Trollenberg Terror, The (1958) (The Crawling Eye) – Nostalgia Central

Written by legendary Hammer Film Productions screenwriter Jimmy Sangster and produced on a shoestring budget by Tempean Films, The Trollenberg Terror had already been broadcast on ATV in 1956 as a six-part TV serial, and Laurence Payne and Stuart Saunders reprised their roles from the serial here, though the lead role went to American Forrest Tucker to attract an international audience.

English girls Anne (Janet Munro) and Sarah (Jennifer Jayne) Pilgrim, comely partners in a psychic mind-reading act, decide to take a holiday in Switzerland.

They meet Alan Brooks (Tucker), a square-jawed American science investigator for the United Nations, and learn that he is destined for the remote mountain village of Trollenberg in the Swiss Alps.

Anne insists that she and Sarah make for the same place, and on their arrival, they hear of grisly happenings, which Professor Crevett (Warren Mitchell), the controller of the local observatory, blames on a radioactive cloud which is hanging over the Trollenberg mountain.

With no expense spared, the cloud effect was created by nailing a piece of cotton wool to a photograph of a mountain.

Anne reacts strangely, and Alan believes she is receiving telepathic messages from the cloud – which, it transpires, envelops giant, one-eyed extraterrestrials with long, slithering tentacles.

Later, geologists Brett and Dewhurst are attacked and, following the discovery of Dewhurst’s body, Anne is threatened.

Finally, the extraterrestrial creatures are destroyed by incendiary bombs dropped from military aircraft.

The film – released in the US as The Crawling Eye – was uniquely graphic for its time, and British censors originally gave it an X certificate due to explicit scenes featuring decapitated bodies, a severed head stuffed in a backpack, and melting flesh.

Alan Brooks
Forrest Tucker
Philip Truscott
Laurence Payne
Sarah Pilgrim
Jennifer Jayne
Anne Pilgrim
Janet Munro
Professor Crevett
Warren Mitchell
Klein
Frederick Schiller
Brett
Andrew Faulds
Dewhurst
Stuart Saunders
Hans
Colin Douglas
Wilde
Derek Sydney
Carl
Leslie Heritage
Fritz
Theodore Wilhelm
Pilot
Garard Green
Jim
Jack Taylor

Director
Quentin Lawrence

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