The Crawling Eye & Random Notes
This is a British science fiction picture which means that people talk a lot and we don’t even seen the beast until late into the picture.
A strange cloud is seen on the Trondhem mountain – as the movie starts we are with 3 climbers who are climbing on a very fake looking back lot set – one (off camera talks about the cloud) then screams and then falls off and is barely held from plunging all the way down the steep cliff face by the safety rope which is tied to his companions. They pull him up but the safety rope breaks before they can save him. Did not matter in the end because his head was gone.
Sound standard horror movie chords and head for the credits.
We come to a train where Sgt. O’Rourke – sorry Forest Tucker – sorry it’s from my growing up, every time I see him I expect him to say “Egarn I don’t know why people say you’re so dumb” and then when ever I see Larry Storch (which isn’t as often) I expect him to say “who says I’m dumb” Sorry – it’s a F-Troop bit that they did about 15 times a show – still it was funny the first 4 after that not so much.
Well that jumped the track quickly. It’s that kind of a film. People are talking in the same kind of polite way people do at parties where most folks don’t know each other – and well you find your attention wandering and thinking maybe playing world of warcaft all day in your underwear isn’t that bad a deal.
Can I add as a side point here that John McCain’s campaign has become “A Noun, A Verb and ‘I was a P.O.W.” – especially whenever (and this happens a lot) St. John steps in it verbally. Like the most recent bit where he doesn’t know how many homes he and his wife owns – which is really kind of odd – even for a very very rich person not to have at least a guess is weird. Of course the answer is that his wife holds the purse strings and she is the one who buys the houses – which is kind of bad for McCain’s image as a two fisted maverick I mean can you be that and a rent boy at the same time?
So back to the film, tucker is getting off at Trondhiem where the cloud is and a friend is. there are two women in the car with him, they originally are going on to Vienna but then the younger one is compelled to get off the train with forest – her sister tags along because that’s what you do in these things.
And there plenty of room at the hotel because of a rash of accidents on the mountain – it’s not clear weather all of them involved head losses but really one of those is enough. And then in the way of British films of the 50’s and early 60’s they start drinking – forest is doing the buying and other folks read meat for the things in the fog come in and start drinking – they explain they are going up the mountain – one fellow seems rather fit and the other is more than a bit overweight – he’s the one doing the drinking and then taking a bottle of brandy for later when they get to the cabin at the base of the mountain.
Off they go to get killed – with Forest who goes to see his scientist friend who has a cosmic ray observatory in the side of a mountain – the geography is a bit confusing here - you can see the mountain in the window – but they are at the base of the mountain – you get there by fake looking cable car – the climbers go off to get killed and Forest and his scientist friend (SF from now on) talk about some doings in the Andes and how this is similar and how Forest got in a lot of trouble and how it is almost the same as the Andes thing except for the lack of mania – at which point forest mentions the girl.
The girl it turns out is psychic – a telepath or something that causes her to faint a lot and to link with other minds!!!! That evening she gives a demonstration of mind reading her sister holds something behind a screen and she says what it is – and then faints because she links to the cloud and it’s moving and it’s killing one of the guys in the cabin after luring him out with a noise – Forest calls the cabin finds out one man is missing and tells the other man to stay put – which is nice of him that way the cloud won’t have to look all over the mountain for it’s next snack.
Forest – who by the way is a UN scientist – back in the days when that apparently meant something – what I don’t know – organizes a rescue party – and then the next day they go up to the cabin and find the guy they told to stay put dead without a head. Gee that was helpful advice.
Meantime they search for missing man (let’s call him John) and two people find him. Actually they first find a knapsack and inside the knapsack is a head – one assumes of the fat gent – it’s hard to tell it’s not a very convincing head. Then John – with a weird light in his eyes – kills the two searchers with his ice axe.
Back at the hotel – the psychic is trying to get up the mountain but she doesn’t know why.
Anyway, it gradually (and for an 84 minute film things take a long time) comes out that something like this had happened in the Andes – everything matches what is happening now except for the weird detail of a man who was dead moving about. The SF and Forrest insist this must be the work of aliens.
And of course on cue – John returns with no memory of what happened (but apparently doing a neat job on cleaning the blood off his clothes, I mean an ice axe is a pretty sloppy weapon.) – he has a drink and then wanders away.
Then he tries to kill the telepath – turns out, he’s under the control of whatever is in the cloud and he was dead – even deader when Forrest shoots him.
At this point they decide they would be safer in the observatory (built like a fortress in case of avalanche) so they load the village up into the cable cars and off they go. Except for one guy who is going to try and drive through the cloud. Good luck with that.
