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1958 British Film with Forrest Tucker (F-Troop), Laurence Payne, Janey Munro, Jennifer Jayne, Warren Mitchel. Directed by Quentin Lawerence.

This is one of those old black and white science fiction films that deserves more attention than its title might merit. Like in the those old films there is a certain air of a detective story combined with alien monsters that were rather creatively devised.

The movie opens with three climbers scaling a cliff on a mountain side. The lead climber above meets with a grisly accident. This sets the premise that there is something dangerous going on with this specific mountain. We are then introduced to the main characters riding on a train. They begin as strangers, except for two women riding together. The one woman watches out the train window at the passing country side and then has a psychic vision when the mountain comes into view. She insists that they must stop and disembark at the mountain resort. The main character (Tucker) is noticeably curious about this vision and disembarks as well. There is an additional man following in their footsteps.

Once at the mountain resort hotel they are told of the hard time the resort has fallen on with all the accidents that have plagued the climbers recently. They meet a group of climbers preparing to start up the mountain. One is a geologist looking for a scientific explanation for all the accidents. The other man is one of the local guides.

As an additional aspect, which becomes more important later, climbers must first cross the valley in a cable car to reach the base of the mountain. On the other side of this valley, near the cable car station, is an observatory. The hero makes a visit to this observatory and discovers it is being operated by an old scientist friend of his. During his visit he is shown some disturbing findings. The observatory has a new radiation measuring instrument that when pointed in the direction of the mountain picks up radioactivity that, of course, should not be there. In fact the radiation seems to be associated with a recent mysterious cloud that moves up and down the slope of the mountain but never completely dissipates. During their conversation we learn that the hero has seen something like this before but the cloud vanished in this previous incident before he could investigate it. That previous incident also had a psychic woman involved but she was mysteriously killed before the hero could talk with her.

We are shown that the geologist and his guide reach a cabin part way up in their climb and prepare to rest for the night. Later that same evening the two women are talked into putting on their famous psychic show for the hotel guests. During a reading the psychic woman falls into a trance and has a vision of emanate danger to the geologist and his guide. She then collapses and is taken to her room. Luckily the cabin where the climbers are staying is equipped with a phone. They relay the warning to the cabin waking the geologist only for him to discover that the guide has left the cabin. The observatory reports that the mysterious cloud has moved down the side of the mountain to the vicinity of the cabin. There is a genuinely spooky scene were the geologist is talking on the phone and calling out the open door into the fog for the missing guide.

The next morning the group of men from the hotel make a trip up to the cabin to find out why there is no answer to the phone. The mysterious cloud has since returned to its usually place high up near the mountain peak. When they reach the cabin they make some strange finds such as the wire connecting the phones has been molecularly altered and made brittle by what the hero believes is exposure to (cryogenic) super cold temperatures. At about the same time there is an incident were the young psychic woman is intercepted at the cable car station where she is in an almost trance like state being compelled up the mountain for a reason she is at a loss to explain.

Once they all return to the hotel they compare what is going on with the one past incident with the other mountain and psychic. They speculate that an alien reconnoiter may happen in just such a way if they aliens' natural environment was that of extreme cold and thin atmosphere. The hero points out the the movement of the cloud up and down the mountain resembles an acclimation process where they could be steadily getting used to Earth's environment. They also conclude that if the young woman is truly psychic or empathic then she may be a threat to such aliens and thus would be in considerable danger.

The climax of the movie begins when the mysterious cloud moves all the way down the mountain toward the resort. The villagers retreat to take refuge in the heavily constructed observatory where it is explained that the structure has three foot thick concrete walls. (It leaves one to wonder that if the flimsy cable car is the only passage to the observatory then how was it built.) There is a tense scene where we see one of the alien monsters for the first time.

The monsters are actually not bad for such an old movie. Although some of the scenes where the humans battled it out with the monsters at the observatory suffered from the poor special effects of that era. But the idea of monsters base on super cold is really rather cool (pun irrelevant.) And the idea of them acclimating themselves on high remote mountain tops is also reasonable. With modern special effects and some story adjustment this could make a nice monster movie remake as long as Hollywood doesn't make it's typical blunder of substituting special effects for good story telling.

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