DVD Review: the Crawling Eye (1958)

I have a soft spot for this 1958 movie, which I only first saw a few years ago.

This Jimmy Sangster-scripted film is at the very least watchable with a great first and second act. It builds suspense, leads you on from scene to scene, it does everything a proper horror movie should do. It's only when you see the crawling eyes of the title that the whole thing starts to get a little shaky, but by that time, you're caught up in it and at least it's not the ridiculous stick-figure bird of The Giant Claw.

I had a similar experience with another movie I saw many years ago which starred Peter Cushing called Island of the Burning Damned, AKA Night of the Big Heat. During a persistent European heat wave, people on an English island are stalked by mysterious, unseen creatures, alien invaders who dissolve people they encounter. The story worked beautifully. Only the pay-off stunk. As I recall, the creatures turned out to be vaseline-covered beachballs. Not even crawling eyeballs.

Interestingly, the Burning Damned plot is similar in some respects to that of The Crawling Eye with a mysertious alien invasion preceded by bone chilling temperatures rather than heat. Based on Sangster's BBC teleplay "The Trollenberg Terror," the setting is Trollenberg Mountain in Germany where visiting scientist Alan Brooks, employed by the UN and played by American Forrest Tucker consults with the resident German scientist who is a friend of his. The German scientist reports disappearances and deaths on the Trollenberg and a vapor cloud that invariably remains in the same position. Both men apparently share a previous encounter in South America of aliens who thrive on cold temperatures and high altitudes, hiding inside the vapor cloud.

Co-stars include the gorgeous Janet Munro, part of a sister act of psychics who somehow are mentally drawn in by what's going down on the mountain. Other actors are probably familiar to British audiences, but not American.

The movie reflects a policy used with success by Hammer Horror in its early years. Hire a recognizable but affordable American character actor (Forrest Tucker, Brian Donlevy, Dean Jagger), support him with a British cast, and shoot a horror movie, a trend they fell into with the success of their first horror feature, The Quatermass Experiment, AKA The Creeping Unknown.

It worked well for Hammer until that studio developed it's own stars capable of getting butts into seats with Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee in the Dracula and Frankenstein movies (and the studio got them cheap for a long time after until Sammy Davis Jr. clued them in to the fact that they had become huge worldwide stars and were making their studios zillions).

It isn't by any means a perfect movie, only better than 90% of so-called American horror movies of the Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster ilk. In fact, I would love to see the Mystery Science Theater 3000 send-up of The Crawling Eye. I must admit my own MST3K theory is that their best stuff was with movies that were at least somewhat watchable. I was much less interested in MST3K's heckling of movies that I wouldn't watch under any circumstances. Even the MST3K treatment won't make me watch Girl With Gold Boots. If that rat-faced Nazi with eyeglasses from Raiders of the Lost Ark held a Luger to my head, I might. Maybe.

If you haven't seen The Crawling Eye, it is at the very least good for a quick viewing.

THE CRAWLING EYE, Forrest Tucker, Janet Munro, Laurence Payne, 1958, black and white, 84 minutes. $14.99.