But just before they leave we have to have a moment of drama – as everybody left the hotel somebody knocked a ball out of the one kid in the crowd’s hand – okay foreshadowing 101 – and then, just as we’re all about to get on the cable car – the woman notices that her kid is missing. Ah just how stupid do you have to be to foregut you kid when the town is being evacuated – cell phone yeah – kid no not so much.
At this point – like 70 minutes into the film we haven’t seen the damn monsters yet- not a sausage really. It’s like come on! Make with the crawling eyes already!
Which they finally do – as the child returns for her ball – and the door opens and ta- da there is the crawling eye in all it’s glory – it’s pretty gruesome for about 30 seconds and then well, you see the tentacles are well on wires and then you start to wonder about side vision and all that.
After Forrest rescues the stupid child and the ball from the tentacles of the crawling eyes they go up into the observatory were they find them selves under siege from the eye creatures – who look stupider the longer they are on screen so I can understand the filmmakers hesitancy to put them on but still sometimes you must embrace the dumb and have done with it. There is a goofy charm about the old style special effect monsters that the current CGI creatures just don’t have and sometimes you have to go with that.
Anyway, in a last plot twist the psychic is again assaulted by another human turned zombie and she remains unconscious until the end of the movie. Of all the little weird missteps this movie has – this is the biggest – they go on and on and on and ON about this psychic and how the creatures think she is a threat to the point of trying to kill her several times and yet at the final denouement of the plot she’s out cold and does nothing.. We never learn why the aliens are afraid of her nor does she have anything to do with the final defeat of the aliens by the air force. The Aliens as will come to no great surprise are venerable to fire bombs– they burn quite nicely and then the film is over and all who still have their heads are happy.
Which does lead to another damn question what the hell were the aliens doing there in the first place – it surely wasn’t to conquer the world – a) there were five of them and b) they blowed up pretty easily? I’d have to think they were stupid but they had at least access to interplanetary travel which is something we don’t have. Who knows maybe they were pests dropped off a ship or something.
Who knows.
I suspect the number of people who are going to vote for McCain because Hillary didn’t win the democratic nomination is going to be smaller than the number of folks who still like New Coke. Yeah they’ll get TV time but TV always looks for freaks.
Peace Love Crawling eyes.
A strange cloud is seen on the Trondhem mountain – as the movie starts we are with 3 climbers who are climbing on a very fake looking back lot set – one (off camera talks about the cloud) then screams and then falls off and is barely held from plunging all the way down the steep cliff face by the safety rope which is tied to his companions. They pull him up but the safety rope breaks before they can save him. Did not matter in the end because his head was gone.
Sound standard horror movie chords and head for the credits.
We come to a train where Sgt. O’Rourke – sorry Forest Tucker – sorry it’s from my growing up, every time I see him I expect him to say “Egarn I don’t know why people say you’re so dumb” and then when ever I see Larry Storch (which isn’t as often) I expect him to say “who says I’m dumb” Sorry – it’s a F-Troop bit that they did about 15 times a show – still it was funny the first 4 after that not so much.
Well that jumped the track quickly. It’s that kind of a film. People are talking in the same kind of polite way people do at parties where most folks don’t know each other – and well you find your attention wandering and thinking maybe playing world of warcaft all day in your underwear isn’t that bad a deal.
Can I add as a side point here that John McCain’s campaign has become “A Noun, A Verb and ‘I was a P.O.W.” – especially whenever (and this happens a lot) St. John steps in it verbally. Like the most recent bit where he doesn’t know how many homes he and his wife owns – which is really kind of odd – even for a very very rich person not to have at least a guess is weird. Of course the answer is that his wife holds the purse strings and she is the one who buys the houses – which is kind of bad for McCain’s image as a two fisted maverick I mean can you be that and a rent boy at the same time?
So back to the film, tucker is getting off at Trondhiem where the cloud is and a friend is. there are two women in the car with him, they originally are going on to Vienna but then the younger one is compelled to get off the train with forest – her sister tags along because that’s what you do in these things.
And there plenty of room at the hotel because of a rash of accidents on the mountain – it’s not clear weather all of them involved head losses but really one of those is enough. And then in the way of British films of the 50’s and early 60’s they start drinking – forest is doing the buying and other folks read meat for the things in the fog come in and start drinking – they explain they are going up the mountain – one fellow seems rather fit and the other is more than a bit overweight – he’s the one doing the drinking and then taking a bottle of brandy for later when they get to the cabin at the base of the mountain.
