: I ended up watching was an unofficial YouTube stream of
Speaker 1: it that had been colorized. I don't know what it
Speaker 1: was colorized, but I was like, well, I'm tired of
Speaker 1: looking for the version I'm going to stream. I think
Speaker 1: this is it, and I don't know. I like the
Speaker 1: colorization in it. It seemed fine to me.
Speaker 3: Okay, the version I saw was streaming on AMC plus Soka.
Speaker 1: So you did find an official stream of it. That
Speaker 1: was Oh yeah, okay, that one eluded me. There's so
Speaker 1: many places to look for these things. All right, let's
Speaker 1: get into the people behind this picture. Starting with the director.
Speaker 1: It's Quentin Lawrence, who of nineteen twenty through nineteen seventy
Speaker 1: nine English TV and film director, best known probably for
Speaker 1: this film, as well as nineteen sixty one's Cash on Demand,
Speaker 1: sixty three is The Man Who Finally Died and sixty
Speaker 1: four is the Secret of Blood Island. He also directed
Speaker 1: an episode of the Old Avengers TV show and was
Speaker 1: originally a physicist.
Speaker 3: Oh that's interesting. I wonder how often people make that
Speaker 3: career switch.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the IMDb sciences to b movie director. The IMDb
Speaker 1: trivia regarding this guy says that he even worked on
Speaker 1: the Manhattan Project, but I don't know. I didn't find
Speaker 1: additional information to back it up. I don't know if
Speaker 1: that's true. Sometimes some myth making finds its way into
Speaker 1: the IMDb trivia.
Speaker 3: This movie was directed by Nils Borr.
Speaker 1: Yeah, all right, I don't think I mentioned this earlier,
Speaker 1: but one of the interesting things about this picture is
Speaker 1: that it is actually a remake of an earlier British
Speaker 1: TV serial titled The Trolllenberg Terror, and a couple of
Speaker 1: cast members return to play the same part in this
Speaker 1: adaptation of that earlier works. Well, yeah, I'll mention those
Speaker 1: as we get to them. But as for the writers,
Speaker 1: there are some additional uncredited writers according to the different databases,
Speaker 1: but I'm just going to mention the screenplay credit in
Speaker 1: the story credit. Screenplay credit goes to Jimmy Sunster, who
Speaker 1: lived nineteen twenty seven through twenty eleven. Writer and producer,
Speaker 1: best known for his influential work at Hammer Studios, including
Speaker 1: writing on the screenplay for fifty sevens The Curse of Frankenstein,
Speaker 1: fifty eight s Dracula, fifty nine's The Mummy, sixties The
Speaker 1: 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 1: Yeah, that's right. Like, this guy was a big deal
Speaker 1: and Hammer Studio. So for any of you Hammer Studios
Speaker 1: nerds out there, this is somebody you definitely know about.
Speaker 1: On top of that, there's an individual by the name
Speaker 1: of Peter Key that also has a story credit. As
Speaker 1: best I could tell, a British TV writer. But dates
Speaker 1: are unknown for this individual. All right, now getting into
Speaker 1: the cast, Let's come back to Forrest Tucker playing Alan Brooks,
Speaker 1: that American un investigator here looking into mysterious mountaintop disappearances,
Speaker 1: strange clouds, and beheadings.
Speaker 3: The James Bond of the United Nations.
Speaker 1: Yes, he lived nineteen nineteen through nineteen eighty six, American actor,
Speaker 1: best known for his time as Sergeant Morgan O'Rourke on
Speaker 1: the long running f Troop TV series. His film work
Speaker 1: consists of a kind of a mix of genres, notably
Speaker 1: a bunch of war in westerns, but with some monster
Speaker 1: films thrown in. So His films include nineteen forty two's
Speaker 1: Keeper of the Flame, forty threes Sans of Yuajima, forty
Speaker 1: six is the Yearling, fifty sevens The Abominable snow Man
Speaker 1: of the Himalayas, nineteen seventies Chisholm, and nineteen eighty seven's
Speaker 1: 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. Time
Speaker 3: Stalkers is the one with John Ratzenberger and Klaus Kinski.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I haven't seen Time Stalkers either, but maybe
Speaker 1: that's what we should come back to. Right in listeners,
Speaker 1: if you have an opinion on this now, Joe, I
Speaker 1: want to drive home here that mister Forrest Tucker was
Speaker 1: thirty nine years old at the oldest when this film
Speaker 1: was made. There's a there's some common in here where
Speaker 1: somebody describes him as his character as being he looks
Speaker 1: about forty, and I was thinking, this man does not
Speaker 1: look forty. This man looks at least fifty, and sure enough,
Speaker 1: he was younger 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 1: Yeah? Yeah, it's a very rugged thirty nine that this
Speaker 1: guy has. We do see him hard drinking and smoking
Speaker 1: throughout the picture. Maybe that's part of it. Maybe it's
Speaker 1: the suits that everyone wore. I'm not sure. Maybe I'd
Speaker 1: look that old if I was wearing a suit and
Speaker 1: certainly throwing back that many spirits. But we were talking
Speaker 1: about how we should feel about this character in this performance.
