B-movies take a very particular sort of palate to enjoy. You have to understand, by basic conception no B-movie is actually designed to come out as a world-class film. The term, originating as a description for any picture a major studio didn't deem big enough to garner a large budget or wider release, typically refers to productions with low budgets, somewhat out there concepts, and the ever infamous bad acting. Why hire Cary Grant or Humphrey Bogart when you can just get some nobody who knows how to project exactly one emotion, and build a film around him instead? They're not really good in the conventional sense of having deep, thought-provoking stories or stellar effects or Oscar-worthy performances, but the sort of cheap, gonzo aesthetic they project can and often does suit the tastebuds of a viewer seeking it. All this is to say it's slightly unfair to criticize a movie with no grander aspirations than being a dinky little thrill-ride designed for quick consumption and easy disposability in the same way one would critique Citizen Kane.
Does this mean I'm gonna be nice to 1958's Fiend Without A Face (999th place in the original list, 959th in the second edition)? Hell no. Just because you don't have the budget to hire the big talents or make the fanciest effects doesn't mean you can't at least try a little. An aesthetic born of shallow pockets is no excuse for laziness.
Before I go tearing the movie to shreds before I've even talked about it a little, I feel I should back up and state I don't HATE Fiend Without A Face. In fact, there's a few elements I find worthy of praise for their uniqueness and execution. But you have to understand, while I'm certainly guilty of liking more than my fair share of bad movies (the 2007 Ghost Rider wavers on and off my top five favorites depending on the day), there really has to be something I can latch onto if I'm going to give a movie a pass for having a multitude of weak elements. Something really, truly outstanding has to leap right out of the screen and grab me by the throat in order to garner my praise - and while the one outstanding element of this movie certainly does manage that quite literally, it comes in far too late to help the overall product.
That said, let's talk story. We're in Canada this time around, in a small backwoods town whose people have recently seen the installation of an American Air Force base. The people of this little nowhere town don't trust the big bad military men, on account of their planes spooking all the cows, and this hubbub going around about atomic power and radiation. There's enough distrust going around that when a local farmer shows up dead outside the base's gate, the townsfolk are quick to blame the military personnel, especially Marshall Thompson's Major Jeff Cummings, our focus character. A few deaths later, and it becomes apparent the dead bodies are turning up with their brains missing. As the local medical examiner puts it, some sort of mental vampire must be going around absorbing the townsfolk's minds. The race is on to find out the exact cause of the deaths before the townsfolk turn against the Air Force entirely.
Or rather, that's how it plays out on paper. During the course of the actual movie, none of the tension you'd expect from this kind of situation actually makes it onto the screen. There's more than plenty lipservice paid to the ideas about nuclear radiation being a bad, scary thing (because this is a 50s monster movie, so of course we have to be afraid of radiation, even if it's being emitted by a radar system of all things), and the conflict between simple country folk and misunderstood military men, but all we really get is talk. None of our principle actors - not Kynaston Reeves as Professor Walgate, nor Kim Parker as Barbara Griselle, nor Michael Balfour as the ostensibly important Sergeant Kasper - seem to have any idea how to emote or inflect beyond a single, predefined state of being, and they stay there for the entire running time regardless of what's happening in the story. Lacking a good performance to ground itself on (or at the very least, by B-movie standards, a nice, big hammy performance), the movie has to sell itself on the story for an hour, and without the subtext which comes naturally to this narrative, it's just a bit dull.
The cheapness shows through pretty clearly when you don't have a strong story or performance going. Ideally, one would be wrapped up in the twists and turns of the plot, or just how far this one supporting actor is going towards gnawing the set to pieces, which should keep you from noticing any areas where the budget isn't up to snuff. Unfortunately, even if Fiend Without A Face had itself a Reb Brown or Tor Johnson, they wouldn't find much nourishment in the set design. It's largely a barebones middle-sized room with a few props thrown around to turn it into whatever the scene calls for, and director Arthur Crabtree only seems to remember to position his actors in a manner that disguises this some of the time. There's one or two locations with more detail, notably the professor's home during the climax, but one suspects the producers lucked out and rented it from another studio for filming - and even then, they seem to forget it's not a run-down shack in a few shots.
We also see failings in the music department here, and before I get into that, yes, I am picking some very fine nits here. As mentioned, Fiend Without A Face isn't really the kind of movie deserving of a fine comb over every inch of its production, but I feel it important to note just how dull and lifeless it is for so much of the running time. If there were something of substance to talk about in an area I'm familiar with, I totally would, but unless you want to hear my detailed analysis of scene #5151 where we explicitly state the themes again and accomplish nothing else, you're gonna listen to the music complaints.
Or rather, the lack thereof. See, it seems as if Crabtree heard the idea somewhere about removing the soundtrack from scenes of heightened tension or horror, to heighten those feelings in the viewer far more than banging on the violin strings would. While this IS indeed true, someone forgot to mention the parts about using your camera movements, lighting, and direction of the actors to compliment the lack of score. Otherwise, you just wind up shooting exactly the same as always, and creating a scene that just feels awkward. It works in one or two places, and I'm certainly glad it's not playing music and reminding me of the sorry excuse for a love theme this movie has, but...
