The Trollenberg Terror (U.S. title: The Crawling Eye; also known as Creatures from Another World [1]) is a 1958 British science fiction horror film produced by Robert S. Baker and Monty Berman and directed by Quentin Lawrence.
[2] The story is based on a 1956 British ITV "Saturday Serial" television programme[3] written by George F. Kerr, Jack Cross and Giles Cooper under the collective pseudonym of "Peter Key".
[2] It played on a double bill with the British science fiction film The Strange World of Planet X, retitled Cosmic Monsters for its American release.
Brooks suspects that these deaths are related to a series of similar incidents which occurred three years earlier in the Andes Mountains, which involved an unexplained radioactive cloud formation believed by locals to be inhabited.
Crevett goes on to explain that, despite a series of climbing accidents, no bodies are ever found, and an always-stationary radioactive cloud is regularly observed on the mountain's south face.
In a thickening mist, a giant tentacled creature with a single huge eye appears at the hotel, smashing down the front door.
By radio, Alan orders an aerial firebombing raid against the observatory, which has reinforced walls and concrete roof that can withstand the assault.
[5] The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote: "Several sequences in this Alpine science fiction production are genuinely alarming, although much more could have been made of the dramatic moments.
The film gives the impression of having been shot and edited in a great hurry and the characteristic addiction to close-ups of such details as severed heads and melting flesh is more in evidence than in most science fiction pieces.
[6] In the 1 January 1959 issue of The New York Times, film critic Richard W. Nason reviewed the double feature starring Forrest Tucker and opined that "...The Crawling Eye and The Cosmic Monsters do nothing to enhance or advance the copious genre of science fiction".
Two bits of cotton wool stuck on a mountain photo make do for the cloudy snowscapes in veteran Hammer scriptwriter Jimmy Sangster's screen version of the BBC [sic] TV series.
Forrest Tucker is miscast as the hero, but Janet Munro is affecting as the telepathic heroine the aliens seize as their mouthpiece.
[9] The main title music from The Crawling Eye was featured on the album Greatest Science Fiction Hits V by Neil Norman and his Cosmic Orchestra, released in 1979 on GNP Crescendo Records.
The Freakazoid episode "The Cloud" spoofed the film's opening credits, as well as key elements of the plot, though with the victims being turned into clowns instead of being killed.
[18] In the 2023 Riverdale episode "Betty & Veronica Double Digest", a 4D screening of the film is held to increase popularity of a financially struggling movie theater.