Speaker 1: I'm going to say that ultimately I thought he was
Speaker 1: really good. Granted, it is a square jawed American male
Speaker 1: protagonist from a nineteen fifties film. So you know what
Speaker 1: to expect here, but I don't know. I felt like
Speaker 1: the character felt lived in. He didn't feel like a
Speaker 1: 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. You know, he's
Speaker 3: the person who kind of rallies everybody together when they
Speaker 3: need to to take action to defend against the eye
Speaker 3: monsters attacking the observatory. He really feels like he knows
Speaker 3: what he's doing. Took all thirty nine years of his
Speaker 3: life to get that experience.
Speaker 1: Yeah, all right. Up next, we have our secret journalist character,
Speaker 1: Philip Truscott, played by Lawrence Payne, who lived nineteen nineteen
Speaker 1: through two thousand and nine, British actor. He also appeared
Speaker 1: in episodes of Doctor Who in the nineteen sixties and
Speaker 1: the nineteen eighties different characters, and his other credits include
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy two's Vampire Circus and nineteen eighty one Cy Warriors,
Speaker 1: one of only two actors reprising their roles here from
Speaker 1: the original Trollinberg 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 1: Yes, yeah, this guy feels more authentically thirty nine forty
Speaker 1: and it is interesting. You could kind of look at this.
Speaker 1: I guess this was a film that was made with
Speaker 1: the intention of being marketed to both the US and
Speaker 1: of course to UK and Europe, and so his character
Speaker 1: is kind of more in line with what you'd expect
Speaker 1: from a British male lead in a picture from this
Speaker 1: 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 reveals himself to be
Speaker 3: a good guy. Yeah, he's kind of sneaking around a
Speaker 3: lot at the beginning.
Speaker 1: All right, Now, let's look at the Pilgrim sisters. Beginning
Speaker 1: with the non psychic Sarah Pilgrim. She's played by Jennifer Jane,
Speaker 1: who lived nineteen thirty one through two thousand and six,
Speaker 1: British actress perhaps best remembered for this film, but her
Speaker 1: credit stretch from nineteen forty nine to nineteen eighty five,
Speaker 1: and they include sixty seven's They Came From Beyond Space,
Speaker 1: eighty three's The Jigsaw Man in nineteen eighty five's The
Speaker 1: 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 manager
Speaker 3: Serial one.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, the logical one, the one that's making the
Speaker 1: real world choices here, and then playing the psychic Pilgrim's sister.
Speaker 1: And Pilgrim we have the incredible Janet Monroe, who of
Speaker 1: 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 to, 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 a real kind of urgency and terror.
Speaker 3: And I thought all of her psychic trance scenes were
Speaker 3: really good. There's a there's a kind of danger that
Speaker 3: comes with her, because when the Mountain is controlling her,
Speaker 3: you really feel like you don't know what she's going
Speaker 3: to do, And at the same time she's a quite
Speaker 3: sympathetic character. I really really liked Monroe in this.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I feel like Pilgrim really could be the film
Speaker 1: central protagonist, and I think definitely would have been in
Speaker 1: a later era. Oh yeah, her character feels the most electric,
Speaker 1: the most mysterious, and I think in many ways the
Speaker 1: most relatable, certainly to maybe to modern audiences more than
Speaker 1: contemporary audiences. But I don't know. The case could be
Speaker 1: made either way, and I would say my only misgiving
Speaker 1: is that she ends up not playing particularly strongly into
Speaker 1: the resolution. It would have been an interesting choice had
Speaker 1: her psychic powers, which are deemed dangerous by the aliens,
Speaker 1: 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 1: Yeah, absolutely still love the performance here, and it's still
Speaker 1: the most entertaining character in the picture.
Speaker 3: But yeah, it's got those those fifties drive in dynamics.
Speaker 3: She mainly just needs rest, the end.
Speaker 1: So I grew up watching Janet Monroe in the nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty Walt Disney live action fantasy romance film Darby O'Gill
Speaker 1: and the Little People, in which she plays Katie O'Gill,
Speaker 1: whose father is dead set on capturing the King of
Speaker 1: the Leprechauns and whose suitors include an Irish Sean Connery
Speaker 1: 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 1: It was a lavish production, you know. I'm not sure
Speaker 1: to what extent true Irish people in place it or not.
Speaker 1: I don't know. Irish listeners write in and let us know.
