Ungeheuer ohne Gesicht

A US military installation has been set up in Canada for some special tests and experiments of an atomic nature. People begin to die from the surrounding countryside by having their brains and spinal chords sucked out by what lead actor Marshall Thompson calls "mental vampires." Thompson, quickly flirting with the sister of one of the dead men, does his usual adequate job playing detective trying to prove that the new base is not responsible for the deaths. It seems that someone or something is siphoning atomic power. Without ruining the who behind the what, Fiend Without a face is a pleasant, interesting excursion into 50's sci-fi. The fiends turn out to be brains that pulse and scrape the ground with long spinal chords attached. This film has a low budget but manages to scare up a few thrills. The acting is mediocre at best. The fiend creation are somewhat novel. Although much of the film is lacking in suspense, the finale is a good payback.

I've read many comments about this movie from those that I assume just recently viewed it. In 1958 my brother and I saw this film at the local theater. It must have cost us at least 35 cents to see it and one other movie. To sum it up it scared our socks off. Remember that sick feeling you got in you stomach when you watched Alien for the first time. That same feeling and probably worse is what we experienced. The shear terror of the invisible beast and the subtle way the movie lead up to revealing the monster created a tension an 11 year kid in the fifties was not ready for. At the time this movie was actually banned in certain countries. This is a fact, not just media hype. With all the high-tech movie making of today it will get harder and harder to scare the sophisticated movie buff. But in 1958 this one sent us home afraid to walk in a dark room or turn our backs to a dark corner.

This is one of those scary flicks I saw in the early 70's when I was very young (six years old, probably), and probably it was the scariest thing I saw at that time. Certainly, there was no other film like it. I really wonder what sort of attitude the filmmakers had when this was being made. Were they giggling fiendishly, thinking of all the people they would scare with these images? (Scaring people was obviously their plan.) Did they think the movie they were making was "cool"?

The action-packed climax is pretty much the last fifteen minutes of the film. The brain creatures attack the people in the house, and pretty soon, bullets are flying, axes are being swung, and brains are being sucked. In my mind, this completely, mind-blowingly over-the-top ending scene seemed to go on forever, like a seriously bad nightmare. It was so repellently real. The creatures have no eyes, and they sort of "sense" your presence electrically to zero in on you, before flying up at you and clamping themselves onto the back of your neck. The depiction of this was pretty effective, and it still surprises me how well thought-out the creature imagery was here. Surprisingly realistic.

It still works, quite well! Go see it.

... which usually highlights the best films from around the world. So you'd expect and you would find "Seven Samurai", "The Third Man", and "Bicycle Thieves" among those films that are or have been in print by this group. But why this film?

I really don't know. Maybe just because it is a good representative of late 50s sci fi horror. In the 30s and 40s people were afraid of Dracula, Dr. Frankenstein, and The Wolf Man. In the nuclear age people are just not that afraid of a giant bat. And that's where this little film comes in.

It's got lots of angles covered. There is the American military installation in Canada. The military and the nearby farming community do not like or trust one another. There is nuclear power at the installation...to power the radars? I looked this up and this actually was a thing. The natives think that the nuclear power plant is effecting the milk production of their cows. One nearby villager is killed one night when he is nearby the military installation taking notes. Then three more locals are murdered. And in a most unusual way. Their brain and spinal column has been sucked out of their body through a tiny hole in their head. And whatever killed them is invisible. So now the Canadians think there is a crazy American soldier killing people on top of everything else.

So enter Major Cummings (Allan Thompson) to solve the mystery. And this film is so very 50s. Cummings openly takes speed so he can work late hours. His idea of romancing a gal is to walk into her house just because the door is unlocked to find her clad only in a bath towel. In fact, Cummings is so bad at romance a special sax score plays whenever it is supposed to be a romantic moment, because you'd never figure it out without that cue. And we are just waiting to see what this invisible killer looks like because it makes the weirdest "swishing" noises as it approaches.

To obviously be a B film with a low budget, it does what it does well, and manages to include as a clue a word that does not exist - "sibonetics". Did they mean cybernetics? I'd recommend this quirky little film that is home in both the Criterion Collection and MST3K.

A fringe scientist involved with mind over matter experiments unwittingly unleashes a horde of horrible, invisible, brain-sucking

whatchamacallits in this 1958 thriller that isn't nearly as bad as it sounds. Although Canadian sci-fi films are usually an oxymoron, this one is at least entertaining, even though it makes use of the standard fifties cause celebre: atomic radiation. As a payoff for the audience, we finally get to see the "fiends" when the power from the conveniently nearby nuclear reactor is cranked up to reveal them as. . .brains. With brain stems. And antennae. And some surprisingly good stop-motion animation. Marshall Thompson, that staple of fifties B movies, does yeoman duty in this film by not only starring in it, but actually taking over the reins of director when the "real" director Arthur Crabtree showed up on Day 1 and refused to direct! It seems that Crabtree angrily told the producers "I don't do monster movies" and walked off the set, whereupon Thompson, to his credit, stepped up to the plate. Crabtree came back, a few days later, and the rest, as they say, is history.

All in all, "Fiend without a Face" may not be in the same league as, say, "The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms", but it's not really all that bad, either. Make a big bowl of popcorn, or get some decent pizza, and enjoy.