Fiend Without a Face (1958)

Movie Info

Hey…a little monster fighting has me wanting to ask you out on a date!

A creature is hunting the U.S. Air Force Interceptor Command Experimental Station No. 6 at the border of Canada and the United States.  While the people of the nearby town suspect radiation from the base, the military find themselves the target of the angry town member who blame the military for the deaths.  Air Force Major Jeff Cumming (Marshall Thompson) begins to investigate the potential killers…and prime suspect could be Professor R.E. Walgate (Kynaston Reeves).  Teaming with Walgate’s assistant, Barbara Griselle (Kim Parker) seeks the truth…no matter how horrifying it may be!

Directed by Arthur Crabtree, Fiend Without a Face is a British science-fiction horror B-Movie.  The film is an adaptation of “The Thought Monster” by Amelia Reynolds Long which was published in Weird Tales (March 1930).  The movie was released as a double-feature with The Haunted Strangler.  The Criterion Collection released a remastered version of the film (Criterion #92).

If I only had a brain!!!

Fiend Without a Face was kind of tricky to track down since unlike a lot of other Criterion titles, it isn’t a “classic” nor is it very well regarded.  Fortunately, I did find it and though it is rather simple, I enjoyed it.

The story is pretty classic science-fiction horror blend.  It features an unseen monster that is murderous and kills arbitrarily.  The problem of the movie is that the science fiction gets a little jargon-y as the explanation of the creature (or it turns out creatures) is revealed.  It leads to an almost Night of the Living Dead battle against brain creatures.

The cast is very average.  Marshall Thompson is a strange lead and the movie introduces multiple characters that kind of diffuses him as the lead.  As the only lead woman in the cast, Kim Parker becomes a bit of a scream queen, but her character actually is smarter than most of the other characters in that she can follow the professor’s experiments.  Kynaston Reeves is the generic professor who spits out garble (and has possibly the lamest death in the movie).

For being a genius professor, he sure went out like a chump

The movie features some rather innovative effects in the last act.  The creature is finally revealed to be a brain with stalk eyes and a prehensile tail that it strangles with.  The creature is done in stop motion and there are surprisingly a lot of scenes with them.  The movie exceeds in its effects.

Fiend Without a Face is a fun short under-seen movie.  With some clever effects, it lifts itself above the humdrum story and stock characters.  The movie shows origins for other movies like The Evil Dead and Equinox which also went the low-budget but visually intensive route.  The Fiend might take your breath away…but probably not.