Fiend Without A Face (1958)
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Fiend Without a Face (1958)
Directed by Arthur Crabtree
Written by Herbert J. Leder (based on the short story “The Thought Monster”, by Amelia Reynolds Long)
This film opens with a bang, whisking us away to the U.S. Air Force base in Winthrop, Manitoba, Canada, celebrated the world over for its grayness. In the fall, tourists come from far and wide to gawk at the lack of color, and to enjoy the local Grayscale Festival, where white people wearing neutral colors attend panel discussions on the hot button issues of the day, like “Galoshes: Too Sexy for Daytime?” and “Shredded Wheat vs. Cream of Wheat: A Blind Taste Test to Find North America’s Blandest Breakfast Gruel”.
Enter our hero: Marshall Thompson, the jungle veterinarian from Daktari, is an Air Force officer and apparently a meth addict, because his comic relief sidekick Al says, “You ever think of trying sleep instead of Benzedrine? You might like it.”
But Major Daktari merely scoffs, “Brother, I’ve had some tough nuts to crack in my time,” as he pops another fistful of uppers—which is his personal business, and suddenly I see the wisdom of that Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy. Anyway, I guess it’s a little like Top Gun, except when this guy says, “I feel the need, the need for speed!” he doesn’t take off in a jet, he just calls Heisenberg from Breaking Bad.
Meanwhile, a very gray local man is murdered off screen by sound effects.
Daktari and Al go see the base doctor to find out about the autopsy, not that it’s any of their business, but you know how tweakers are, always getting up in your grill. However, the locals have already snatched the body. Daktari wants that corpse back to prove their atomic power station didn’t kill him, because the backwards, superstitious Canadians fear the Atom, when they really should be building a cargo cult to it.
Major Daktari meets the dead man’s bereaved sister, Barbara, who sets some kind of World Land Speed record as she races through the Five Stages of Grief . But as Daktari drives her home, she discovers a previously unknown, Sixth Stage of Grief: Flirting.
(Brief tangent: Barbara is played by Kim Parker, who was born Herta Padawer in Austria in 1933. This was the best and biggest role she ever had; all her other characters were named “Maid”, “Secretary”, or “Brunette.” Fans of Mystery Science Theater 3000 may just barely recognize Miss Parker as one of the continually prancing nitwits in Fire Maidens of Outer Space.)
Meanwhile, back at the plot, Major Daktari is trying to use Radar to spy on Siberia, but his efforts are sabotaged by a “Power Fade,” which I think is the haircut that guy from Kid ‘N’ Play had. His boss Col. Butler tells him to “turn the atomic reactor up to High!” Daktari says, “it’s already on High.” Col. Butler says, “What’s the next setting after that?”
Daktari checks the manual, “Uh…’Mushroom cloud.’”
“Well, turn it up to that!”
(I’m paraphrasing, but that’s the gist.)
So, after telling the Canadians that they’re ignorant superstitious pussies for fearing the Americans’ nuclear power, Daktari calls the plant manager and says, “What the hell, let’s break all the safety protocols! It’s just atomic radiation! I think glowing maple syrup would make my flapjacks taste like victory!”
Anyway, Barbara remembers she’s bereaved just in time for her brother’s funeral. But the mourners seem less sad and more peeved by the B-52 that buzzes the open grave.
The farm couple from American Gothic make a noise like howler monkeys while getting strangled by invisible monsters, which in turn make a sound like guinea pigs.
The Air Force doctor does an autopsy and finds that the farmer and his wife have had their brains and spinal cords sucked out of them. Whatever is killing people, it’s got a taste for sweetbreads. And since it’s slurping up spinal columns like spaghetti, it’s probably got Mad Cow Disease too.
The Colonel gives Major Daktari carte blanche to investigate, so he uses the murders as an excuse to mack on Barbara. But he waits until the day after her brother’s funeral, figuring she ought to be over her grief by now, and goes to her house. She doesn’t answer the door, but he hears her showering, so he lets himself in for a peep. Then he rifles through her stuff and finds that Barbara works for Professor Walgate, who writes books about “Sibonetics” (I think the screenwriter was trying to spell “cybernetics”, but wasn’t getting paid enough to actually look it up in the dictionary).
While he’s invading the privacy of a damp, half-nude, occasionally grieving woman, the local constable shows up and Major Daktari punches him in the face, because as an American he’s a guest in their country, and wanted them to understand our deeply-held cultural values of violence and voyeurism.
The mayor of this one horse, two-tone town gets strangled, so the constable organizes a posse to go into the woods and lynch some invisible brain sucking guinea pigs! It doesn’t go very well. The constable gets killed almost instantly and the posse decides that instead of hunting down the creatures and destroying them, they’ll go back, hold a town council meeting, and complain about them.
Meanwhile, Major Daktari goes over to Professor Walgates’ house to ask him why such a world renowned academic can’t spell “cybernetics”. The Professor blames it on the screenwriter, then has a fainting spell, which Barbara blames on Major Daktari.
Daktari goes to the cemetery at night for some reason and accidentally locks himself in a crypt. Snapping into action, the Major instantly panics and pounds on the door so hard he breaks his flashlight. I hate to be critical, but I’m starting to become dissatisfied with this movie’s hero, and would like to return the unused portion for a full refund.
