The Crawling Eye (1958)

If you happen to like classic sci fi films with a healthy dose of B movie vibe than you will enjoy this. I give it extra points because of it's British'ness as that's never a bad thing in my book. Sure it's low budget and the special effects are unintentionally humorous, but there's a good story here, right up until the final scenes when we learn that eyeballs are out to conquer the world. I think if the monsters had been kept in the shadows this would have made for a far superior film but there is something endearing about a time when SFX people had to rely on their ingenuity without the option of turning it over to the CGI department. I can remember watching this as a kid with my mom when a local station was carrying an all night movie marathon on Halloween night. Therefore the film will always rate at least a seven out of ten in my book. Harmless, fun and nostalgic.

Quentin Lawrence directed this British science fiction horror film that stars Forrest Tucker as UN science investigator Alan Brooks, who goes to a remote mountaintop Swiss Village where a series of mysterious decapitation murders have taken place. Also there is Professor Crevett(played by Warren Mitchell) and a young woman with psychic powers(played by Janet Munro) who discover strange aliens who are crawling eyeballs who travel in the fog! The survivors try to escape their hotel to find a way to defeat them. Strange film is atmospheric but hurt by its silly monsters and inadequate F/X. Would have been better to keep them more in the fog, where they would have been eerie.

This movie started out kind of interesting, but then got real slow in the middle. It picks up again at the end, but it just moved to slowly and refused to reveal the monsters for to long to be a good movie. The story has these two sisters on a train making their way to Geneva, however, one of the sisters apparently has a vision or something and they end up stopping in this one resort mountain town where some strange things have been happening. Seems a lot of climbers are disappearing and there is even an incident where one climber lost his head in an unexplainable way. Well a guy visiting the area seems to suspect something and his friend at the observatory also believes something is happening that is more sinister than just a bunch of freak accidents. However, during the middle portion of the film there is just a bit to much speculation and way to much build up before they finally let us see the monsters in all their glory. They do not look that bad for the time, as I have seen a lot worse monsters in films made much later than this one. The film is also rather more bloody with a couple of people who have lost their heads along the way. The film was just very close to being a good movie, perhaps a better cast could have helped this one as I had a hard time understanding the ones they had at times during the film. Also, they could have been a lot less skittish about their monsters and give us an earlier peek. So while overall I did not like it, it was not boring and borderline good.

(some of the details discussed my be considered "spoilers" for anyone unfortunate enough that they have not already seen this movie... several times)The Crawling Eye is both excellent sci-fi and a study in the psychology of 50's culture.Only the special effects suffer in this B&W classic, though not badly for the era. Produced in the atmosphere of the dawning nuclear age it was a pioneering effort, speculating on the possibility of life on other worlds. Special effects at the time were limited for the most part to chocolate syrup for theatrical blood and scaled miniatures and backdrops to add depth to a studio scene, and silly rubber costumes. The fact that the monsters seem a little artificial shouldn't spoil this film for anyone.The storyline is quite brilliant for the era. Xenobiology and serious scientific speculation on the nature of life, what form it might take, how it might look, didn't exist yet. We had only our imaginations and the understanding that life on other worlds would likely be very different... a huge bulbous brain/eye with tentacles, was as valid at that time as any other guess, and it was creepy, gross, and unexpected. What the Crawling Eye was NOT, more than anything else... was a monster that looked like some poor guy dressed up in 50 pounds of latex.Comments by scientific giants of the day that discounted the notion that intelligent life was unique to Earth as hubris, became the seed for the wonderful Sci-fantasy stories that followed. The possibility that we might not really be alone, but drama requires a villain. The bigger the threat, the greater and more dramatic the effort required to overcome it.We had just finished a horrible world war, Russia had gone from our ally to our most powerful enemy almost overnight, unrest stirred in Asia as Korea was embroiled in civil war and we replaced these threats in cultural fiction with much more fearful threats. More terrible than Hitler and Stalin combined, alien life with advanced technologies beyond our understanding, space flight, tremendous intellect, and inhuman evil provided the antagonist. Once again the Earth was saved not by brilliance, or super weapons, but by heroism, stalwart character, and the refusal to submit to tyranny... The paragon of western values. Our fictional monsters had to be more horrible than life, because we'd already beaten Hitler... and we really had to dig down into our imaginations to find something more evil, more cunning, and more horrible to defeat... We found it for the moment in a tentacled abomination with one huge eye and the force of will to control men's thoughts, even onto death.I suggest a large box of popcorn, a soda in a too large leaky paper cup and more ice than necessary, and a bit of gum or a milk-dud stuck to the seat for the full effect.