The Crawling Eye Picks Up a Few Things at Piggly Wiggly on the Way Home from Work

One day when I was a tiny boy, I was waiting with my sister, Ann, in a movie theater lobby. We saw a big poster for an upcoming movie, "The Crawling Eye" and it depicted an enormous, disembodied orb clutching a scantily clad woman with one of its prehensile optic nerves... and it was leering at her (well, I mean, what else can a disembodied eye do?) My sister laughed uncontrollably, talked about moronic the thing was, how doofy such a movie must be. I thought it was so cool. I was in love with the Crawling Eye. A little over a year later, I was switching channels on a Jurassic era TV set, when what should pop up on the Million Dollar Movie? The very first scene from "The Crawling Eye"! This in itself seemed very startling and science fiction like to my six year old brain. Back during the Eisenhower administration, NEW movies didn't pop up on television, movies on TV were OLD! (well, obviously, new low budget, bottom half of the bill movies with names like "The Crawling Eye" did show up but, hey, I was in first grade. What the hell did I know?) Anyhoo, three minutes into the thing, a mountain climber turns up with his head ripped off and THAT WAS THE SCARIEST DAMN THING I'D EVER SEEN IN MY SIX ENTIRE YEARS!!! Turned it off, ran upstairs and hid in my bed. Had nightmares for weeks.

Saw that thing on DVD the other night. Damn. I love "The Crawling Eye."