Despite his reputation of being one of the worst horror directors that ever lived, I personally always felt a strange respect and admiration towards good old Don Dohler. Both "Nightbeast" and "The Galaxy Invader" qualify as terrifically cheesy entertainment (if you fancy low-budget exploitation cinema, of course) and I even daresay this "Fiend" is his absolute finest achievement. Sure, "Fiend" is a slow-paced film with a total lack of logic or explanation, but simultaneously it's a truly spirited film with likable performances, better-than-average effects and (unintentionally?) clever undertones. The movie opens with a written definition of what exactly is a fiend and immediately after we witness how a demoniacally possessed reddish cloud enters a grave on a forsaken cemetery, possesses the corpse of a recently deceased music tutor and causes the body to emerge. Where did the evil cloud come from? Don't know
Why did it enter that grave specifically? Who cares
? What purpose will the walking and continuously rotting fiend now fulfill? Why even bother to contemplate about that? The fiend, Eric Longfellow, settles himself in a seemingly quiet Baltimore suburb but, unfortunately, he has one little problem to take into account. His body decays over and over again, so he frequently needs to recharge his vital batteries by strangling innocent victims preferably young women he picks up from the streets. His neighbor with too much free time on his hands suspects Longfellow to be involved in the unsolved murder spree and starts his own private investigation. "Fiend" is often too slow and tedious, but the delightfully cheese and clumsily shot murder sequences compensate for a lot! Whenever Longfellow strangles a new victim, his face and hands bath in a funky red glow and once or twice you even notice how his decomposing face revitalizes itself, which was really well-done. Unintentionally or not, "Fiend" also works as a parody on the typical life and relations in suburbs. The neighbors are noisy and suspicious towards newcomers and, at the same time, Longfellow himself wondrously depicts the prototypical social outcast. Every neighborhood has one like that, the strange guy your mom warns you not to go near or the bastard that never returns the ball when it accidentally falls in his garden. Don Leifert, who starred in practically all of Dohler's movies, is simply terrific as the emotionless corpse. I read in an article that Leifert was going through a rough personal period and struggled with an alcohol addiction at the time of shooting. Well, this is perhaps the only time that depressions and the effects of alcohol abuse contribute something good to someone's acting career. My advice would be to disregard the low rating, skip reading the bashing reviews and forget everything you heard about Don Dohler as a director. This film is a lot of fun too watch, Dohler's direction is actually quite steady and the script contains a handful of dared twists (child's death, for example) and a shocking finale. "Fiend" is a genuine smörgåsbord for experienced B-movie/cinematic trash fanatics.
