"I can’t see. It’s foggy."
The movie “The Crawling Eye”, also known as the “Tollenberg Terror” which to me was a better name, stars Forrest Tucker as Alan Brooks and Janet Munro as Anne Pilgrim.
The movie takes place at a resort on a mountain called The Trollenberg in the Swiss Alps. There is a cloud on the mountain that does not move. A radioactive cloud. There is something else on the mountain. In the cloud. An alien creature that is killing people. That is the only time the cloud moves. If it’s not tearing off people’s heads with it’s tentacles it is turning them into zombies to manipulate them to do its bidding. One person seems to have a telepathic connection to the monster. Anne Pilgrim can connect with the alien. She can see what the alien sees. And it’s calling to her.
"The Crawling Eye" was released in 1958 and was directed by Quentin Lawrence. The special effects are dopy and the “terror” is kinda dumb but that doesn’t matter. Most of these low budget “B” movies have bargain basement special effects. What this has that a lot of them don’t have is a good mystery. It’s intriguing. Eerie. Especially the parts with Anne the psychic. That’s were things are actually spooky. She can make a description of a snow globe sound creepy. I enjoyed it despite the paper mache monster.
The movie was based on a British TV series also titled “The Trollenberg Terror”. The “cloud” was made by stapling a fluff of cotton wool to a picture of a mountain. John Carpenter said that the idea of creatures hidden in a cloud was the inspiration for his film "The Fog".