Speaker 1: But it's a film I grew up watching and I
Speaker 1: always really enjoy I rewatched it again just a few
Speaker 1: years back, and it was still a lot of fun,
Speaker 1: and she's a big part of its charm. Just a
Speaker 1: very charismatic actress. She was a British actress who won
Speaker 1: a Golden Globe Most Promising Newcomer Female for her role
Speaker 1: in Darby Ogill and the Little People, and then she
Speaker 1: went on to win a BAFTA a Best British Actress
Speaker 1: nod for her role in the nineteen sixty two drama
Speaker 1: Walk in the Shadows. Her follow up Disney films included
Speaker 1: Third Man on the Mountain from fifty nine, which I'm
Speaker 1: not familiar with, and The Mountain Movie, Yeah, and then
Speaker 1: Swiss Family Robinson from nineteen sixty which I definitely watched
Speaker 1: on VHS back in the day.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, we had a tape of that when I
Speaker 3: was growing up. I watched that a bunch of times.
Speaker 3: I loved all the traps they made. I was obsessed
Speaker 3: with the traps.
Speaker 1: She also appeared in the Day of the Earth Caught
Speaker 1: Fire nineteen sixty one, which is definitely one of those
Speaker 1: titles that matches up with the themes we were talking
Speaker 1: about exactly. Yeah. This was only her second feature film appearance,
Speaker 1: following nineteen fifty to seven Small Hotel, and she was
Speaker 1: only active from fifty seven through nineteen seventy t so ultimately,
Speaker 1: you know, not that long of a career, and her
Speaker 1: life was cut significantly short, but very memorable screen presence here,
Speaker 1: just 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 1: All right, let's roll through some of the supporting performers. Here.
Speaker 1: We have the character I believe it's Krevit, but they
Speaker 1: mostly just call him the Professor, So I if they
Speaker 1: ever said his name, I missed it.
Speaker 3: I don't remember what they called him. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah. The Professor is played by Warren Mitchell, who lived
Speaker 1: nineteen twenty six through twenty fifteen. British character actor of stage,
Speaker 1: screen and TV, whose credits include sixty one's The Curse
Speaker 1: of the Werewolf That's the Hammer Studios picture with Oliver
Speaker 1: Reed Is the Werewolf, nineteen sixty five's Help, That's the
Speaker 1: Beatles movie, and nineteen seventy seven's Jabberwockie that was a
Speaker 1: Terry Gilliam picture. I, however, know him best as the
Speaker 1: villain from The Amazing Hammer Studios mod Space Western Moon
Speaker 1: zero two from nineteen sixty nine, a film that was
Speaker 1: also featured on Industry Science Theater three thousand, but is
Speaker 1: 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 eccentric 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 1: Yeah, it feels like this character should be arguing for
Speaker 1: the return of Santa Claus from the planet Mars, but yeah,
Speaker 1: he's a pretty straight life scientist. The accent I kept
Speaker 1: puzzling over. The accent felt very Guido Sarducci, you know,
Speaker 1: and I wasn't sure exactly where this guy was supposed
Speaker 1: to be from. All right, A couple of additional supporting
Speaker 1: characters I want to mention really quickly here because they're
Speaker 1: both pretty neat in their own right. We have Andrew
Speaker 1: Folds playing Brett This is a mountaineer, a doomed mountaineer
Speaker 1: from early in the picture who then pops up later.
Speaker 1: He lived nineteen twenty three through the year two thousand.
Speaker 1: He was a British actor of stage and screen, whose
Speaker 1: best known roles aside from this were sixty threes, Jason
Speaker 1: and the Argonauts and Cleopatra, as well as nineteen seventy
Speaker 1: five's Lithsmania. He was also a British Labor Party politician
Speaker 1: and served as a member of Parliament from nineteen sixty
Speaker 1: 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'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 kind of man of
Speaker 3: few words, but as a kindly presence earlier in the film,
Speaker 3: and then appears greatly changed later on, and it works.
Speaker 3: It's a good shift, all right.
Speaker 1: And then accompanying him there on a doomed adventure up
Speaker 1: into the mountains, we have the character Dewhurst, played by
Speaker 1: Stuart Saunders, who have nineteen oh nine through nineteen eighty eight.
Speaker 1: Another fun performance. This guy had a minor role in
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty three. He's Octopussy the James Bond film. He
Speaker 1: played Major Clive. This is a character who loses a
Speaker 1: game of backgammon to the villain and then he's like,
Speaker 1: you know, he gets up and then who takes his
Speaker 1: spot playing backgammon with the villain is, of course, Roger Morris.
Speaker 1: James Bond.
Speaker 3: Octopusy is one of the Bond movies I have the
Speaker 3: fewest memories of. I think I've only seen it once or.
