Weirdhouse Cinema: Fiend Without a Face

And hey everybody, we're classing it up a bit here today because this is a Criterion collection. Um. I think the only previous Criterion collection film we've watched was Godzilla versus Hidora. Um. And now, if you're wondering, well, what is the Criterion collection criteria, it is quote unquote important classics and contemporary are films. So today's film is about a bunch of dudes shooting brain monsters with handguns in

a truly marvelous fashion. I will say that the special effects of the last like fifteen minutes of this movie, it's hard to believe that they were released in a movie of nineteen fifty eight, Like, uh, this is a movie mostly about invisible monsters, but once you finally see the monsters revealed in their true form at the end of the movie, they are these amazing stop motion brain creatures and they are Ray Harryhausen level. It's like top

notch stop motion effects. And also gore that is absolutely disgusting. It's like when the when the military buzz cuts are shooting these brains, there is just chunky salsa flying out of the bullet holes. It is gross. Yeah. Yeah. And the sound effects are wonderful to lots of squeaky sound effects for these guys when they're crawling around, but also when they're inevitably shot or busted up with an axe. Uh yeah that the effects here really feel ahead of

their time. Um, you know, there may be some I'm sure there are some other films you can compare them favorably to. But like, just for my own part, I'm thinking Brainstorm Monster. I also think of The Tingler. The Tingler came out the following year in nine nine, and I love The Tingler. That's a great film, great monster but and and and it's it's effectively portrayed on the on the screen. But the like the the effects gap between how we see The Tingler and how we see

these creatures. Uh, it's it's pretty pretty wide. Yeah. I would also say a major difference is that the main actor in The Tingler is Vincent Price, who I mean, Yeah, I gotta love Vincent Price. The main actor in this movie is much more down the middle of the kind of guy who was always the stock hero in these nineteen fifties sci fi horror movies. Absolute flat top dolt, just a gray bucket filled to the brim with skim milk. What is it about these fifties movies having the most

boring square hero almost every time? Oh? Yeah, I mean it very much seems to have been the style of the day. I mean, I'm instantly reminded of fifty ones, the Thing from Another World, which is just wall to wall with interchangeable guys that look like this. But in terms of characters, I did enjoy a bit of the character texture in uh Fiend without a Face, because this central rectangle man is surrounded by a really interesting cast

of weirdos. There's this guy named either Gibson or Gibbons I don't remember, but he's like the town constable who has this baffling accent. He sounds like he's from Mars like. Sometimes he sounds Irish, sometimes he sounds Canadian, sometimes he sounds like New York. I really could you tell what was going on with this guy? I could not. In general, the accents in this this movie, we're we're kind of varied. At times, you felt more like you're in a European

setting supposed to a Canadian setting. But yeah, you've got him. You've got the sandwich man. I don't know if you noticed the sandwich man, the guy who's in the military base trying to sneak bites of bologna when the commander isn't looking. Uh. And then you've got the psychic scientists. This is our second movie in a row with an awesome crank. And then finally, of course all the atomic radiation stuff with the workers in the reactor corps who

look like they're wearing oiled up leather trench coats. Yea, So is this a great movie all around? Not? Really does have some really great monsters in it, But does it meet the criterion criterion? Is it an important classic? Uh? Yeah? Sure? Why not? Sure? Why not? I mean I find it comforting that Criterion collection has a film like this in there, because again, otherwise, you know, I love Criterion Collection. I think they you know, they do a great job, and

some of their additions are fabulous. But either we're all just um, you know, awesome Samurai films and Fellini pictures. Uh, it wouldn't be the same. It's nice that you have room for not only Cronenberg, but also a picture like this. You gotta let the camp in. Yeah, and those middle category movies too, that they do a lot of the ones that are kind of artsy but also kind of pulp trash, Like I feel like Night of the Hunter is kind of in that middle category. I've got the

Criterion of that and it's great. Oh yeah, I mean they also a Son of the White Mayor. The first time I watched it, I watched it on the Criterion channel. They're streaming product. So yeah, they have a lot of animation on there. There's a lot of weird stuff in there. So if you if you know, they don't don't assume that it is just Samurai films and Fellini. There's there's room for a lot of other stuff. Not to say Samurai films and Fellini are not awesome and cannot be

super weird as well. Now, before we get into discussing some of the themes of this movie, what what's the elevator pitch? I believe it is. Your brain is gross, your brain is a monster? Oh man? How best to quickly summarize this? There is like an atomic air base somewhere in northern Canada. It's like way up in Manitoba, and it's being operated by the US military. They're running some kind of radar experiments and they've got a big nuclear reactor, and people in the local town or mad

