Thank you Billy Idol. Truth be told, I've been putting off watching Fiend Without a Face all week. It's not that I've been dreading watching it, because truth be told this is a movie I've been waiting to watch for years. Well, maybe "waiting to watch" isn't so true as "been looking for an excuse to watch" would be, but I've just been busy as all Hell this week. This is the month with the highest suicide rate of the entire year and it's really killing me (horrible pun intended) in terms of an overwhelming workload. So many forms to fill out and souls to collect, not to mention all the blubbering and whining I hear like "Why did I waste my life?" and "How come he doesn't love me the way I love him?" and "What will my family think?" Here's a little advice people: life isn't all sunshine and orgasms, so always be prepared for the occasional bout of bird shit on your shoulder. This way if the worst happens then you're prepared, and if it doesn't then things will always be better than you expected them to be. Suicide is not the answer... because if I get arthritis from you offing yourself due to you losing your job or your significant other turns out to be a douche bag, I will bitch slap the crap out of your with my good hand for the rest of eternity. Now, where was I? Oh yeah, 1958.

So Fiend Without a Face is my 1958 entry into this whole "52" project I've cooked up for myself and, yes, it's another cheesy "science run amok" horror flick. In fact, this is the second week in a row I've done a movie about atomic brain monsters... Jeezus Kryst, I’m only on week 3 and I'm already in a rut?! Damn. Unlike my last two reviews, X the Unknown and The Brain From Planet Arous, Fiend Without a Face gets its own place amidst the pantheon of DVD snobbery known as The Criterion Collection! Why? Damned if I know. Director Arthur Crabtree didn't exactly shake up the Hollywood scene before or after FWaF. Writer Herb Leder went on to write and direct a handful of uninspiring horror flicks of his own, but again they weren't anything the huddle masses were exactly huddling to amass. The cast pool didn't spawn any future Oscar winners or underground darlings who went on to do gay porn or eat dog shit either. Oh well, let's see if we can't find out what all the hubbub is by just watching it!

When a farmer shows up dead outside of a US Air Force base in Canada (or in this case, the UK) with his face twisted in utter terror the likes of which you'll only find on the horrific visage of somebody who walks in on Abe Vigoda in the shower, the task of finding out why he died comes upon our hero; the slightly grizzled (you might even say gristled...) Major Jeff Cummings. Jeff who? Exactly. Along with his plucky sidekick Captain Al Chester (the Molester?), Jeff's got a mystery on his hands. A mystery that's made all the more interesting when the base coroner isn't allowed to run an autopsy because the local authorities came to claim their corpse. This makes Jeff unhappy, because he thinks it's a power play by the locals so they can somehow blame the farmer's demise on the base's nuclear reactors. Though a collective "Huh?!" probably just shot up from the two people reading this, it seems that the local yokels have been looking for any excuse to shut down the base, blaming the military's atomic generators for any and all local environmental mishaps. As such, a mysterious dead body appearing just off the base perimeter could be just the argument they need to shutdown those reactors and get the military presence out of town so they can get back to their pot farming and meth cooking! Yee-Haw!... errr, I mean, “Yee-Haw, Eh?!”

Being the macho hero movie lead type, it's no surprise when Major Cummings (tee-hee) finds himself making "come sit on daddy's lap" eyes at the dead farmer's sister, Barbara. Meanwhile, Jeff's also working on the base's new radar setup, which should allow them to keep an eye on the Russians from the comfort of the Canadian (*cough*British*cough*) wilderness. But, when the project has power issues, Jeff's boss Colonel Butler orders that the nose-pickers in the reactor control room up the wattage, ignoring all warnings from Jeff and the other sane men on base that the Colonel is taking not only his own dick, but the dicks of every man on that base into his hands... wow, that sounded wrong even before I finished typing it. Yikes. Anyway, more concerned with results than nuclear fallout, Butler gives the orders and every last drop of juice is squeezed from the atomic apples, but even at their maximum power it seems that something (or some THING) is draining off the radar's power... cue the dramatic sci-fi music here... and try to look a little terrified at something off screen if possible. Thanks.

At another nearby farm (where the planes apparently fly incredibly low, but manage to not kick up the slightest breeze...), a husband and wife are the latest victims of what no doubt killed Barb's brother: an invisible something-or-other that strangles them both while making unsettlingly wet popping and snapping sounds. Hearing it is like watching a really piggish and unwashed person cracking bones and sucking out the marrow. It makes your skin crawl. An autopsy on these two new victims reveals something really tasty though: their brains were sucked right out of their heads through small holes in the base of their skulls! Spinal chords too! See, I told you it was a tasty revelation. Damn could I use some lunch right now.

