Monday, March 22, 2010

S01E01 - The Crawling Eye

Plot

A United Nations investigator is called in to visit the mountainous town of Trollenberg, Switzerland, where a series of unusual deaths have been occurring. He is followed by a pair of young women into the town, one of whom appears to have a strong psychic ability. Together with an investigative reporter and a local scientist studying a bizarre cloud on the mountain slopes, they all discover that Trollenberg is the location of a deadly invasion from a group of giant eye aliens.


Movie Review

The nationwide exposure of MST3K began with a black-and-white 1958 monster movie called The Crawling Eye, originally known as The Trollenberg Terror outside of America. Why the name change? I'm willing to guess that the American distributor believed audiences wouldn't flock to a movie in which the monster wasn't already known, hence changing the name to something identifying the creatures as giant crawling eyes (though it's peculiar that "eye" wasn't pluralized, since more than one crawling eye is in this film). Considering that the creatures only fully appear well over halfway in the film, this is likely the case. And guess what that leaves us?

Yep, over forty-five minutes of men and women standing around talking, yakking, and more talking. Oh, sure, there are a couple scenes were people get killed, but the eyes are always off-screen, forcing us to wait impatiently for their grand entrance. And while we wait, we have to listen to the UN investigator make discussion with everyone around him, including the two women whose inclusion in the film is solely so the film isn't a sausage-fest. The little action in this film is always bookmarked by long lengths of talk, which is made worse because of the film print's poor sound quality (several minutes are even marked by a horrible scratching sound). Perhaps if the dialogue were better written or the actors were interested in this film then all the talking would be tolerable, but since neither of this is the case...well, you know.

As for the girls, the roles of the two women in this film will likely be something I expect to see a lot in these kind of films: blatant sexism. The one sister who is psychic gets to play the role of damsel in distress not once but twice, and her contribution in the film is to act as the passive psychic link to the eye creatures (a plot point that is mentioned briefly then waved off). Her more assertive sister does little better as she acts like a caretaker to her weaker sibling and little else. And let's not forget the end of the film, where the intrepid reporter (whose own role in the film was quite flimsy) initiates a "coupling" with the young psychic woman by taking her outside for fresh air, while the older sister accepts a smoke from the UN troubleshooter. Not overtly blatant sexism, but the need for some kind of coupling at the end was unexpected and forced.

And what of the monsters themselves, the giant crawling eyes? Well, what can you say about a race of tentacled eyeballs that chose to live on the side of a mountain in a radioactive cloud as they tried to adapt to Earth's atmosphere? Hmm, they have the same intelligence as the aliens in Signs, who could be killed by water yet chose to invade a planet primarily composed of water? Sounds about right. I can only surmise that these aliens were waiting to fully adapt to the atmosphere before mounting some kind of invasion, but if that's the case, why blow their cover by hiding with their radioactive cloud so close to a Swiss mountain town with an observatory? These aliens are psychic, surely they saw this coming...right?

This movie is a typical creature flick of its era: cheaply made and poorly written. There were some nice effects used to make the monsters look convincingly real, but that's about the only slight positive. The characters are all disposable one-note archetypes and the crawling eyes are generic movie monsters, making a film's biggest upside that it's just not that memorable.


MST3K Review

The Joel era of MST3K got started during the KTMA episodes, but it's here that he is first seen outside of the confines of Minnesota. As someone who grew up with Mike Nelson and the eldest incarnations of Crow, Tom, and the like, it's fascinating to see the show in its original form. For starters, in addition to Joel playing the human character instead of Mike, the bots are not voiced by Kevin Murphy (Tom Servo) and Bill Corbett (Crow), but instead Josh Weinstein and Trace Beaulieu, respectively. Additionally, there is also no sign of Pearl Forrester, Brain Guy, and Professor Bobo, but Dr. Clayton Forrester (played by Trace) and Dr. Laurence Erhardt (played by Josh).

The most jarring difference for me is the different sound of Tom Servo's voice. Granted, Crow's voice is also different, but the difference between Trace and Kevin's voices isn't as jarring as that between Kevin and Josh. I'm sure if I compare both Tom Servo and Crow's original and and later voices there would be a huge distinction in both of the bots, but personally I cannot stop noticing the disparity between Weinstein and Murphy.

Perhaps part of that can be attributed to how the jokes are told in this initial episode. Compared to a Sci-Fi-era episode, the riffing in The Crawling Eye is a lot less rapid. Whereas jokes in Werewolf would shoot out around five jokes a minute, here it seems to take almost thirty seconds between riffs. I often felt myself waiting for a joke to be made during a boring segment in the film, only to have the moment pass by. And when a joke is made, it sounds lethargic, almost care-free compared to the carefully scripted riffs of later seasons.

That's not to say the riffs in The Crawling Eye are poorly done, just simply very different than what I've been used to. The jokes start out very slow initially, with long pauses between riffs at the start of the film. Near the end, though, once the crawling eyes have shown themselves, the riffs are made more frequently, and as a consequence are a little funnier. There is certainly a roughness to the format at the moment, but brilliance is clearly visible beneath the inexperience.

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