because of the nuclear reactor. Their cows are giving sour milk. People start mysteriously dying when they're being attacked by some kind of invisible creature. And eventually the culprit is linked to the psychical experiments of a crazy old crank who specializes in what was they call it psychic investigations or something. Yeah, and he's kind of leeching radiation off of the research

facility to further these ends. But I think this movie actually gives us a great opportunity to talk about a problem faced by many horror movies that go this route, which is how do you handle an invisible monster? Uh? Now, even in a movie with a generally visible beast, the question of how much you should show and how early you should show it, I think it's a very important one. I tend to air more on the side of showing less of your monster, especially early on, even though I

love to see a good monster. You know, it's good for the pacing of the film, keep the mystery alive long. But at the same time, you've got to have some interesting imagery in the movie to to excite the mind, to sort of titillate the your your sense of horror. You know, you need some swatches of fur to rub, So you've got to show a little bit of the monster.

A movie with an invisible monster can't exactly do this by showing you like bits or flashes of the monster, so they have to provide that texture some other way. And maybe this can be through sound design, like we can't see it, but we can hear it. Uh. Sometimes this is through using environmental effects, like seeing things moving around because of the monster or monster, or seeing footsteps

or something. And I think this movie, uh, it's most memorable once you can finally see the brains that are attacking everyone, But it actually has some earlier scenes that do work very well with this invisibility criterion. One image that really worked for me was the scene where the Invisible Monster cuts a slit in a screen door, which I think is all done with stop motion, but it

looks fantastic and it's very creepy. Yeah, that's a great sequence, and it's it's our first I think it's our first real taste of the stop motion mastery to come well. I was trying to think about movies that do invisible monsters really well and thinking what techniques do they use, how do they do it. One recent example that came to mind is the remake of the universal horror classic The Invisible Man. This version started Elizabeth Moss, and I

think this is a fantastic example. This movie works especially well because the invisibility of the villain is not just a blunt, practical aid to his evil plans, but it's sort of a cohesive theme that's interwoven through the story. Like it poses questions that people, you know, many people would face at some point. What do you do when the thing that is threatening you is something that nobody can see, and if you can't see it yourself, how do you know it's real? And not just a figment

of your imagination. Uh. And this place directly into the mechanics of the film, like they're they're really scary scenes in it, and they work by creating lots of uncertainty. There's a lot of did we really just see that? Or did I hear something weird? There are several memorable, long, uneasy shots of empty rooms that there's nobody in the room, nothing is moving. You're just seeing the empty room for it for a long time, and you keep wondering, is

something going to happen? Am I going to see anything? Am I gonna see something move? And the tension created by that ambiguity is horror gold. Yeah, I've heard great things about about this one. I haven't seen it yet, and I have to have to say I was probably a little bit turned off of the idea of invisible man movies in general because of Paul Verrhoven's Hollow Man Pictures years and years ago. Uh that is. I love Paul Verehoven, but that movie is a travesty. It is horrible.

But I love Elizabeth Moss, So you know, some some solid invisible man effects I'd be in for that. It's it's weird to think about invisible man movies because I don't know that it's very it's a very appealing concept, obviously we keep coming back to it. Um. But then to have a non visual enemy, you have to have these visual clues to really drive home what's happening. And then I also think about various ghost films and hologram people movies where you have somebody who is invisible to everybody,

but the viewer can see them. And for some reason, I was just wondering, like, does that work just as well as having some sort of really cool invisible person affect? Um, could you do an adaptation of the Invisible Man and just say, actually, we're going to see the invisible man the whole time, um, and that will just be our point of view for things. Oh yeah, I see what you're saying. Just so like it's understood that the characters can't Well, actually, I can think of a movie that

is sort of like that, which is Predator. Uh you know, so in Predator there are scenes where the alien has its invisibility cloak on, and like we the audience can see there's something there, it's not I mean, we can't see the full design of the creature, but we can see a kind of blurry humanoid outline. The audience is able to see this in a way that the characters can't. Really. I think there's only like one character in the movie who can kind of see something when none of the

others can. But there's actually a way. I would say that Fiend Without a Face and Predator have something very similar in common. Both are movies with invisible monsters that create a kind of boundary crossing revelatory moment in the final act of the film when the invisibility is is

turned off. Basically like for most of the runtime in both movies, the monsters are invisible, but then in the last fifteen minutes or so, the invisibility fails and we get to see their true form, and that transition is exciting. It makes it feel like the movie is kind of ascended into a different place, at different level of steaks. It creates this escalating sense of horror that I think would not be the case if the monsters had just

been fully visible from early on. Yeah. Yeah, and it works well like that because that's like you said earlier, that's that's often the case with monsters in general. Uh, don't show a lot of the monster early on. Maybe you even rely on a lot of like monster point of view shots and uh, and shots that sometimes obscure completely the creature that will be revealed in full later