Speaker 1: So memorable in that it has an octopus in it
Speaker 1: and Louis Jodan plays the villain. He was always a
Speaker 1: lot of fun. But yes, anyway, Stuart Saunders one of
Speaker 1: He's the second of the two actors reprising their roles
Speaker 1: from the original Trollnberg TV series. All right, A couple
Speaker 1: of notes about the special effects here, because two of
Speaker 1: the individuals here involved in the special effects are pretty
Speaker 1: impressive names. Les Bowie, who lived nineteen thirteen through nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy nine, has special effects credit credits here. Canadian born
Speaker 1: special effects artists who worked mainly in the UK. A
Speaker 1: legend in the field of Matt paintings, which we definitely
Speaker 1: see a few of in this picture. This was not
Speaker 1: filmed in the Alps or anything. It was filmed at
Speaker 1: a UK studio. He's best known for his work on
Speaker 1: various Hammer pictures, including nineteen fifty eight Stracula, as well
Speaker 1: as a handful of Ray Harryhausen films, including seventy seven
Speaker 1: Sindbad and The Eye of the Tiger. No, we were
Speaker 1: just talking about that, yeah, And he was also on
Speaker 1: the Oscar winning team behind the effects of nineteen seventy
Speaker 1: eight Superman.
Speaker 3: That's a good resume, yeah.
Speaker 1: And then assisting him on this was Brian Johnson born
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty nine. Johnson would go on to work on
Speaker 1: the special effects teams for such films as nineteen sixty eight,
Speaker 1: two thousand and one A Space Odyssey, nineteen seventy Nine's
Speaker 1: Alien and nineteen eighties The Empire Strikes Back, all three
Speaker 1: of which won Oscars for their special effects. Wow. He
Speaker 1: also served in the special effects teams for nineteen eighty
Speaker 1: one's Dragonslayer and nineteen eighty.
Speaker 3: Four Is the Never Written Story Wow Again.
Speaker 1: And then finally the composer here is Stanley Black, who
Speaker 1: lived nineteen thirteen through two thousand and two, British film
Speaker 1: composer and bandleader, whose other credits include Fifty Eights, The
Speaker 1: Blood of the Vampire nineteen sixties, The Flesh Fiends, sixty
Speaker 1: one's The Day the Earth Caught Fire in nineteen sixty
Speaker 1: three's Maniac.
Speaker 3: I don't know if the music in this movie really
Speaker 3: made an impression on me.
Speaker 1: There are a few scenes where I thought it was
Speaker 1: fittingly creepy, but also, you know, it is definitely a
Speaker 1: nineteen fifty genre score, so I thought I thought it
Speaker 1: was quite good. You know, nothing that I'm going to
Speaker 1: listen to in isolation, 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 1: Yeah, there's some creepy sequences where I feel like everybody's
Speaker 1: bringing there all to delivering that vibe, you know, from
Speaker 1: the camera work, the performances, the lighting and so forth.
Speaker 3: All Right, you ready to talk about the plot.
Speaker 1: 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 those things where
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 Trollenberg, again,
Speaker 3: not a real mountain in Switzerland.
Speaker 1: And I think already The film's doing a good job,
Speaker 1: whether we realize it or not at this point, because
Speaker 1: it is establishing the mountains as being these, you know,
Speaker 1: almost like mythic mountains that are reaching up not merely
Speaker 1: into the sky, but into the place where our world
Speaker 1: 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. The other
Speaker 3: climber says to him, you idiot, We almost had him,
Speaker 3: and the first says, did you see his head?
Speaker 1: It was torn off.
Speaker 3: And the scream of torn off bleeds into the sound
Speaker 3: of a locomotive horn, and suddenly we're on a train
Speaker 3: somewhere else, rushing across the country, going through these ravines
Speaker 3: and then black tunnels, and here we get a title
Speaker 3: screen for The Crawling Eye. At least in the US release,
Speaker 3: I don't know what the credits look like in the
Speaker 3: British release, but a little observation on my second viewing,
Speaker 3: the credit sequence here uses these high contrast arrow designs,
Speaker 3: these like bold arrows going across the black background and
Speaker 3: pointing to things, kind of similar to the clean arrow
Speaker 3: motif see in the sole Bass credit sequence for Alfred
Speaker 3: Hitchcock's north By Northwest, which came out a year after this. Now,
Speaker 3: I am not saying that sall Bass and Hitchcock borrowed
Speaker 3: from The Crawling Eye, but I'm saying I like these arrows.
Speaker 3: They're very classy, modern. They feel kind of like the
Speaker 3: credit design equivalent of an Eames chair.
Speaker 1: According to artofthetitle dot Com, this credit sequence is is uncredited.
Speaker 1: We don't know who the title was who did the
Speaker 1: title design here? So okay, wasn't so bass, but.
Speaker 3: No, it's not as elegant. I want to be clear,
Speaker 3: it's not as elegant and elaborate as the sell 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 Ann 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.
Speaker 1: Probably, yeah, yeah, I think so. There's not that nobody's
Speaker 1: discussing their home life all that much.
Speaker 3: You wouldn't have a movie otherwise. All these adults are
Speaker 3: ready to mingle anyway. Sarah points out that they can
Speaker 3: now see the mountains out out of the train window,
Speaker 3: and Anne gets up to look, and at first she
Speaker 3: seems enraptured by the natural beauty. We see this kind
Speaker 3: of angelic light fall over her face. But then as
Speaker 3: she gazes up the slope of the Trollenberg and her
Speaker 3: eyes kind of meet the snowy peak. Eerie music starts
Speaker 3: to play, and her smile fades, and you think maybe
Speaker 3: she's going to start frowning or looking unhappy, but it
Speaker 3: doesn't turn into a frown. Instead, it turns into a blank,
Speaker 3: slackened expression, like she has lost control of her mind.
