This earns a little oogie ghostie on the ratings board, not because there is ANYTHING scary about it...but because it was the movie that scared the bejesus out of me as a kid (about 7 or 8 years old). And I have to put in a copy of the new cover art for the dvd here, to show you the monster from this movie:

So here's the cover...and notice this picture of the eyeball with tentacles, which was completely made up by someone on their computer to make the monster look scarier, and sell more copies of the dvd.
Now, here are two pictures of the ACTUAL MONSTER from the ACTUAL MOVIE. No, it doesn't look like much unless you're a highly imaginative 7 or 8 year old...I didn't sleep for a week, believe me!

So how does this amazingly scary and awful movie hold up, forty seven years later? Um. well. you know how it is...it's not only EXTREMELY not scary, it's kinda dull, although it does have moments.

It stars Forrest Tucker (now better known for his role as Sgt. Rourke on the TV series F Troop, but who actually had a lot of other movie and TV credits by the time he did this) and Janet Munro, better known Chez Otter as the cutie sharing screen time with Sean Connery in Darby O'Gill and the Little People. I also found out from IMDB that there was actually a 6 part British serial called the Trollenberg Terror (the other title for this movie) that was shown on TV in 1956...so evidently it was popular enough to be made into a movie. Love to see it sometime.

Anyway. Bunch of people in a small village, wierd fog that makes people turn into homicidal zombiecicles (no kidding), a cute psychic girl who has a compulsion to visit the aliens, a special laboratory where all 12 of the villagers and the visiting cast members go for safety when the big planes from Berne, already loaded with firebombs (convenient...) come by to make alien toast.

There are actually some genuinely creepy moments, like finding the dead guy in the hut, and the other guy killing people, and the whole zombie thing, very nice. But the slowness of the buildup makes you long for the 10 minutes of action at the end, and the ludicrousness of the aliens is hard to take. Oh, and we liked the professor bragging about how expensive his lab is and that no expense has been spared...he has to say it, because it's just a plain, bare room, with a concrete floor and a few tables with cheesy equipment!

Confession: we were having the AGVAPSNBA (All Girls Video and Pizza Sleepover No Boys Allowed) and the only version of this I had was the MST3K...and you know, even those guys just didn't have much to riff on...this is a slow one. But satisfying for me...nice to revisit childhood memories.