on in the picture. Yeah, it's nice to get little glimpses or clues, like I think in in Predator, there's a scene early on where we don't see the creatures full form, but we see I think, like we see from its point of view and we see like it's arm after it's been injured or something. And then with the brains in this movie, we never see them in full but like at one point we see one I think moving through a puddle of paint or something, and

and you see the trail that it leaves. Yeah, Predator and Fiend Without a Face are are also similar in that some movies put off as long as possible showing you that monster because, let's face it, the monster effect is not that great. But both Predator and Fiend without a Face have amazing monsters, you know, given the time periods that these films were released in, and also like

the budgetary constraints, uh, certainly on Fiend without a Face. Uh, Like both both of the effects look amazing when they're finally revealed, which is almost something of a surprise in a film. It's kind of like in Um Friday the Thirteenth New Blood when the mask comes off Jason and it looks so amazing. Okay, there's part of me that doesn't expect the sub mask makeup to be that good. You might expect something more like in Jason Takes Manhattan,

where he's like a cute gray muppet. Okay, Well, before we go any further, maybe we should hear some trailer audio. Brain, let's go. That's not all The entire spinal cord is missing. It's incredible. This is if some mental vampire at work. Does it come from another country or another world? This terrifying menace that G two must destroy before it's too late. Image is fading, Sir, There it goes again. Central, How can they stop this invisible force whose only warning is

a weird, blood chilling sound. Only two people still alive can help this agent find the answers, the girl who could be a spy and the scientist who could be the destroyer of the entire human race. We're facing a new form of life, but nobody understands. I believe it feeds on the radiation from your atomic plants, and that it's evil to stop him. There's only one way shut down your atomic If I can get through, I can

blow out the control room. All right. Yeah, that's a fun, fun trailer um including the phrase science gone wild, which I guess is more more of a pure statement at the time. Um. I mean, another thing I think it's worth appreciating about this is I think Fiend Without a Face was really pushing what you could get away with in terms of mainstream film content, in like the level of terror and explicit gore and stuff. And this is really unusual for the time period. I can't really think

of any other movie like it. No, No, it definitely stands out. So let's get into some of the people responsible for this baby. So the director was Author Crabtree, who lived nine hundred British filmmaker who learned his craft under a young Alfred Hitchcock. Um. Hitchcock wasn't that much older than him, but but that's what we apparently learned

to learn his craft. His first film was Madonna of the Seven Moons, and after a string of pictures in the early nineteen fifties, he switched to directing TV, directing episodes of such shows as the Adventures of Lancelot Uh and The Adventures of Robin Hood even nine Ivanhoe starring Roger Moore. What wow, that sounds dry. That sounds like a dry cracker. Yeah. So towards the end of crab Tree's career and he retired by he moved into B Pictures for just hand full of pictures to sort of

round out his career. But as psychotronic film scholar Michael Weldon points out, Crabtre really hit it out of the park with the last two two hits in a row from Mr Crabtree, Michael Weldon writes, because he directed Fiend without a Face in nineteen eight, followed in nineteen fifty nine by Horrors in the Black Museum, a hypno murder film starring Michael Goff. Now, I have not seen that other one, and also I can't vouch for this because

I don't remember what the source was. But sometime a while back, I know I was reading about this movie somewhere and recall the claim that Crabtree was not exactly happy to be working on Fiend without a Face and may have tried to Did he try to abandon the production or something. Um, I don't I don't have details on that. I mean, it wouldn't surprise me. This is a guy who had not been doing B movies most of his career and was just kind of, I think,

finishing things up career wise. Uh. But you see, that is sometimes the case with with directors actors. You know, you look back on on some of some of these individuals and you might say, remember them for a certain picture, but that picture wasn't really big on their radar at the time. It was just like the next step then before they moved on to this or that. Uh. So's it's always interesting, like what pictures really stand out in

the filmography? Uh, you know, even though they might not have been super important to that individual at that time. But there's no arguing with the results. This one's this one's fun. Yeah. All right. Now, as far as the screenwriter on this goes, we'll get to the source material in just a second, but the screenwriter was Herbert J. Later, who was born in nineteen twelve died in ninety three.

And Joe, do you remember when we were talking about the Nazi zombie movie shock Waves from seven and we discussed the weird subgenre of Nazi zombie movies, and we pointed to two earlier films with Nazi undead stuff in them. Oh yeah, this seems to be a a rich vein of exploitation movie material undead Nazis in one way or another. There. Yeah, well, uh.