...oh god, I haven't even mentioned the romance subplot. It highlights every single weakness in Fiend, from the stiff acting (your brother just had his brain sucked out - show SOME emotion!), to the musical failings (even if I never have to hear that movement again, I'll still resent the composer for writing it), to the sloppy writing (but it's a forced romance subplot, so I repeat myself.) Just... maybe it's just me, because I have a particular distaste for unnecessary love stories in media, but it doesn't play at all, and the movie has the gall to try and sexualize Parker by giving her a shower scene and having her tend towards tight chest-enhancing sweaters despite supposedly being a simple farmgirl while still trying to present her the perfect innocent non-sexual girl, and there's at least two separate "we kissed for the first time and it's awkward isn't it sweet" moments, and...
Blegh. Blegh blegh blegh. Burn it from my memory, it's just bad.
So after all that, if you've got a short memory and can't remember the start of this review, you might be sitting around thinking, "Hey, Gilbert! Isn't there ANYTHING you like about this movie?" To which I say...
These lil' bastards.
Spoilers ahoy, if you actually care that much about spoilers for a B-movie, but the poster already showed 'em off anyways, so don't come complaining to me about it. See, as it turns out, the titular fiend is actually a living brain and spinal column the professor brought to life while using a combination of electrical impulses straight to the head and siphoned atomic energy from the Air Force base's nuclear radar tests, as part of a series of experiments in telekinesis to bring one's thoughts into reality. Ignoring for a moment how exactly teleKINESIS involves materializing matter, it's a silly 50s monster movie explanation for how you get little brains crawling around on the nerve endings jutting out of their spinal cords, and it just gets better when it turns out the fiends are invisible because they came from the realm of thought, need to suck the brains out of other living things to grow stronger and multiply, and can only become visible once they've absorbed enough radiation.
I won't call them perfect or anything, but they're certainly fun monsters, and add a much-needed spark to the movie once they actually show up. Whatever budget the makers had clearly went into creating these little guys, who are animated through stop-motion, which I'm personally a big fan of, even when done badly. Hell, ESPECIALLY when done badly, because the herkey-jerky look you get from poor stop-motion just adds to the otherworldliness of the creatures. Not quite as over the moon about them as I was the skull of Marquis de Sade from last review, but they've got personality, and I can't help but like the little guys for livening things up.
Also of particular note is how bloody their deaths get. This being 1958, audiences weren't quite used to seeing blood and gore on the big screen as we are nowadays. Though it is somewhat lame to see the monsters built up over the entire film as unstoppable if they ever get ahold of enough radiation to suddenly gain the unfortunate vulnerability of being visible, and thus easily put down by bullets, the graphicness of the way they go down is rather interesting to see. It's easy to forget, but when you see a guy get shot in the head, there's quite a lot standing between you and the organ getting messed up by a hail of lead blasting through it. Given that we're seeing the effects of those slugs without a cranium to hide the gruesome details, it's no wonder this picture earned an X-rating in Britain back in the day.
But, as mentioned, they come into the picture far too late, and we learn their origins and basic function through a rather clunky exposition scene courtesy of the professor. The fiends without faces might be somewhat interesting designs, and liven up a dull movie a little in the final act, but the lateness of the hour and particulars of the ending (I won't say exactly, but it's a 50s sci-fi horror movie, so how do you THINK it's gonna end?) mean they can only do so much to salvage it.
Is Fiend Without A Face a bad movie? I've critiqued it quite a bit and said more negative than positive, but I really don't think I can go so far as to say BAD. As mentioned at the start, this is a B-movie, and thus subject to different standards. It fails to serve as an entertaining or worthwhile film for most of its running time, but we're clearly here for the fiends and the quote-unquote thrill of watching them encroach on the characters. Everything before that point is just here to make sure they had a full movie's worth of material. So if the meat of the movie is enjoyable, can I really say the film fails based on elements it doesn't care about? Some might say yes, and I might feel inclined to agree, on the principle there's never any excuse to put in low effort on 80% of your running time, but the fiends are just endearing enough for me to give the film a pass. Not a recommend, mind you, just a statement of it being alright.
I'll never understand how it managed a Criterion Collection release, though.
Body Count: A whopping thirteen this time around. Granted, half of those are corpses only seen in the background and not given any focus, but a dead man is a dead man.
Franchise Potential: I wouldn't say so for this one. You'd need to contrive an explanation for why the fiends have come into being again, and I don't really see where you could go with the concept as established without having to do more groundwork than necessary to salvage it. With a remake, you might have some potential, but beyond that... I don't see it.
We're finished up with this one for now! Be sure to come back for the next review, where we'll get into the 1965 Spanish-French horror, The Diabolical Doctor Z. See you there!
He don't look none too good, does he?
