If you happen to like classic sci fi films with a healthy dose of B movie vibe than you will enjoy this. I give it extra points because of it's British'ness as that's never a bad thing in my book. Sure it's low budget and the special effects are unintentionally humorous, but there's a good story here, right up until the final scenes when we learn that eyeballs are out to conquer the world. I think if the monsters had been kept in the shadows this would have made for a far superior film but there is something endearing about a time when SFX people had to rely on their ingenuity without the option of turning it over to the CGI department. I can remember watching this as a kid with my mom when a local station was carrying an all night movie marathon on Halloween night. Therefore the film will always rate at least a seven out of ten in my book. Harmless, fun and nostalgic.

The filmic adaptation of a 1956 UK TV serial of the same name, The Trollenberg Terror is a whole bunch of fun and not deserving of the stinker reputation it has in some sci-fi loving circles.Action is set in Trollenberg, Switzerland and concerns a creature from outer space that has taken residence in a radioactive cloud atop of the Trollenberg mountain. As the bodies start to pile up and various climbers go missing on the mountain, the United Nations send a boffin to help the local scientists to hopefully solve the mystery.The effects work has been the source of some disdain, and in truth it's poor but not the worst from the 1950s pantheon of "B" schlockers. The back projection scenes are crude, but again in keeping with the fun aspects of the genre and era. However, Jimmy Sangster's screenplay is tight and produces brainy conversations and strong sequences.Horror comes by way of headless bodies turning up and that once sane people turn into maniacs as "the terror" weaves its magic. On the normal human side the narrative is given a boost by Janet Munro's (excellent) telepathic darling, something which troubles the visitors greatly and puts her in grave danger. The psychological aspects of the story mark this out as a genre piece of worth.Elsewhere director Quentin Lawrence does a study job with what is available to him, Forest Tucker is the hero in waiting, playing it reserved like, and Warren Mitchell proves good foil for Tucker and the Terror! It's not a great film, but it is a good one, let down in some tech departments for sure, but strengths elsewhere make up for its flaws. 7/10

I was scared to death by this movie at 6 when it was 2 years old. Later I found it in a movie store marked as one of the worst science fiction movies of all time. I bought it. The movie no longer scares me but it is well written and can be watched again and again if you don't mind drinking,smoking and offering the same to others when you want to be polite. I liked the acting, writing and story which to me were not over the top and let me add I like movies but am not a huge fan of 1950s science fiction. I am not fond of classics from that era when we were fighting the cold war and the aliens represent evil. The special effects are not special but if that makes no difference to you, this is a good movie.

One of the late Jimmy Sangster's 'extra-curricular activities', as it were, was taking some time off from Hammer Films and contributing scripts to other 'brand names': this, in fact, is among a handful he made for the movie-making team of Robert S. Baker and Monty Berman. While here he was dealing in science-fiction, he would also pen their JACK THE RIPPER (1959) and THE SIEGE OF SIDNEY STREET (1960), both of which attempted to recreate notorious real-life incidents and whose own viewing will follow presently.Like Hammer's own QUATERMASS titles (scripted by Nigel Kneale), which were the prototype of this subgenre, the film under review saw its origins as a TV serial: actually, Sangster had earlier been responsible for X–THE UNKNOWN (1956), the very first off-shoot of that classic franchise (again made by the famed British House Of Horror). Still, even if the writing is reasonably intelligent (feeding on the alien invasion/mind control themes then prevalent within the genre), the 'lower-berth' nature of the production does render the proceedings slightly less than persuasive: for one thing, the design of the creature (The Crawling Eye, as the U.S. moniker would have it, though there is actually more than one and it can perhaps best be described as an over-sized octopus!) is more silly than scary, their telepathic connection to Janet Munro's character never properly explained…nor, for that matter, just what kind of threat she was supposed to pose for them that they had to send 'zombies' – whose flesh literally disintegrates when exposed to extreme heat – in order to eliminate her, since she is mostly so distraught by these visions that she faints outright after each experience! Another illogical detail pertains to the walls of the fortress-like conservatory (to which the severely under-populated village retreats during the alien clampdown), which are shown as not able to withstand the sheer impact of the invaders' weight, yet we are asked to believe that the bombs fired away by the stock-footage planes that come to the rescue will not harm the edifice! This is not forgetting the monsters' victims, which are bafflingly left beheaded (though this may have been merely a way of incorporating gory effects, which were becoming fashionable around this time!).I cannot say whether it was done on purpose, but it seems to me that the Central European setting in this case was a direct nod to the Universal FRANKENSTEIN films (which had just been revived by none other than Hammer with the involvement of Sangster himself!), down to the iconic moment in which an innocent young girl comes face to face with the monster – though here she is saved by hero Forrest Tucker. Typically, an American lead (albeit hardly a star) was recruited to secure overseas commercial appeal: actually, he had already appeared in Hammer's fine THE ABOMINABLE SNOWMAN (1957; scripted by Kneale and co-starring company and genre icon Peter Cushing) and would also make the even less distinguished THE STRANGE WORLD OF PLANET X (1958; which I have yet to watch, even if I do have a TV-sourced copy of it somewhere!).Mind you, while I seem to have been rather harsh on the film, I enjoyed it a good deal: if anything, apart from the familiar suspense situations and exciting action sequences, it is well-enough cast – numbering among its other protagonists future Hammer alumni Jennifer Jayne (from KISS OF THE VAMPIRE {1963} and THE REPTILE {1966}) as Munro's elder sister and the other half of their clairvoyant stage-act, Laurence Payne (who had been the protagonist of the interesting Poe adaptation THE TELL-TALE HEART {1960}) as an initially suspicious figure who, revealed to be a scoop-seeking reporter, eventually turns heroic and Warren Mitchell as the obligatory eccentric scientist (who has summoned former colleague Tucker to Trollenberg after a similar 'radioactive cloud' occurrence – which the aliens utilize to travel in! – at another mountain-top setting, the Andes, some years before).