Here we are at the 100th New Creature Canon post, surely a milestone worth celebrating—so, how do we do that? Why not a review of the only monster movie I know of that is set around where I live? Surely you are as interested in the subject as I am.
Nowadays (or, at least, the parts of “nowadays” that discounts the past year or so of disruption), my home province of Manitoba is used as the shooting location for a surprising number of films (prominently among them: The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford), including many horror films (they filmed at least one of those direct-to-video Child’s Play sequels here)—and why not? During the fall and winter months, the flat prairie landscape with its sparse wooded patches has a desolate quality that can bring atmosphere to these projects. Of course, none of them ever take place in Manitoba, but have it sub for whatever location they want—and, ironically, the one bit of horror movie history I’ve found that is explicitly set in Manitoba was absolutely not filmed here. That would be fifties B-movie staple Fiend Without a Face, a movie that has had a long life as a piece of out-of-context footage used in montages or clip packages about old Sci-Fi. This is likely because Fiend Without a Face features one of the most grotesque monsters from the fifties monster movie boom, and not because it’s set in Manitoba (which was apparently only because a Canadian location was considered a suitable middle ground between a British or American one.) In any case, this is another example of how these old monster movies could be quite a bit less quaint than their reputations would have you believe.
The history of Fiend on its own is rather fascinating. It was independently-made in the UK, based on a thirties short story called “The Thought Monster” by Amelia Reynolds Long in a deal brokered by Famous Monsters of Filmland founder/book agent Forrest J. Ackerman. The director, Arthur Crabtree, was brought in as a last minute replacement and angrily walked off the set when he realized he was tasked with directing a monster movie—and also probably to make sure he lived up to the name “Crabtree”—and had to coaxed back to work while the movie’s lead actor directed in his stead. This movie was considered so shocking in the UK that they could barely get an X rating, and even with cuts it still ended up being controversial. If you to watch the first 75% of the movie, you may wonder how it is that this raised such a ruckus even in the stuck-up fifties—it seems a lot like every other Sci-Fi monster movie of its time, and even had the brilliantly thrifty idea to have its monster be invisible for most of the movie. Oh, but just you wait, this is a story that goes big for its finale.
Set in the fictional town/village/pseudo-medieval mudhole of Winthrop, Manitoba, Fiend avoids having to accurately portray any part of this province by making the setting as generically rural woodland as possible and by having its heroes be US air force members stationed on a joint American-Canadian base, which is not really something that happens here but whatever. The rest of the cast, which consists of American, British, and Canadian actors who were in the UK at the time, manage to give the locals of Winthrop every accent imaginable, including a few that do not exist in reality. Those locals, portrayed as an expected group of provincial hicks of the sort that appear frequently in movies, are not particularly pleased with the air force base nearby, complaining about the noise (our leading lady reveals that the cows were so put off by the jets taking off that their milk production was affected), and especially about the nuclear reactor the base is using to power itself, as well as its experimental radar the military brass hope to use to spy on the Soviets (they’re basically trying to invent the same technology they did at the end of Gog.) Early on, part of me wondered if this (British) movie was going to have subtle digs at American military chauvinism—after all, the townies complaints seem to be entirely justified given the few scenes we see of their days being disrupted by Air Force activity—but that doesn’t really end up panning out.
The characters in this movie are basic B-movie stereotypes, as you could probably guess, including a stern-but-fair colonel who is there to take in information and look perplexed, and a doddering old scientist who knows more than he’s letting on. There’s a romance between the Air Force major who takes it upon himself to investigate matters and the only non-elderly woman in the movie that seems to stem mostly from him seeing her step out of the shower, an image that the original poster dutifully makes use of. Somehow, though, there’s an energy to the performances here that prevent them from feeling leaden, especially with the American actors who don’t have to independently invent what they think a Manitoba accent sounds like.