One of the films we mentioned was the nineteen forty three John Carradine film titled Revenge of the Zombies, but the other was the nineteen sixties six film titled The Frozen Dead, in which a mad scientist keeps the heads of Nazi war criminals alive so he can reattach them to new bodies. Well, Herbert J. Leader wrote and directed that movie. He also directed episodes of Meet the Press in the late nineteen forties, and wrote and directed nineteen

sixty seven's It, starring Roddy McDowell. That's it with an exclamation point, not to be confused with it with a period, right or it or the question mark or the thought provoking Lee open ended it with the semi colon. Oh yes, all right, But like I said, this was this was an adaptation of a of a existing work. That existing work was was a short story titled The Thought Monster by Amelia Reynolds who lived nineteen o three through nineteen

seventy eight. She was a groundbreaking female classic old author who pinned the Thought Monster in ninety She wrote numerous works of short fiction, many of which I'm to understand or detective stories, though I have to admit I don't think I've read any of her work unless I am. You know, it's possible, given she wrote a number of things. Maybe I read something in a in a compilation at

some point and I've completely forgotten about it. Yeah. Her story was originally published in Weird Tales, and I think you mentioned detective stories. I haven't read it in full, but I found the full text and I did quickly scan through it looking for some how some scenes might align with scenes in the movie. And it looks to me like the original story is more sort of detective oriented than the movie is. I mean, the movie has your standard military square as the leading man. In the movie,

he's named Major Cummings. In the original story, it seems like Cummings is not a military dude, but a quote psychic investigator who arrives in town to get to the bottom of these strange murders. Yeah, now that sounds are like a like a weird tale sort of story, and get a psychic investigator in there, Rob, do you mind if I read an exerpt from this story featuring a trope that has come up on this show a number of times before. Oh, all right, so this is from

the Thought Monster. That afternoon, Cummings called upon Dr Bradley, who was the coroner. I am going to make a strange request, doctor, he began, I'm going to ask that you permit me to photograph the eyes of this poor man. The doctor, greatly mystified, gave his consent. In the case of a violent death, Cummings explained, as he set up his apparatus, an image of the last thing seen is

usually photographed upon the retina of the eye. I want to see whether a carefully developed enlargement won't show us that image. At Bradley's interested request, he promised to let him know the results of the experiment two or three hours later. Therefore, he returned to the doctor's office. I have drawn a blank, he confessed. The eye shows absolutely nothing, but objected the doctor. I thought it was he saw that killed him. Your theory didn't work, then asked Bradley, sympathetically.

No Cummings answered, And yet I don't see how it could have failed in a case of this kind. There is one alternative. Perhaps there was nothing for the dying man to see. M hmmm, oh yeah. This is a fun um bad science concept that famously pops up in the nineteen two film Horror express uh Spanish horror film that we've referenced a couple of times on the show, right, the idea that you could find the killer's identity by looking at the retina of the dead person, because the

killer was the last thing they saw. But here, uh, they try to use that, but then it doesn't work because I mean, in actuality it doesn't work, but also because the monsters themselves are invisible. And this connects to a recurring theme that's in the movie and the story as well, which is that the people who died die with expressions of such terror on their faces. It appears they have been scared to death. All right, now, I've already had a lot of talk about the military square

or the psychic investigator, Major Cummings. Who who's the actor who plays this guy? This is Marshall Thompson who lived nineteen five through nine all American actor. You couldn't get more all American for the nineteen fifty cinema than this guy. Um, he's like a football hamburger. Yeah, he's kept thinking of him as his major milk died here. He's just just

I don't know, but um, yeah, he's uh. Looking at his filmography, he's not a guy who's really familiar with but he seems to have two major wings to his filmography, cult films and family movies about animals. Oh boy, So first the cult stuff. He appears in Cult of the Cobro from nineteen fifty five, this movie. Of course, he's also from It, The Terror from Beyond Space from nineteen fifty eight and First Man into Space nineteen fifty nine.

Way is that the same IT with Roddy McDowell. I think it might be the same IT as as before. I can't imagine there are two IT exclamation point movies. I just didn't have the But weirdly enough, it's not IT colon, so it exclamation point colon The Terror from Beyond Space. Wait a minute, the years don't match up. These might be two different IT with an exclamation points. Yes, you were correct, it's pretty separate. Movies that have it

exclamation point. Well, all right, I guess you know it's a solid title now that it exclamation point with Rody McDowell. I will say, I have not seen it, but it has a great looking monster in it. The monster costume looks like something. Um, it's it's pretty pretty intimidating, looks kind of like a space money anyway. So those are those are Thompson's more cult of films. Now onto the animal movies, and this is probably where some of you probably know this guy if you're if you're familiar with

some of these older films. He did a horse movie called Gallant Best and forty six, and then he went on to star in nine Clarence the Cross Eyed Lion, and then the TV series he spinoff of That Doctor, which ran for eighty nine episodes, um, which I mean, of course, major TV show like eighty nine episodes is like half a season, So I don't know how long it actually ran, off the top of my head, but

