Stars: Marshall Thompson, Terry Kilburn, Michael Balfour, Gil Winfield

Director: Arthur Crabtree

Summary: An American airbase in Canada is blamed for a recent spate of disappearances due to fallout from the nuclear experiments at the base...

A scientist is working with telekinesis in a series of experiments. Strangely, the emissions from a nearby nuclear power plant enhance the intensity of his vibrations, and soon he develops the power to materialize his thoughts in the form of brainlike creatures. The creatures frighteningly become invisible, escape, multiply, and leap on people's backs to devour their brains. The film features Marshall Thompson, who also starred in IT! THE TERROR FROM BEYOND SPACE.

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Few 1950s creature features deliver in the way Fiend Without a Facedoes. The first hour is all build-up as tension grows between an Air Force research base and a small Canadian town (this is one of those British B films that pretends to be set overseas) as a series of mystery deaths are blamed by the superstitious on weird military experiments. It's not a spoiler to give away the big revelation, since every item of publicity material, including the DVD cover, blows the surprise: the initially invisible culprits turn out to be a killer swarm of disembodied brains with eyes on stalks and inchworm-like spinal cord tails. These creatures have a nasty habit of latching onto victims and sucking out their grey matter.

The finale is a siege of a house by the fiends, which swarm en masse making unsettling brain-sucking sounds, and are bloodily done away with by the heroes. Using excellent stop-motion animation, this climax goes beyond silliness and manages to be genuinely nightmarish. The orgy of splattering brains stands proud among the cinema's first attempts at genuine horror-comic glee, setting a precedent for everything from The Evil Deadto Peter Jackson's Braindead. Marshall Thompson is a bland, stolid uniformed hero and most of the rest of the cast struggle with "anadian" accents, but Kynaston Reeves is fun as the decrepit lone researcher whose fault it all is.

On the DVD:Fiend Without a Faceon disc comes with a montage of scenes from other films in this batch of releases (The Day of the Triffids, The Stars Look Down) that plays automatically when the disc is inserted, but otherwise not even a trailer, much less the commentary track and other material found on the pricey but luxurious US Region 1 Criterion release. The print has nice contrasts but is pretty grainy. --Kim Newman

Main Language:	English
Region:	Region 2
Year:	1958
Release Date:	June 30, 2003
Runtime:	71 minutes
Certification:
Catalogue Number:	B B C D V D 1162
Keywords:	Fiend, Face, General, Without, Horror, Occult, Sci, Fi
Genre:	Horror/Occult