Anyway, some weird stuff happens: citizens of Winthrop are dying for some mysterious reason—we get a glimpse of these deaths early on and in regular intervals afterwards, as random people are attacked by some invisible something. When the Air Force brass manage to convince the town’s meddling mayor to let them do their own autopsies, they discover that every victim has two puncture wounds at the base of their skull and are missing their entire brain and spinal cord, which is something that you’d think would be pretty noticeable. Some of the locals think that the radiation from the base is causing this, somehow, but others suspect that something alive is responsible and get their pitchforks out for the hunt in the dark woods, while the Major begins to think that the scientist that his love interest works for, the one with the history of researching telepathy, just might be connected to this brain-focused situation.
While the monsters-are-invisible gimmick might seem a bit cheap at first, they make those scenes surprisingly effective through the use of some inventive effects that show the unseen monsters leaving tracks on floors and pushing over every inanimate object in their way. Even more memorable is the disgusting slurping-like noise that they make, the first thing every character notices before they are quickly killed off. It’s not necessarily horrifying, but it’s imaginatively bizarre for those early goings—probably the closest thing to a truly disturbing moment is a scene where a local, a guy that our lead gets into a fistfight because he’s a jerk, bursts into a room and babbles like he’s been lobotomized. Of course, had the monsters remained invisible for the entire movie and those effects were all we got, it probably would have gotten old—but they certainly don’t do that.
Eventually, after managing to get himself out of a locked tomb (it happens to the best of us), the Major and the others confront the scientist and get him to admit his connection, which is told through the ol’ narrated flashback, a device that even other fifties B-movies are too efficiently plotted to stoop to. You see, in order to produce telepathy and thought projection, he started electrifying his own brain, and then got the bright idea to reroute small amounts of radiation from the base to give him even more mental power, a plan that has absolutely no obvious downsides. But actually, he ends up creating an invisible thought-form given evil sentience by the sheer amount of radiation available (so the Air Force is at least partially responsible, although the survivors certainly don’t act like there’s any lingering questions left by this gruesome event), which breaks out and starts attacking people. This is ludicrous, of course, maybe even more ludicrous than every other instance of “radiation is magic” that I’ve encountered, but then the thought-form and the duplicates it created absorb enough radiation to become visible, and they turn out to disembodied brains that inchworm around on their spinal cords (evidently the missing brains from the previous victims brought to life), and the last fifteen or so minutes of this seventy-four minute movie goes beyond ludicrous.
The climax turns the movie into a proto-Night of the Living Dead siege scenario, except involving numerous brain monsters animated using stop motion. This is not top-of-the-line, Ray Harryhausen-level stop motion, and the brains basically exist in a frame rate entirely separate from the rest of the movie, but their design and the herky-jerky animation (dig the way they leap their way across the screen!) combine to make something that seems right out of a nightmare, especially with the sheer number of them squishing their way across the set in macabre tableaus. The action in those scenes are gory, too, with the brains getting shot and hacked with an axe and oozing blood, and when they are finally destroyed (by blowing up the base’s radar control panel and presumably the reactor, which doesn’t seem like a great idea) they melt into puddles in a way that brings to mind the more intentionally surrealist stop motion of someone like Jan Svankmajer (the actual animator was K.L Ruppel, with direction by Florenz von Nordoff.) Everything else in this movie is easily justified by this big conclusion, which is one of those monster movie moments that totally lives up to the lurid promise of the promotional materials.
After viewing this movie, I doubt you’ll learn anything about Manitoba, or about the relationship between civilians and the military, nuclear radiation, or the human brain. It’s entirely possible that you might actually lose understanding of some of those things. Even so, Fiend Without a Face puts its emphasis in the right places for a cheap double-bill horror movie, serving up some of the most entertainingly repulsive imagery you’ll find in a movie with a plot that alternates between by-the-numbers and utter nonsense. In this case, it really is the thought that counts…and crawls.
A Scrapbook of Infinite Noise 