Fiend Without A Face

You know what's weird? Every movie I've reviewed this week has gotten shorter each time. The Blob was almost an hour and a half, Invasion Of The Body Snatchers was an hour and twenty minutes, now this movie is an hour and fifteen minutes.

Fiend Without A Face, a very well done movie for it's time with an interesting concept and a grotesque monster. The plot follows an army major trying to uncover what has been killing the civilians around their military base and boy howdy, is the explanation a doozy. A scientist was conducting psychic experiments to be able to do ordinary tasks, think of it like a more scientific way of using the Force. But one day the scientist became too ambitous and created a being of pure thought. Throughout the entire movie you never see the monster until the very end, being an object of thought it is invisible and they are truly horrific and is stated that they look very akin to the human brain. They suck people's brains out of their skull! That's pretty gruesome for 1958! And since they cannot be seen, all you hear is the disgusting sucking sound which makes my stomach churn. But when it really gets going is about 10 minutes before the end, a radiation spike causes the creatures to become visible and are horrific to look at. Imagine a human brain, imagine it had a spinal cord tail that allows it to move about similar to how a caterpillar moves, imagine it had antennae to seek out people. That...is disturbing. I got to say this film had some gore in it for the 1950s, long before we saw flesh eating zombies in George Romero's Night Of The Living Dead, we saw brains being shot, smashed with an axe, and even dissolving. Ugh, it's nasty! Just to see these things squirt blood everywhere after being shot makes me wonder how audiences reacted to it back then. True it's in black and white, but you can only imagine how much more gross this would have been in color. I would recommend this movie just for the last 10 minutes, it's a special effects marvel that needs to be seen to be believed.

Next week, we shall be looking at a few more well known, true horror movies that really deserve more attention.