David Kramarsky may have been credited as the director, but Roger Corman was the executive producer on The Beast With A Million Eyes and calling most of the shots on the production. And in those days, Corman was always working on what one might politely call the "minimalist" side of filmmaking -- if not quite at Edward D. Wood, Jr.'s level of threadbare production, he was always trying to figure out ways to cut corners, especially on his early productions, of which this was one. And on The Beast With A Million Eyes, he tried to deliver a monster movie with no monster in it, his excuse being that the "monster" manifests itself through the animals that it controls -- and his distributor, American Releasing Corp. (later American International Pictures), rejected it. This film represented one of the few times that Corman ever had to tinker with one of his movies to satisfy his clients (and presumably his audience), and he duly added some material at the end containing an alien, allowing the movie to pass muster. Actually, what is here ranges from the terrible -- parts of this movie recall the kind of semi-professional westerns that Victor Adamson used to shoot in the silent era, coming into some rural town and recruiting extras with promises of a box-lunch; but other scenes have a spellbinding eeriness growing out of the same emaciated production design and budget that does hold the interest of the viewer, far better than some much bigger budgeted sci-fi/horror entries of the same era. And this is where some of the elements of Roger Corman's genre filmmaking begin to coalesce -- Jonathan Haze, who would become a mainstay of the producer/director's output as an actor, was part of the crew on The Beast With A Million Eyes, and Paul Birch began his long association with Corman's movies here, while character actor and comedian Dick Sargent (Bewitched etc.) started his movie career with this picture. Is it great filmmaking? Not remotely -- but is it astonishingly good filmmaking on a budget of under $50,000? Absolutely, and worth seeing on that basis alone.