The Crawling Eye, The Inspiration For F Troop

I think we all share a similar plight, over the past few years we have yearned for more Forrest Tucker movies on television.  While waiting for the complete F Troop series to come to Blu Ray, I highly recommend the 1958 classic B movie, The Crawling Eye (aka The Trollenberg Terror).  If you have ever endured George Clooney in Solaris, anything with Forrest Tucker would be a welcomed respite.

The plot:  Ah, so familiar to all of us!  Everyone of us can so relate to how this movie begins.  We all have our stories of touring Switzerland by train and sharing our cabin with two women who comprise a touring psychic act.  Alan Brooks (Tucker) is an American scientist voyaging to the Trollenberg Mountain to study increased radiation levels.  The sisters are forced to depart the train at Trollenberg when the younger one has some mysterious psychic reaction when the Trollenberg Mountain becomes visible.  A radioactive cloud has descended on the mountain and climbers, venturing into the cloud are subsequently decapitated.  In a classic scene, something (which ends up being a giant tentacled eye) decapitates a mountaineer and casts him off the mountain.  As the headless body is falling, it is screaming "Ahhhhhhhh!!!."

As Brooks shares notes with Swiss scientists, the cloud expands.  The cloud brings these giant tentacled eye creatures with it, and cuts Trollenberg off from the rest of Switzerland.  As the creatures attack the inn in which our characters are staying, they flee it to the only safe place, a weather station bunker up the mountain.  Will the three-foot concrete walls keep the creatures out? No.  Our team needs to find a way to quickly defeat the horde of eye creatures before they get into the bunker.

I have it from a reliable source that Shania Twain made up her mind to move to Switzerland after she saw this movie.  This is classic 1950s sci-fi.  The eye creatures are creepy, and the scenery is beautiful even though it was filmed in a London studio.  Forrest Tucker is perfect as the tall, square jawed hero.  If Stanley Kubrick's, Barry Lyndon, did not excite you, see The Crawling Eye.