eighty nine episodes by today's standards, certainly substantial. He later directed some Flipper episodes and pops up as the character just referred to as director in Samuel Fuller's Serious two film, White Dog, starring Christy McNichol and Paul Winfield. Okay, but but other cast members I mentioned This movie also has a crank, and it much like the loyalized Grasp, is

the loweralized grasp. Remember had the the Professor who had a lab just full of animals wandering around, and he figured out that if you inject a severed human hand with something and then shine a light on it, it will turn into a lizard hand. But then if you stab it with a radioactive knife, it turns into a pile of nothing. And that was his breakthrough. This movie has a crank who discovers that you can turn your thoughts into an external zombie like creature that goes around

sucking out people's brains. Yeah. Like, basically he develops a tool pa. You know. It's kind of like psychic projection monster. Yeah, which I do have to stress again, you know, the plot leading up. It's not like one of these movies where oh, just skip to the last third team minutes because the rest is direct like they do. It's stuffy by too many of today's standards, But I feel like they do a pretty good job establishing uh conflict within a given environment, you get a feel for where this

movie is happening, uh and so forth. So I ultimately like all of this stuff, even though watching it or sort of rewatching it. Uh the other day, I was. I was excited to get to the Brain monsters, but I still had to appreciate the path that we took to get there. Yeah. Like I said earlier, I mean, so the main military characters are kind of boring, but

they're also kind of weird in certain ways. That will sin when we talked about the plot and the broader cast of characters, including the scientists and some of the townspeople I think are positively wacky by by standards. Oh yeah, and this guy playing Professor R. E. Wallgate uh Naston Reeves. Oh, this guy's a lot of fun. He live through nine one.

I think it's my favorite performance in the whole film because he has this great, weird kind of crunch jaw delivery, and he comes off as kind of a protagonist slash sort of antagonist blend of JR. Tolkien and Chancellor Palpatine. That's good. Yeah, And I have to say the Palpatine thing connection here for me came largely from a line he has in which Barbara, his assistant, uh, says, I didn't know you had a laboratory. He mentions he has a laboratory, and he's like, it's not a story the

Jedi would tell you. But anyway. Reeves had a hundred and fifty two credits according to IMDb, and acted from one through nine seventy. He appeared in The forsythe Saga in the sixties and is also known among you know, some classic film fans for his role in house Master from thirty eight. He also pops up on The Avengers, The Prisoner and the film School for Scoundrels from nineteen sixty, which I believe was remade in recent years the Dennis the Menace Academy of of Pranks and Hijinks. Yeah, I

think he played a lot of like stuffy, upper crust characters. Well, I found him quite lively and enjoyable in this movie, even though his character is supposed to be I think, like physically and mentally depleted. He's sort of on his

last legs when we meet him. But yeah, he has this very pleasing mixture of uh, you know, a kind of jovial, benign British aristocratic personality kind of like the way Bertrand Russell talked, h if you've ever seen tapes of him, but then also mixing yeah, like you say,

some Palpatine, like a little bit of edge of sith. Yeah, yeah, which is a good line to walk with this character, because, like I said, he turns out being responsible for the mental vampires that are going around invisibly sucking people's brains out through holes in the back of their head. All right, now, I mentioned Barbara. This is the character's name. Is Barbara Grizzle. Grizzle Grizzle, Um, Barbara Grizzle. That would be that'd be

more of a Cronenberg character. But anyway. She's played by Kim Parker, who lived nineteen thirty two through two thousand and ten. She was an Austrian refugee who acted in a number of mostly I think British films between fifty four and fifty nine, including The Good Companions, The Man Without a Body and a number of you will know this film nineteen fifty six gave us fire Maidens from

outer Space or fire Maidens off outer Space. This was featured on Mystery Science Theater three thousand back in the day, and I remember it as being pretty fun. Not a good film by any stretch of the imagination, but but very enjoyable as a as as a bad movie. I don't know if I've seen this episode. It was in one of the early seasons. This was. This was a Joel episode and who I only vaguely remember. Like it

had fire maidens in it. They were from outer space, and there was some sort of poorly executed beast man who was kind of like a charred skinned monster. Okay, now you're gonna have to help me, Joe with some of these others because I'm gonna name some people. I'm gonna name some characters, and I don't necessarily know which interchangeable military dudes some of these people were. Okay, I'll

do my best, but I'm not sure about any of this. Okay, So there's a captain, Captain al Chester in this film, and that character is played by Terry Kilburn. I think maybe this is like the little the Jimmy Olsen guy who's Major Cummings little buddy. Yes, I think that would make sense. So this this is actually a really fun connection. So this guy was born in and as of this recording is still alive at age. I think gonna turn this year. Um and uh. He started out as a

child actor in Hollywood. He acted on screen from nineteen thirty eight through nineteen sixty nine. Um. He famously played Tiny Tim in nineteen thirty eight at Christmas Carol. Yeah. Other film roles of note include ninety nine is Goodbye Mr. Chips in nineteen sixty two is Lolita. And he was a longtime partner of American actor Charles Nolty, who lived ninety three through two thousand and ten. Well, if he is the character I'm thinking of, he appears to be

having a great time in this movie. Again, not a super not a superior part on the page, I would say, except for right at the beginning he gets to accuse our leading man of abusing drugs like it's the first line in the movie. Yeah. Yeah, we'll get back to that all right now. Now I do remember this character. We also have Dr Bradley. Dr Bradley is played by