Speaker 3: Anne's eyes roll back and she sort of takes a
Speaker 3: step toward the door and then just suddenly collapses, falling
Speaker 3: across the lap of the man across from them. After
Speaker 3: a moment, she comes around and all is well again,
Speaker 3: and they all introduce themselves to each other, they become acquainted.
Speaker 3: Brooks offers and a flask to help her recover from
Speaker 3: her fainting episode. I love how in these old movies
Speaker 3: people seem to believe that hard liquor just has general
Speaker 3: medicinal qualities and it treats everything from the common cold
Speaker 3: to alien mind control. So he gives her the flask
Speaker 3: and she's like, oh, great, thanks. It takes a big
Speaker 3: gulp and then her eyes bug out of her head
Speaker 3: a bit.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they hit the spirits really hard in this movie.
Speaker 1: Seemingly the drop of a hat, they'll just suddenly have drinks,
Speaker 1: 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 belt 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 Kline 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 Deuhurst. This is the rotund geology professor here
Speaker 3: to study the mountain, who is a wiry, laconic mountain
Speaker 3: guide who will be climbing the mountain with Dewhurst. And
Speaker 3: 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 going to maybe
Speaker 3: speak about the rest of the movie in a more
Speaker 3: summary way, and then we'll see if there's anything we
Speaker 3: want to come back and focus on in more detail.
Speaker 3: So from here, some of the main plot threads are
Speaker 3: that we see Alan Brooks. He goes up to the
Speaker 3: observatory by way of cable car up the side of
Speaker 3: the mountain to visit his old colleague, the professor, and
Speaker 3: they discuss the disturbing incidents on the mountain, like climbers
Speaker 3: keep disappearing without a trace. Plus there's the recent beheading
Speaker 3: of the English student on the mountain. Also Krevit explains
Speaker 3: to Brooks that there is a strange cloud which hovers
Speaker 3: on one side of the mountaintop, occasionally moving around, and
Speaker 3: the cloud they have figured out is radioactive. This is
Speaker 3: another hallmark of the nineteen fifties movie You gotta work
Speaker 3: our radioactive something in there. So there's some backstory between
Speaker 3: these two. We learned that Brooks was also involved in
Speaker 3: investigating a similar incident in the Andes of South America
Speaker 3: several years before, which had some of the same features.
Speaker 3: There was a weird radioactive bank of fog around a mountaintop,
Speaker 3: and there were disappearances of climbers, But that case also
Speaker 3: had other features not yet seen here in Switzerland, Brooks
Speaker 3: mentions mental compulsion. Also in this meeting, the professor proudly
Speaker 3: shows off the observatory's defensive measures in cl a lot
Speaker 3: of like Chekhov's blast doors in this scene. So they've
Speaker 3: got like metal plates that you can roll down over
Speaker 3: the windows to shield themselves allegedly against an avalanche. Also,
Speaker 3: they have somehow got closed circuit TV cameras that can
Speaker 3: show you anywhere on the mountain at infinitely high resolution.
Speaker 3: I'm a little skeptical of some of these features, but
Speaker 3: the point is this obtemps to Yes, yeah, this observatory
Speaker 3: is basically a fortress. They also argue there's some funny
Speaker 3: stuff here where they're talking about his funding. The professors like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 3: the government, they just give me money to do whatever
Speaker 3: I want as long as I What are they arguing about.
Speaker 3: He's saying like, they won't give me money if I
Speaker 3: report that there's something weird happening here, but they will
Speaker 3: give me money for anything else. We also have these
Speaker 3: characters Dohurst and Brett. Again, Dohurst is the geologist and
Speaker 3: Brett is his mountain guide. They're they're gonna ascend the
Speaker 3: mountains so that do I believe he wants to collect
Speaker 3: samples for research. He's a geologist and he thinks maybe
Speaker 3: you can find something weird in the minerals up on
Speaker 3: the mountain that could explain something. So they're going to
Speaker 3: go up the mountain. Their plan is to camp the
Speaker 3: first night of the ascent in a hut halfway up
Speaker 3: the mountain. They're doing a lot of drinking, like they
Speaker 3: drink before they leave. In the morning, the characters all
Speaker 3: gather around for just some scotch or whatever before they
Speaker 3: go up the mountain. They're also drinking a lot along
Speaker 3: the way and in the hut.
Speaker 1: But they do explain at least in passing, that this
Speaker 1: 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 is her assistant and
Speaker 3: successfully guesses a bunch of hidden objects. They do their
Speaker 3: standard tricks as we talked about earlier. Sarah explains to
Speaker 3: Brooks that they do not use any tricks or secret codes.
