Svengoolie Movie: “The Crawling Eye”

I saw the movie “The Crawling Eye” last night. Sena gave up after about 15 minutes. It was almost 2 hours into the film before you see any of the giant eyesores—and they were in dire need of Visine treatment.

The movie was made in 1958 and it’s about an alien invasion of a fictitious mountain in Switzerland called Mount Trendelenburg, no wait, that’s an inclined position of a patient on an operating table; it’s actually Mount Trollenberg.

The aliens are giant eyes with pinpoint pupils. The hero, United Nations employee Alan Brooks (played by Forrest Tucker) manages to stab one with a secret weapon called a sty-letto. Brooks is apparently heavily invested in pushing cigarettes and booze on the various other characters, a few of whom for some reason get transformed into zombies, probably because they get so stoned on cognac. Brooks deals with them by blowing his whiskey breath in their faces.

Brooks has to be pretty stern to get others to cooperate to a new battle plan against the eyeballs after it becomes clear that dilation drops won’t work. I can’t remember exactly what he barked at them but it was something like, “Keep your eye on the highball!” Maybe it was “Do as your told!”

Brooks also directs them to make bombs, which look like Molotov cocktails, and that was a nice break from drinking the regular cocktails at the hotel bar. Brooks orders them not to fire until they see the whites of their eyes, but by now everybody ignores him. At first, they have a hard time hitting the creatures, I guess because they were eyeballing the distance.

When the crawling eyes get hit with the bombs, they get a severe case of floaters, which makes them realize that they’re now up against something even more irritating than the cigarette smoke Brooks blows at them. Unfortunately for the eyeballs, they left their safety sunglasses on their home planet.

The best part of the movie was the Sven Squad; their jokes were so cornea they saved the day.

Amaryllis Progress and Other Notes

I have a few messages to pass on today. This is the last day of November and the Amaryllis plants are doing so well Sena had to brace the tallest one using a Christmas tree stake and a couple of zip ties. It’s over two feet tall!

I’m not sure what to make of almost a dozen comments on my post “What Happened to Miracle Whip?” Apparently, a lot of people feel the same way I do about the change in taste of the spread. So, maybe it’s not just that my taste buds are old and worn out.

Congratulations to the Iowa Hawkeye Football team last night! They won against Nebraska by a field goal in the last 3 seconds of the game. I had to chuckle over the apparent difficulty the kicker had in answering a reporter’s question, which was basically “How did you do it?” There are just some things you can’t describe in words. There’s even a news story about how thinking doesn’t always have to be tied to language.

Along those lines, there might be no words for what I expect to think of tonight’s 1958 horror film on Svengoolie, “The Crawling Eye.” This movie was called “The Trollenberg Terror” in the United Kingdom version. I can tell you that “Trollenberg” was the name of a fictitious mountain in Switzerland.

I’m not a fan of Jack the Ripper lore, but I like Josh Gates expedition shows, mainly for the tongue in cheek humor. The other night I saw one of them about an author, Sarah Bax Horton, who wrote “One-Armed Jack”). She thought Hyam Hyams was the most likely candidate (of about 200 or so) to be Jack the Ripper, the grisly slasher of Whitechapel back in 1888. He’s a list of previously identified possible suspects. I found a blogger’s 2010 post about him on his site “Saucy Jacky” and it turns out Hyams is one of his top suspects. Hyams was confined to a lunatic asylum in 1890 and maybe it’s coincidental, but the murders of prostitutes stopped after that. I’m not going to speculate about the nature of Hyams’ psychiatric illness.

There’s another Psychiatric Times article about the clozapine REMS (Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategies) program. I found a couple of articles on the web about the difficulties helping patients with treatment resistant schizophrenia which I think give a little more texture to the issue:

Farooq S, Choudry A, Cohen D, Naeem F, Ayub M. Barriers to using clozapine in treatment-resistant schizophrenia: systematic review. BJPsych Bull. 2019 Feb;43(1):8-16. doi: 10.1192/bjb.2018.67. Epub 2018 Sep 28. PMID: 30261942; PMCID: PMC6327301.

Haidary HA, Padhy RK. Clozapine. [Updated 2023 Nov 10]. In: StatPearls [Internet]. Treasure Island (FL): StatPearls Publishing; 2024 Jan-. Available from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK535399/

The paper on the barrier to using clozapine by Farooq et al is very interesting and the summary of the barriers begins in the section “Barriers to the use of clozapine in TRS (treatment resistant schizophrenia). I think it gives a much-needed perspective on the complexity involved in managing the disorder.

So what do you think about Miracle Whip?