Peter Madden. Madden lived nineteen o four through nineteen seventy six, British actor who appears in nineteen sixty Reads from Russia with Love James Bond film is the Message, and he also pops up on The Avengers, and he plays the Undertaker in the opening sequence of The Prisoner. Other films of note in his filmography include Frankenstein Created Woman, The Kiss of the Vampire, and Doctor Shivago. Okay is this guy that wait, which doctor is this? Is he the

local doctor or is he the military doctor? That is a good question that I am not prepared to answer. But he's one of those two doctors. Okay, yeah, there, I believe they're both both of the two doctor characters are kind of like these locals, what can you do? Yeah? Well, is he the doctor who gets to say, Okay, here's what happened to this dead man. His brains and spinal cord were sucked out through two holes in the back

of his head. I think that's the military doctor who says that, Yeah, this is the one of the very gaunt face. Oh okay, So I think he's the local doctor and who like counters that guy by saying, but I don't know of any animal in these parts who would suck out someone's brain and spinal cord through their neck. Alright. One other actor of note, and it's this characters Sergeant Casper played by Michael Balfour, who lived nineteen eighteen through Again.

I'm not exactly sure which military dude this was, but he has two very notable credits. He plays a scientist and Tim Burton's batman, and he was the first murderer in the nineteen seventy one adaptation of William Shakespeare's Macbeth. The two murderers are not huge roles in Macbeth, but it's solid Hinchman work, and I have to say I was delighted to see in the one Macbeth adaptation from Joe Cohen um B movie action star and former Shall Khan,

Brian Thompson plays one of the murderers. So but one of the many great reasons to check out that film. Oh wow, you just reminded me that I haven't seen this yet. Uh, and I would like to. Is Francis mcdormandes Lady Macbeth. Yes, awesome. Yeah, you've got Denzel washing Ten. Just just a wonderful cast top to bottom and beautifully shot in black and white, very dream like. I loved it. Yeah,

I gotta see that now. As far as the music goes on this one, This was composed by Buckston Or who lived nine n Scottish born composer who did nine film scores for various genre films, including The Haunted, Strangler, Corridors of Blood, First Man Into Space, Doctor Blood's Coffin, and The Snake Woman. He also did some soundtrack work on Doctor Who in nineteen sixty four and nineteen sixty five. Okay, now we should probably mention whoever did the stop motion

effects in this movie because they are tremendous. Yes, yeah, again, tremendous effects of these stop motion brain monsters and a few other stop motion effects. Peter Nielsen also has a special effects credit on this But for the most part we're looking at the Austrian duo of Rupele and Nordhoff. So that never heard of him? Yeah, I had not heard of them either, But uh, the this is Flow Nordhoff who of nineteen fourteen through nine eight seven and

Carl Ludwig Rupal born nineteen fifteen. I'm assuming Ruple is deceased because he would be a hundred and six or a hundred and seven by now, but I'm not sure. I couldn't find a date for his death if he is in fact dead. So these two were apparently based out of Munich, and I was looking into their bios a little bit. Ruple apparently directed a trio of short propaganda films for the Nazis under the Third Reich in

the late thirties and early forties. I could not find out much about them, but his name comes up three times in the book Hitler's Third Reich of the Movies by Rolf Geeson. Uh though kind of in passing. It's so at least based on what I was. You know, when I was looking through this book, it doesn't seem like he was a major figure. But he did. He

did direct a few things. Now, Nordhoff does not come up in that book, and according to IMDb, wasn't active in film until nineteen fifty three, and Nordov actually directed the nineteen sixty seven anti totalitarian animated short film titled Hands Up, Mr. Ras Nici, for which he was also an animator. He also directed a short animated film in nineteen sixty titled uh d Un, and then Rupel and Nordhoff worked together on the Star of Africa and fifty

seven by director Alfred uh Weidenmann. Nordhoff was also a painter. Nordhoff's full name was Florence Fuchs von Nordhoff, and there is a short bio about him on the website for the International Film Festival Rotterdam. Uh. It mentions that he served in World War Two. Uh, it does not say it does. It does not give any details on that service. But based on what I was looking at, I don't think it's like it's not like these two seem to really go on from this film to do like a