Off they go to get killed – with Forest who goes to see his scientist friend who has a cosmic ray observatory in the side of a mountain – the geography is a bit confusing here - you can see the mountain in the window – but they are at the base of the mountain – you get there by fake looking cable car – the climbers go off to get killed and Forest and his scientist friend (SF from now on) talk about some doings in the Andes and how this is similar and how Forest got in a lot of trouble and how it is almost the same as the Andes thing except for the lack of mania – at which point forest mentions the girl.
The girl it turns out is psychic – a telepath or something that causes her to faint a lot and to link with other minds!!!! That evening she gives a demonstration of mind reading her sister holds something behind a screen and she says what it is – and then faints because she links to the cloud and it’s moving and it’s killing one of the guys in the cabin after luring him out with a noise – Forest calls the cabin finds out one man is missing and tells the other man to stay put – which is nice of him that way the cloud won’t have to look all over the mountain for it’s next snack.
Forest – who by the way is a UN scientist – back in the days when that apparently meant something – what I don’t know – organizes a rescue party – and then the next day they go up to the cabin and find the guy they told to stay put dead without a head. Gee that was helpful advice.
Meantime they search for missing man (let’s call him John) and two people find him. Actually they first find a knapsack and inside the knapsack is a head – one assumes of the fat gent – it’s hard to tell it’s not a very convincing head. Then John – with a weird light in his eyes – kills the two searchers with his ice axe.
Back at the hotel – the psychic is trying to get up the mountain but she doesn’t know why.
Anyway, it gradually (and for an 84 minute film things take a long time) comes out that something like this had happened in the Andes – everything matches what is happening now except for the weird detail of a man who was dead moving about. The SF and Forrest insist this must be the work of aliens.
And of course on cue – John returns with no memory of what happened (but apparently doing a neat job on cleaning the blood off his clothes, I mean an ice axe is a pretty sloppy weapon.) – he has a drink and then wanders away.
Then he tries to kill the telepath – turns out, he’s under the control of whatever is in the cloud and he was dead – even deader when Forrest shoots him.
At this point they decide they would be safer in the observatory (built like a fortress in case of avalanche) so they load the village up into the cable cars and off they go. Except for one guy who is going to try and drive through the cloud. Good luck with that.
But just before they leave we have to have a moment of drama – as everybody left the hotel somebody knocked a ball out of the one kid in the crowd’s hand – okay foreshadowing 101 – and then, just as we’re all about to get on the cable car – the woman notices that her kid is missing. Ah just how stupid do you have to be to foregut you kid when the town is being evacuated – cell phone yeah – kid no not so much.
At this point – like 70 minutes into the film we haven’t seen the damn monsters yet- not a sausage really. It’s like come on! Make with the crawling eyes already!
Which they finally do – as the child returns for her ball – and the door opens and ta- da there is the crawling eye in all it’s glory – it’s pretty gruesome for about 30 seconds and then well, you see the tentacles are well on wires and then you start to wonder about side vision and all that.
After Forrest rescues the stupid child and the ball from the tentacles of the crawling eyes they go up into the observatory were they find them selves under siege from the eye creatures – who look stupider the longer they are on screen so I can understand the filmmakers hesitancy to put them on but still sometimes you must embrace the dumb and have done with it. There is a goofy charm about the old style special effect monsters that the current CGI creatures just don’t have and sometimes you have to go with that.
Anyway, in a last plot twist the psychic is again assaulted by another human turned zombie and she remains unconscious until the end of the movie. Of all the little weird missteps this movie has – this is the biggest – they go on and on and on and ON about this psychic and how the creatures think she is a threat to the point of trying to kill her several times and yet at the final denouement of the plot she’s out cold and does nothing.. We never learn why the aliens are afraid of her nor does she have anything to do with the final defeat of the aliens by the air force. The Aliens as will come to no great surprise are venerable to fire bombs– they burn quite nicely and then the film is over and all who still have their heads are happy.
Which does lead to another damn question what the hell were the aliens doing there in the first place – it surely wasn’t to conquer the world – a) there were five of them and b) they blowed up pretty easily? I’d have to think they were stupid but they had at least access to interplanetary travel which is something we don’t have. Who knows maybe they were pests dropped off a ship or something.
Who knows.
I suspect the number of people who are going to vote for McCain because Hillary didn’t win the democratic nomination is going to be smaller than the number of folks who still like New Coke. Yeah they’ll get TV time but TV always looks for freaks.
Peace Love Crawling eyes.
posted by Unknown at 4:29 PM
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