Speaker 3: They used to, but then they discovered that Anne actually
Speaker 3: is a mind reader, so they don't need to use
Speaker 3: any sleight of hand anyway. In the middle of this
Speaker 3: mind reading demonstration, Anne has another one of these mountain
Speaker 3: mind control episodes where she begins to see what is
Speaker 3: happening somehow to do Hurst and Brett in the climber's
Speaker 3: hut up on the mountain, and weirdly, she's almost looking
Speaker 3: as if from the perspective of a sort of a
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 eyes mindset, I mindset coming
Speaker 3: through the and mind reader.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And this, this scene and many like it in
Speaker 1: the picture are 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 and then
Speaker 3: he screams as something seems to be entering the cabin door,
Speaker 3: and then they lose the call. So it's time for
Speaker 3: a search party. Got to have a search party and
Speaker 3: a good mountain movie. The remaining characters organize into a
Speaker 3: couple of parties to scour the mountain and find out
Speaker 3: what happened to Dohurst and Brett. Dohurst is found in
Speaker 3: the cabin without a head, and this is one of
Speaker 3: the scenes of shocking. Gore.
Speaker 1: I thought, yeah, absolutely, yeah, the gross, gross thing.
Speaker 3: It's wet. Yeah. Brett is spotted somewhere elsewhere on the
Speaker 3: mountain with the aid of an airplane. But when a
Speaker 3: couple of the mountaineers make it to his location, first
Speaker 3: of all, they discover that his backpack has a human
Speaker 3: head in it.
Speaker 1: And then and you know that backpack is going to
Speaker 1: have a human head. Like the West. They're just setting
Speaker 1: there ominously and they're they're stalking up to it, and yeah,
Speaker 1: it was. It was. This was also a highly effective I.
Speaker 3: Thought, well, the way it shot, it's like the camera's
Speaker 3: on the backpack and he's reaching up to p fell
Speaker 3: away the flap. It's like, what were we going to
Speaker 3: see in there? But then after this, Brett appears and
Speaker 3: attacks the rescuers with a climbing axe. So something has
Speaker 3: happened to Brett. Brett was not like this before. In
Speaker 3: the middle of the movie, there's also this thing where
Speaker 3: Anne is she's sort of losing control of herself and
Speaker 3: she is being compelled by this outside force to try
Speaker 3: to ascend the mountain alone as she goes into a
Speaker 3: kind of trance like state, and she takes the cable
Speaker 3: car up to the observatory and she tries to go
Speaker 3: up further, presumably up to the cloud, but she is
Speaker 3: intercepted by other characters and guided back to the hotel.
Speaker 3: Then at the hotel we get the return of Brett.
Speaker 3: So we're at the bar and unexpectedly, Brett, the lost mountaineer,
Speaker 3: staggers in from the cold. He seems dazed and uncoordinated,
Speaker 3: just saying that he got lost and he's just now
Speaker 3: was able to make it back and does. Everyone watches.
Speaker 3: Brett tries to pour himself a drink and light a cigarette,
Speaker 3: but 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 Truscott, and they
Speaker 3: lock him up in some kind of dungeon in the
Speaker 3: basement of the hotel. Maybe it's supposed to be a
Speaker 3: wine cellar.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, maybe, so 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 plann 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 1: Yeah, and it's this is such an interesting threat in
Speaker 1: this picture that is not fully explored, like why are
Speaker 1: the psychics considered such a threat? In fact, they seem
Speaker 1: to be the only for the most part, they're the
Speaker 1: only thing deemed a threat by the aliens. They're otherwise otherwise,
Speaker 1: they seem happy to live about in high altitude clouds
Speaker 1: and just kill the occasional mountaineer and so forth, at
Speaker 1: least for now. Who knows what their long term plans are.
Speaker 3: Well, the explanation the characters eventually land on is that
Speaker 3: the psychics, because they can connect mentally to the aliens
Speaker 3: and the clouds, are able to provide information to the
Speaker 3: humans that would potentially stop the alien and from succeeding
Speaker 3: in their invasion, because otherwise the Earthlings are going to
Speaker 3: be you know, caught by surprise. But the psychics can
Speaker 3: give them advance warning.
Speaker 1: 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 like reaches out through a
Speaker 3: hole in the door and strangles the guy. And then
Speaker 3: he tries to kill Ann in the middle of the night,
Speaker 3: but she's rescued when Brooks shoots him before he can
Speaker 3: hurt her. And then there's a there's a cool effect
Speaker 3: where there's like a rapid decomp effect on Brett's arm
Speaker 3: I think caused by like after the mind control thing
Speaker 3: is broken on his zombie corpse, he like rapidly breaks
Speaker 3: down in the heat of the hotel. Anyway, we move
Speaker 3: on to the final act where in the final act
Speaker 3: they discovered that the cloud is now descending the mountain.