lot of special effects work. But like again, the stuff the work in here is is tremendous, like I can only imagine, like this stop motion animation inspired other stop motion artists future. Okay, well, so are you ready to talk a bit about the plot? Let's do it. Okay, so let's zoom in on the opening. Uh. Interesting way of approaching it, since the opening for this film is incredibly bland but also abrupt abruptly bland. Yes, yes, uh

silent ominous opening on military airfields and airplanes. Uh. I got a note for if you are going to go back in time and make movies in the nineteen fifties, here's one way to mix it up. Don't pad your movie out with shots of airplanes flying around, landing and taking off. It's not that interesting. I don't I don't know what people were into about this. That stock footage is one way to pad it out. You don't need to pad it out though, I mean, like shorter movies

are good. This movie actually we haven't mentioned this yet, but this is great, great uh in the range of drive in movie link. This is a seventy four men it movie, and I give it credit for that. There is absolutely no reason to make your movie longer than it needs to be. It should be exactly as short as you can get it with it doing what you wanted to do anyway. Okay, so back to this military airfield. So we see a soldier. He's like a guard with

a rifle, having a smoke by a fence. And there's a sign on the fence that gives us some that gives us some set up. It says US Air Force Interceptor Command, Experimental Station number six, Winthrop, Manitoba, Canada. So Winthrop is the name of this small local town. And there's no music, almost no sound effects really. In the beginning, there's like a spy plane flying overhead, and we see radar antennas swiveling around above the base, and then the

guard begins to hear something a sound. We will we will hear many more times throughout the film, kind of scuffling, crunching, sound like somebody walking around in a vat of kick cereal. Rachel and I were calling it captain crunch noises. She she was saying, like, man, this movie is making me hungry for Captain Crunch. And I get what she's saying, because every time the monsters show up, it's crunch crunch.

But it was it's good branding. It's like, when that sound occurs, you a know that is it is unnatural. It doesn't really sound like anything you should be hearing in the woods or in a barn or wherever the action is taking place. And then when you hear it subsequently, subsequently, you know what's up. Right, So the guard goes to investigate. There's a scream, and then he comes across there's a dead guy in the woods. And then we get the

title fiend without a face. For some reason in the title screen, fiend and face are done with like electric electric bolts. U. I was wondering why that is, Maybe because the the the atomic power station in the movie plays a role. Yes, this is these are atomic radar bolts, not not lightning bolts or thunderbolts. It's easy to make that mistake. So we get the credits, and then a lot of footage of military aircraft s seaming around at high speed and taking off and landing and stuff on

the local runways. And we learned some stuff about the setting. This appears to be a foreign US military base up in northern Manitoba. We learned it's very rural, far away from the nearest big city. Uh. And then we meet our lug hero with a flat top haircut. This is Major Cummings and his little buddy. Again, we couldn't remember which character this is, so maybe this is Captain somebody or Sergeant somebody that it's his buddy here and his buddy.

This is nearly the opening line of the film. I think there's like maybe some little comment right before it, but pretty much the first thing said by a human is cummings buddy saying, you ever think of trying sleep instead of benz adrine. You might like it. And while he's saying this, he is like pouring Major Cummings a drink of some clear liquid out of a Florence flask, like a boiling flask you would use in a lab. Yeah,

this is great. I immediately chuckled. And from the context, you don't have to even be told what benzadrin is. But bensador was a brand name for amphetamine soul fate, which was used and I think ultimately abused from the nineteen thirties through the nineteen seventies. So major Cummings here, though portrayed, is like a straight lace baby face. Uh,

is just tied on speed through presumably most of the film. Uh. There's there's a later scene where he's doing his research and he's just pounding Benny's and speed reading books on experimental neuroscience and psychology. It's a It's the kind of thing where I guess, this is just like I said, he's just supposed to be a normal military guy, but

by today's standards, like this is this is kind of crazy. Yeah, before we learn literally anything else about him, we learned that he is jacked on bensadrin and uh, and I think this is I think the way it's positioned in the movie is to is not to say, hey, this guy is abusing drugs and isn't in his right mind. It's to show us, Wow, he's really busy. You know, he has a lot of work to do. This is his his his his work. At think it's just so

strong that he just hasn't slept in weeks. Okay, so we got to find out who is this guy who died in the woods, that's what they're talking about, and we learned that it is a character named Jacques Grizzle. Uh. In fact, Major Cummings knows all about him here because they immediately had the FBI send over a file on

this guy. This happens multiple times in the movie. It basically presupposes that the FBI, the US Federal Bureau of Investigation, has just files they can send over on random Canadian citizens. The same thing happens later with Dr Walgate. Just send over the FBI file. But yeah, there's neither of these people are implied to have any criminal record, and they're not even Americans. They're like just random Canadian people. But