Al and Barbara rescue Daktari. Fortunately, while taking a break from sobbing and soiling himself, the Major found a clue in the crypt—the Professor’s pipe—and immediately goes to confront him. The Professor has another fainting spell and croaks, “It’s a terrible story…!”
We know, Prof. We know!
The Professor tells Daktari to shut down the atomic plant. Thus, because the lives of a few Canadian hillbillies are at stake, the U.S. Air Force risks global thermonuclear war by switching off our radar, because that’s the kind of awesome people we are.
Unfortunately, somebody smashed all the uranium fuel rods and the chain reaction is already running wild. So is my heart, with the possibility this is about to turn into another, better movie, like The China Syndrome.
But no, it just turns into the last scene of every Perry Mason episode, as the Professor confesses to experimenting with telepathy. At first he was handicapped by a lack of high voltage electricity, but then he started siphoning power from the Air Force’s nuclear reactor, and also probably stealing their WiFi too—he seems like the type—and managed to create transparent evil brains that destroyed his machines and all his notes! (Presumably the invisible brains plan to steal his work and publish first in a reputable peer-reviewed journal!)
Nobody believes the Professor, so the monsters jiggle some ivy to freak everyone out, then they choke a sergeant to move the plot along. The besieged characters board up every door and window to keep out anymore lame exposition, but it’s no use, because the stupidity is coming from inside the house!
Meanwhile, the brains strangle everybody in the nuclear power plant and crank up the juice until they turn visible. And yes, they’re brains with antennae and a chunk of severed spinal column for a tail that they use to push themselves around.
Major Daktari runs off to blow up the nuclear power plant with dynamite, which sounds really idiotic, but I bet will be deeply satisfying for the dynamite, which has been feeling a little neglected ever since the atomic bomb showed up.
The Professor runs outside to get hogpiled and killed by his own creations, because when it comes to mad science, them’s the rules.
The brains steal the humans’ hammer and pry the boards off the windows (which is something zombies never thought of—these monsters are brains for a reason!) then they start diving through the window, two or three at a time, looking very much like sperm. It’s as if a giant masturbated just outside the house…but a giant so smart, he actually ejaculates brains.
Anyhow, the Air Force guys are running out of ammo and Barbara is running out of birth control pills, so everybody’s screwed.
Back at the nuclear power plant, Major Daktari lights the dynamite and runs. One of the brains nearly blows out the fuse, until it realizes that, along with a face, it also lacks lips.
The nuclear power plant explodes (never a great way to start a sentence), and all the brains die in an overwrought, drama queeny kind of way, then dissolve into a puddle of Smucker’s Boysenberry Preserves.
So! After all that, what exactly did we learn from Fiend Without a Face? I’d say there were three main lessons we can take away from this film.
First, we discovered that the title appears to be literally true; when revealed, the Fiends do indeed display a distinct facial deficiency. But they also lack a neck, a coccyx, a fibula, a tibia, or a fistula. In other words, the title lies by omission. But movie theater marquees are finite in size, forcing the filmmakers to limit the Fiend to just one thing it didn’t have, and I can’t fault them for going with the alliteration of “Without a Face”, although I would have preferred the assonance of Fiend Without a Spleen.
Second, I’m impressed by how clearly, even shamelessly, this film rips off the gimmick from Forbidden Planet: machinery turning thoughts into a tangible, but invisible monster. However, Forbidden Planet was a rip-off of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, so I don’t suppose it’s in any position to call the cops. Also, while Forbidden Planet beat Fiend Without a Face to the silver screen by two years, the gimmick itself debuted more than a quarter century before, in Weird Tales magazine. Unlike the two films, American writer Amelia Reynolds Long’s 1930 short story doesn’t rely on instrumentality to create and sustain the monster. The science is purely paranormal, and the technology is limited to a lead-lined room designed to act like a lint trap for psychic energy. But the story, however farfetched, has one thing going for it that Fiend Without a Face doesn’t have: occasionally, it’s actually kind of scary.
In “The Thought Monster”, Ms. Reynolds is not above snuffing a couple of innocent children simply to assure the reader that she means business, and that’s just the overture. In this grim tale of good intentions gone bad, the casualties mount from first paragraph to last, including the detective they import from New York to solve the case. But one scene haunts me more than any other, and if Fiend Without a Face had bothered to dramatize it, I would probably be this movie’s biggest fan:
That night a car drove into town with a dead man in the driver’s seat, his hands gripped to the wheel in convulsions. In the tonneau sat two more corpses whose faces, like that of the driver, were contorted with stark terror. Only the ruler-like straightness of the road and the vise-like grip of those dead hands upon the wheel had kept the car from overturning. It was like a challenge from the Terror to the town.
Finally, this little sci-fi programmer shows the tidal changes to the entertainment industry over the last 60 years. Back in 1958, it wasn’t uncommon for your B-picture to feature British actors in England pretending to be Canadians in Canada while being dubbed by Americans in Los Angeles. Now our TV screens are filled with nothing but Canadians in Vancouver and Toronto pretending to be Americans pretending to be anywhere else but Canada.
P.S. Okay, one last bonus kvetch. As much as I enjoy this little black-and-white cheapie and the slam bang, Three Stooges-like energy of its third act, the first half is brutally dull. Don’t get me wrong; I enjoy a good slow burn, but watching fake Canadians hammily miming their death throes while getting strangled by invisible spinal cords is about as silly as it sounds.