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Trollenberg Terror, The

Entry updated 25 May 2020. Tagged: Film, TV.

1. UK tv serial (1956-1957) ITV. Produced and directed by Quentin Lawrence, written Peter Key. Cast includes Sarah Lawson, Rosemary Miller and Laurence Payne. Six 25-minute episodes. Black and white.

This is set mainly in an Alpine Hotel where intimations of doom received by a woman with ESP are followed by the revelation that Aliens are on the mountain.

2. Film (1959; vt The Crawling Eye; vt The Creature from Another World). Tempean Production/DCA. Directed by Quentin Lawrence. Written by Jimmy Sangster, based on the 1950s tv serial as above. Cast includes Jennifer Jayne, Warren Mitchell, Janet Munro, Laurence Payne and Forrest Tucker. 85 minutes. Black and white.

The film version is more full-bloodedly unpleasant than 1, especially in scenes where the Aliens animate their dead human victims telepathically (see Telepathy) and turn them homicidal in a not very sensible scheme for conquest. The aliens themselves cannot come off the mountain, because they can survive only where it is very cold. Special-effects man Les Bowie worked hard on a shoestring budget, but the octopoid alien, with its one big eye, is ludicrous and the cloud beneath which the aliens lurk on the mountain was a piece of cotton wool pinned to a photograph. Loose ends of plot dangle everywhere, perhaps as a result of a three-hour story being reduced to half that length, but the film is not as bad as legend has it. [JB/PN]

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