While paying a visit to Barb, Major Spermexpulsion learns of a local smarty-pants named Prof. Walgate, whose major field of interest has to do with the mind or, more precisely, controlling it. Curiouser and curiouser... not to be confused with “Simon and Simon”... Gerald McRaney and his cowboy hat be damned! Elsewhere, the faceless fiend's next stop on the brain buffet (as it makes sure to knock over as much stuff and make as much noise as inhumanly possible while doing so...) is the local Mayor. Has anybody else noticed how the creature's only eating Canadian brains and not American brains? I wonder if, much like beer, brains vary in appeal from country to country. Either way, this latest death of course leads to more uproar by the locals, who start to blame the murder spree on some crazed American G.I. that they're convinced is running amok through the local wilderness. Lead by Gibbons, the local Scottish rabble-rouser (who literally pulls NINE rifles from the backseat of his fucking car!), a posse of wanna-be vigilantes heads out into the wild to do some Yankee huntin'! Of course Gibbons is the one guy who doesn't come out of those woods the next morning.

With this latest assumed death, the town council calls an emergency meeting, inviting Major Semenejaculation along to represent the military base. And, despite the fact that their last few meetings always ended in arguments and Jeff being kicked out, Barb and our hero still make goo-goo eyes at each other during the entire sit down. Obviously it's love... the kind of love that will lead to them having three kids, cheating on each other frequently, both becoming alcoholics and pill-poppers, and dying in a violent domestic dispute that would make Tennessee Williams pop a chubby. As for the meeting, it ends abruptly when Gibbons shows up, moaning like a big man-child and dead behind the eyes... not unlike Anne Coulter. ZING!

After a near fatal investigation into the local cemetery, Jeff confronts Dr. Walgate. About what I'm not really sure, but the old man insists that the base needs to shut down their reactors, because each attack occurred at the height of the plant's output. When they attempt to do so though, it turns out that all of the control rods have been smashed, so there's no way to shut the place down! While waiting for new rods to be flown in, Walgate sits down Major Manchowderexcretion and the rest of our cast and tells them about his experiments to make telekinesis a reality and "materialize thought". With a healthy (or rather, unhealthy) surge of electricity to his brain, Dr. Wally eventually achieved his goal of moving shit with his mind. Like unfiltered cigarettes vs. filtered cigarettes, the basic electrical power the Prof was flooding his brain with was harsh and he needed something smoother. Enter the base's nuclear reactor and Wally's new invention which sapped some of that power and redirected it to his gray matter! This is when the brown did a swan dive into the nearest fan...

As part of his experiments, Waldorf not only "detached" his thoughts and made them solid, but he also started to give them a specific form that would allow them to continue existing outside of his head. This form became something similar to the human brain, only invisible... and snaking around on a spinal cord... and with big snail-like eye stalks so it could see where it was going... and with a taste for nuclear power and sweet sweet head meat! Wonder where all those brains and spinal cords went after they disappeared from the victims? Wally's original thought spawn is breeding more "fiends"... all without faces I'm sure.

Despite being made of brains, the fiends aren't exactly smart. In their lust for some tasty atomic morsels, they don't realize that cranking the reactor's output to critical mass has an adverse affect on their stealthiness: it turns them visible. Of course this now means that the monsters can be stopped, so when they attack the rest of our heroes in their barricaded farmhouse Night of the Living Dead style, it's projectile stop-motion brain creepers for everyone!

Much like The Brain From Planet Arous, this movie's an interesting concept whose execution ruins it. I know it's not the fault of the people who made it. They only had so much special effects technology to work with back then after all. Unfortunately, that gives me little comfort when I'm watching some twenty or so stop-motion brain creatures with goofy eye stalks trying to interact with a human cast. Speaking of which, there were only four actual victims of the brain attacks, so where did all of the other fiends come from!? Was there a mysterious murder spree two towns over that we never heard about!? Then of course there's the biggest "fuck you!" to common sense: Major Babyjuicespray stops the monsters by blowing up the base's nuclear reactor with a load of dynamite. I repeat: HE BLOWS UP A NUCLEAR REACTOR WITH A LOAD OF DYNAMITE... So even though he stopped the fiends and saved the day, everybody within a 60 mile radius is going to die slowly and painfully of excruciating cancer over the next five years. Great heroing job there Jeff. At least with the fiends the people would die quickly. Yeesh!

And so, as was the case with The Brain From Planet Arous, the acting is fine (though I miss John Agar's insane facial expressions and wacky contact lenses), the story is beyond interesting, and it was all shot cleanly and competently, but the not-so-special effects and logical farts keep it from being anything more than another grain of sand in the beach of corny '50s sci-fi flicks... not that there's anything wrong with that! Now, if you'll excuse me, I've gotta go exhume that lunch I was talking about earlier. I'm thinking some brain and kidney pie... minus the kidneys.