Fiend Without A Face

Well, we’re now 19 films into the seemingly never-ending “14 days to stop the spread”, and with the Shelter-In-Place Winter Marathon poised to feature some heavy films (the reasoning is manifold, I’ll explain when the time comes) I figured it would be a good time to hit a few light pieces before those come up.  The first one I stumbled across looked like an MST3K-worthy ’50s sci-fi film.  Well, it was!  This 1958 cheeseball goes by the name Fiend Without A Face, and was directed by Arthur Crabtree, who sounds suspiciously like a Monty Python character.

Canadian Gothic

The conflict in the film starts out pretty quickly, with a series of dead bodies with missing brains and spinal cords showing up in a farming village in the Middle Of Nowhere, Manitoba, a farming village that just so happens to be right next to a U.S. military base that is running some sort of secret experimental long-distance radar from airplanes circling the north pole. So far, so good, but evidently this radar is so power-intensive that they have to use a nuclear power plant to drive it.  Now, keep in mind that the radar is on the airplanes, so a land-based power source makes no sense at all.

[Jon Lovitz] ACTING!!!

But let’s be realistic.  If you want to have a movie filled with invisible strangle-monsters that steal people’s brains and spinal cords, those invisible strangle-monsters that steal people’s brains and spinal cords have to come from somewhere, and in the 1950s that somewhere was DEFINITELY Godzilla-fueled nuclear panic.  So we’ve got a poorly-justified nuclear power plant, at a U.S. military base, in northern Manitoba, next to a farming village.  Because of the long growing seasons in northern Manitoba.  I’ll let it go.

I would never date a dirty colonialist like you!

Our main characters are Air Force Major Jeff Cummings, who is in charge of investigating the mysterious deaths, and Barbara Griselle, a village local.  These two start out the film in a state of conflict with each other, so they’re totally not getting together.

The unlucky Chameleon Towel on the bar can be observed exhibiting half-hearted camouflage, almost as if it wishes to be seen

This scene, with the shower that seemed to be in the living room, really had nothing to do with the plot of the film.  Hmm.  I wonder if they might be getting together after all?

My junior year in high school, in Bio II, we dissected cats.  My lab partner and I managed to remove the brain with a good portion of the spinal cord intact.  We hoped to smuggle it out of the lab and plant it in somebody’s locker as some sort of alien monster, but never managed to.  I guess we were beaten to the concept anyway.

You know what?  Let me spoil the entire second act of the film, because it was kinda pointless, and let’s skip to where we find out that the invisible strangle-monsters that steal people’s brains and spinal cords are, in fact, BRAINS AND SPINAL CORDS that have been turned into invisible strangle-monsters due to the combined effects of nuclear power and some some mad emeritus psychologist’s crazy psychic experiments.  Mad emeritus psychologists often retire to the Middle Of Nowhere, Northern Manitoba to carry out their final years in experiments liable to wipe out the human race, so this is believable.

Quick!  Hit it in the dorsal root ganglion!

So that they can be seen to be killed, the invisible strangle-monsters become visible due to [reason explained in the script on page 97].

Lizzie Borden saves the day!

It turns out that visible strangle-monsters can be killed with axes.

You’ve gotta ask yourself, “Do I feel lucky?”  Well, do ya, pink?

Guns work too.  As a matter of fact, they seem to be relatively mortal, and with their element of surprise spoiled by their inability to hide from sensory organs sampling the reflected electromagnetic spectrum between about 400 and 700 nm, they’re quickly wiped out by the gin-crack shot U.S. military people.  You know, with only modest losses from that point on.

That’s quite a bar code, big fella

And the eligible Major Jeff Cummings and the very nubile village local Barbara Griselle totally get together.  The End.

You know, Kanopy sold this film as if it were some sort of cinematographic coup de force, impeccably directed with incredible special effects.  Yeah, right.  I mean, for the first hour or so of the movie, we don’t even get to see the monsters.  And while this is admittedly true for basically every film in the genre of 1950s horror/sci-fi, there can really only be one (or both) of two reasons: first, that the special effects budget isn’t adequate to show the monster for the whole film, or second, because the genre traditionally refuses to show the monster in the first two acts to be concordant with earlier films that were subject to the first reason.  But let’s be honest.  Either way, this film was either too cheap to strangle actors with visible brains for the first hour, or it slavishly did that anyway to avoid bucking convention.  We all knew exactly where this movie was going after the first 10 minutes, which is actually OK, because at that point the target audience was making out at the drive-in and only checking in on the film periodically.  That doesn’t mean it’s not a fun film, though, and if you’re the sort of person who loves adding your own riffs at the film, it’s basically perfect.