Speaker 3: It has been up there and now it is coming
Speaker 3: down here. And so our characters who are in the
Speaker 3: no develop a theory. Basically, they think it's got to
Speaker 3: be aliens. At one point they say what else could
Speaker 3: it be? Yeah, yeah, okay, so it's aliens, And they
Speaker 3: figure out maybe the aliens have to adapt themselves to
Speaker 3: our atmosphere on mountaintops where the air is thinner, and
Speaker 3: then as they gradually acclimate to our atmosphere, they can
Speaker 3: move on down and attack us where we live. I
Speaker 3: thought that was kind of cool because that's an inversion
Speaker 3: of like the you know, the mountaintop acclamation that like,
Speaker 3: if you're going up to a very high altitude, you
Speaker 3: need to spend some time at a kind of middle
Speaker 3: altitude to get used to it and allow your body
Speaker 3: to adjust. And so they're imagining the aliens are doing
Speaker 3: the exact opposite thing.
Speaker 1: 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. Uh oh, child
Speaker 3: in peril. So Brooks runs to the rescue, and here
Speaker 3: we get the reveal of a great eyeball monster mounted
Speaker 3: on a brain chassis coming in with tentacles waving all
Speaker 3: over the place and smoke billowing out around it, and
Speaker 3: it attacks basically the front door of the hotel. That
Speaker 3: goes right to the front door and blows it open,
Speaker 3: and the kids there trying to get the ball and
Speaker 3: the alien. I guess it's going to eat her or whatever.
Speaker 3: But then Brooks arrives just in the nick of time
Speaker 3: and hacks off one of the tentacles and rescues the child.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the eyeball especially is very convincing. It just feel
Speaker 1: it does feel to me anyway, very organic, very real,
Speaker 1: like I'm looking at some sort of a bizarre living creature.
Speaker 1: The tentacles are maybe a little less convincing and various,
Speaker 1: but still still as far as tentical effects go for
Speaker 1: the nineteen fifties, is still pretty solid.
Speaker 3: There was a scene where I thought the suspense kind
Speaker 3: of worked pretty good where they're in the cable car
Speaker 3: trying to make it up to the observatory and the
Speaker 3: fog bank makes it up to the bottom station where
Speaker 3: the car comes in. And they've established earlier that these
Speaker 3: creatures can freeze like telephone wires and cause them to
Speaker 3: crystallize and shatter. And you can tell they're trying to
Speaker 3: freeze out the cable that's guiding the car to cause
Speaker 3: it to break, and really looks like it's going to happen.
Speaker 3: But they do manage to make it up to the observatory,
Speaker 3: and up there they basically agree that, okay, heat is
Speaker 3: their weakness. We know that they don't like heat, so
Speaker 3: let's get them with fire. You got to make them
Speaker 3: all cocktails, that's right.
Speaker 1: This is where they learned that, yes, we can defeat
Speaker 1: the alien menace by just lobbing flames at them. And
Speaker 1: this is pretty much how it goes from there on out,
Speaker 1: throwing Molotov cocktails at the enemy and then realizing, well,
Speaker 1: what we should probably bring the military in on this
Speaker 1: as well. Let's have them fire bomb the observatory that
Speaker 1: we are in in order to destroy the alien threat.
Speaker 3: The walls are thick enough that we'll be safe.
Speaker 1: Yes, they do establish that, but it's still it's a
Speaker 1: little fun calling the airstrike, what location right here? Also
Speaker 1: the cloud. There's some arguing back and forth with the pilot.
Speaker 1: He's like, you want me to bomb a cloud and
Speaker 1: they're like, yes, bomb the cloud.
Speaker 3: He's giving orders on the radio to the pilot bomb
Speaker 3: the cloud.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: And it's kind of like Tarantulas. There were a bunch
Speaker 3: of movies like this in the fifties where there's this
Speaker 3: monster they're debating like, how can we possibly beat in
Speaker 3: the discover In the end the answer is bombs.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I call it. The military air strike just
Speaker 1: takes care of it, cleans it all up. At the end,
Speaker 1: you are safe, you are protected. But I do think
Speaker 1: it would have been interesting, and I think in another
Speaker 1: era you would have seen this, let's see and defeat
Speaker 1: the aliens with those psychic powers, which I guess they've
Speaker 1: established that psychic powers are only a threat to them,
Speaker 1: like you said, because they reveal the alien's secrets. It's
Speaker 1: a privacy issue. But what if there was more to that?
Speaker 1: If what if there was a possibility there that human
Speaker 1: psychics didn't even realize that they could just like with
Speaker 1: a particularly potent thought, you know, explode the large brains
Speaker 1: of these creatures. You know the psycho much yes, scanners
Speaker 1: 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 1: Yeah, yeah, that would have been interesting. But instead we
Speaker 1: get the air strike, which is you know, fitting of
Speaker 1: the air There's.
