After reviewing "It!" I felt bad about how mean I was to Herbert J. Leder. Determined to smooth things out, I decided to go back to "Fiend Without A Face", which is when we first fell in love, in hopes of rekindling our relationship. The good news is my affection for this movie is stronger than ever. This is the picture where Leder's love of mixing together strange ingredients really works well.
There's been a series of murder's surrounding a US air base in a Canadian farm community. An unseen "mental vampire" is killing citizens, each found with their "brain sucked out like an egg". The townsfolk suspect the nuclear power plant at the base is blame. It's being used to power a new radar system to spy on them there Russkies. Major Jeff Cummings (Marshall Thompson) is our speed popping hero. "You ever try sleep instead of Benzedrine?", he's asked, "You might like it." He's determined to get to the bottom of the murders and prove it isn't the military's fault. Through his investigations he comes to know the foxy Barbara Griselle (Kim Parker), sister of the first victim.
She works for Professor Walgate, played by Kynaston Reeves, who is just wonderful and is everything a B-movie professor should be. Sport jacket? Check. Pipe? Check. Whiskey? Check. Desk? Fireplace? How about a desk in front of a fireplace? Double check! Cummings meets with The Professor in an attempt to gain some insight into what's been going on. When it is suggested the killings may be supernatural in origin, Walgate gets super pissed off. In the end, though, we will discover he is more involved than he claims to be.
The execution of the murders (filmically speaking, not literally) is an example of doing the most you can on a low budget. For most of the movie the creature is invisible, so the filmmakers rely on sound design and subtle special effects, along with the death pantomimes of the actors. It's remarkably effective, and the murder scenes have a scary, brutal atmosphere.
An ominous lumbering sound let's us know the killer is near, but it isn't only in these morbid scenes where audio is used to tell a story. A constant theme of the picture is the townspeople's unhappy relationship with the neighboring air base. To illustrate this, the sound of loud aircraft flying is often heard on the soundtrack. The most striking example of this is during the funeral for the first victim. A noisy plane flies overhead and the mourners cast their eyes skyward; the military intruding on even the most solemn of the communities moments.
This is a Herbert J. Leder script, so that means there's an abundance of idiosyncratic, oddball ideas. The affect of the military base on cow's milk is brought up more than once, and later it is revealed the killings are a result of the Professor's experiments in manifesting his thoughts. Using nuclear power syphoned from the base, he managed to successfully use his mind to create a living thing which has now run amok. It's the perfect metaphor for Leder, who's own work seems to suffer from runaway ideas. Indeed, the idea of a man's own thoughts being turned into enemies, gaining life beyond himself, could be seen to symbolize the relationship of an artist to their work, or even mental illness.
Leder was originally slated to direct, but work visa issues prevented that, so veteran British cinematographer turned director Arthur Crabtree stepped in to take the reins. He ably guides the film as it progresses from atom age scare film, into a Gothic interlude in a crypt at night, until finally becoming a siege movie. The cinematography is crisp, atmospheric black and white. Take note of the scene in the autopsy room; Crabtree and cinematographer Lionel Banes evoke a creepy, ominous mood through use of shadow.
When the creature's finally become visible, they are crawling brains with antennae and spinal cord. The climax, in which they launch an attack on Walgate's house, where our character's are holed up, is shockingly violent and gory. Stop motion is used to animate the brain creatures, and though it ain't Harryhausen, it doesn't look terrible. The idea of gross, murderous brain's sounds funny on paper, but under Crabtree's direction it comes across as scary and intense.
A nuclear scare film that is also about the relationship of the military-industrial complex with civilians, the power of thought, and killer brains; "Fiend Without a Face" is the best example of Herbert J. Leder's "conceptual stew" approach to screenwriting. The mix of ideas work in harmony in a manner they just don't in the pictures he directed himself. Perhaps it's the journeyman efficiency of Crabtree that managed to corral all those elements into a cohesive whole. This picture does what a B-movie should; it introduces interesting and unusual concept's and conflict's and then solves them with monsters, guns and explosions.
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