Speaker 3: One more cool thing in the in the final scene,
Speaker 3: which is remember the character Hans the bartender. They say
Speaker 3: he takes one of the cars and he's trying to
Speaker 3: At first, he's like, no, I'm not going up to
Speaker 3: the observatory. He's trying to high tail it out of
Speaker 3: the valley and they see him drive into the fog
Speaker 3: bank and like, whoops, okay, no more Hans. But then
Speaker 3: he reappears later he's at the observatory. He's like, I'm fine, Actually,
Speaker 3: can I Where's Anne? I'm looking for her.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So we give one more psychic assassin attempt by
Speaker 1: 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 Brooks and Truscott. And then so after
Speaker 3: they defeat the the eye creatures in the end, I
Speaker 3: don't know, is it kind of implied that that maybe
Speaker 3: Anne Pilgrim and Philip Truscott are going to be an item,
Speaker 3: and maybe maybe Sarah Pilgrim and Alan Brooks are gonna
Speaker 3: be an item too. I think so, I implied romance.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, we're left to do the assumed match making
Speaker 1: on our own. But it's like, oh, these these kids
Speaker 1: are all young, let's uh, they should they should get together,
Speaker 1: settle down. The alien threat is defeated. Now it's time
Speaker 1: to start a family.
Speaker 3: They'll they'll become part of the un Investigative Psychic mind
Speaker 3: reading Team.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because I think based on what they've established, like
Speaker 1: the threat's not over. There are other mountainous regions of
Speaker 1: the world where these creatures may be taking up residents
Speaker 1: and they need to be defeated. We need somebody out
Speaker 1: there with psychic abilities to figure out where they are,
Speaker 1: and then someone else to call in the air strikes
Speaker 1: 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 1: Oh. I didn't run across that, but it's not surprising
Speaker 1: because again, this is a highly effective film, and I
Speaker 1: know a lot of people loved it back in the
Speaker 1: day I did read. I don't remember this from my
Speaker 1: reading of the novel, but in Stephen King's It there
Speaker 1: is a reference to the crawling eye. I think, yeah,
Speaker 1: one of one of the kids is frightened by one
Speaker 1: of the sequences in it. You know, so it you
Speaker 1: know it's it's it stood the test of time for
Speaker 1: 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
Speaker 3: of like, I don't know, maybe it needs more of
Speaker 3: a main character with more of a struggle or something,
Speaker 3: and so I've thought about that before, but Another thing
Speaker 3: in it that never quite worked for me is the
Speaker 3: radio announcer character played by Adrian Barbo, who's like calling
Speaker 3: out to the to the characters over the radio where
Speaker 3: the fog is in town. Something about the mechanics of
Speaker 3: that just never made sense, like, oh the fog is
Speaker 3: there now, Oh it's there now. It makes more sense
Speaker 3: in this movie when you're like you have an observatory
Speaker 3: that's watching where the fog is going, like on a
Speaker 3: mountaintop versus going down in the valley. That kind of
Speaker 3: reads better, I think than the like street to street
Speaker 3: fog navigation assistance.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah. John Carpenter's the fog
Speaker 1: of film that I think I only ever saw once.
Speaker 1: And I like the music and I like the fog
Speaker 1: pirate effects. Yeah, but I just have never gone back
Speaker 1: 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 1: Yeah, Yeah, the fog monsters are great. And you know,
Speaker 1: having mentioned Stephen King, I can only imagine that this film,
Speaker 1: at least in some small way, helped inspire his novella
Speaker 1: The Mist, Fog, Monsters, Missed Monsters. There's overlap there.
Speaker 3: Maybe we should do an episode on the Fog at
Speaker 3: some point. That could be a good Halloween season one.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, Pirate Day. I don't know. I forget what
Speaker 1: day Pirate Day falls, but I don't think we've done
Speaker 1: a proper pirate mo.
Speaker 3: Is Pirate Day? Is that different from talk like a
Speaker 3: Pirate Day?
Speaker 1: That that is what I'm thinking of? Talk like a pirate.
Speaker 3: I don't know when that is either?
Speaker 1: No, I don't need it.
Speaker 3: Well, yeah, r Maybe are we done here?
Speaker 1: I believe we are, But are we done? We'd love
Speaker 1: to hear from everyone out there if you have thoughts
Speaker 1: on this film. At what point you were introduced to it?
Speaker 1: MSD three K fans definitely right in about the crawling.
Speaker 1: I just a reminder that Stuff to Blow Your Mind
Speaker 1: is primarily a science and culture podcast with core episodes
Speaker 1: on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but on Fridays we set aside
Speaker 1: most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film
Speaker 1: on Weird House Cinema. You can find a full list
Speaker 1: of all the episodes we've covered over the years at Letterboxed.
Speaker 1: Our user name there is weird House, and you can
Speaker 1: also look up Weird House as its own playlist. Wherever
Speaker 1: you get your podcasts, you can subscribe to it, you
Speaker 1: can rate it there. You know, we'd ask that you
Speaker 1: still subscribe and rate the core Stuff to Blow your
Speaker 1: Mind podcast feed as well, but it's an additional tool
Speaker 1: that we're experimenting with.
Speaker 3: Huge 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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