the FBI know all about them. And you know, this is something that again kind of like the Benza draina. It could be played up is weird later on, like there's this Canadian town where the FBI has elaborate files on everyone. Isn't that crazy? But in this film just presented as yep, this is how it works. Yeah, that's just that's the way of the world. There's nothing remarkable about it. So the military men are all immediately suspicious

of this dead guy of Jack Grizzlee. What was he doing out in the woods at three in the morning. They're like, what was he doing out there farming? Um and uh? And they're talking about him. They're saying, who can forget the look on that dead man's face? Again, it's implying that there was an expression of such horror

that that his death is implied to be understood as unnatural. Uh. Here, I just want to remark, we get our first meeting while in a thrilling scene of them walking across the office to go talk to the coroner, we we meet sandwich Man, the man who is trying to hide his bologna sandwich from the commander. Yeah, he's quite a specimen. Sandwich Man is later killed by the brain creatures in the last act of the movie. Tragically. I wanted sandwich

Man to make it, but so they have. They have a talk with I guess the the um doctor on the base or the corner or something, and they're like, hey, was this death caused by radiation? Well, they need an autopsy to find out, but the locals don't want an autopsy.

Uh So Cummings has to go meet with the colonel, and the colonel is already in a meeting with the local town's mayor who was named Hawkings and the sister of the dead man, Barbara Grizzle played by Kim Parker, who you could barely tell is there because her brother was killed by a monster in the woods. She she's very matter of fact about everything. Well, maybe she had a Mark Hamill character come up to her and break it to her and say, I'm sorry, but your brother

died in the woods and it was weird. Oh yeah, yeah, oh yeah, yeah, what did he know about the giver? But actually no, they do suspect to the brother of having a forbidden knowledge because the colonel during this meeting, he brings up the fact that Kim Parker's brother here had a notebook with him containing notes on the flight time of airplanes leaving the base. Okay, so that this raises a serious specter. Was he some kind of communist

spy hiding in Manitoba? Well no, Barbara ends up making the colonel look absolutely foolish by showing how this was part of her brother's attempt to document a connection between the fighter jet flight times and his cows being unhappy. So all the local farmers are irate at the military base because they think that the airplanes are making their cows spew nasty milk. So the Colonel is sort of humiliated,

and then Cummings gives Kim Parker a ride home. He is obviously like romantically interested in her, which is weird given the circumstances um but he's like, at one point on the right, he's like driving her in a jeep down this road through the woods, and he's talking about the guys at the military base, and he's like, we're human, we're not monsters from outer space. Now Here we have sort of the opening of the mystery, and more characters

will be attacked by unknown creatures throughout the film. But I guess here, I'm not going to go scene by scene, but maybe we can focus on some things that were interesting. One thing I want to talk about is the nuclear reactor scenes. So for example, there's a scene later where the Colonel and Major Cummings are trying to use radar to like I think they're trying to scan the entire globe so they can get you know, use this one radar station to see every flight going on in Russia.

But something is draining the power from their atomic reactor, so the radar isn't working the way it's supposed to be, and they're like, what could it be. Well, they call up their friend who works in the reactor core, who again is wearing what looks like I guess this is supposed to be some kind of radiation shielding, like a leadline suit or something, but he it looks like a kind of slick leather trench coat. I don't know. It's interesting. And there there of course, like push it for more power,

take out those rods. We want the reactor at a hundred and eighty percent, and the guy is like, okay, that's danger us, but I'll do it. Meanwhile, local farmers are repeatedly just attacked by invisible monsters. We see, uh, we see a lady going to feed her chickens and then she's like attacked by something we can't see in the barn. And then her husband comes and then he's attacked as well. They finally do an autopsy on these people, and the scientists confirm they say, the brain is gone, Yes,

sucked out like an egg through these two holes. Uh. The spinal cord is missing too, And the doctor at the army base says, I'm a doctor, not a detective colonel. There's nothing about this in the books. Major Cummings had the best explanation so far, mental vampire. And I think this is where the doctor we were talking about earlier comes in and he's like, rubbish, there are no animals around here that suck out people's brains. I mean, it

is really hard to imagine how this works. Two holes in the back of the head and the entire brain and spinal column are somehow sucked out through that hole and then but are not like liquefied presumably in the process, because we see these brains and spinal columns crawling around later in the film with just like extra tentacles coming out of them. Yeah. We get more scenes of Major

Cummings uh being overly friendly with with Barbara. There's one scene where he goes to visit her house and he just like knocks on the door and it's open and he comes in and oh, she's getting out of the shower and a towel and and he and it's oh, it's so embarrassing, but she's unfazed by it. She's just like, oh,

let me put something on. And meanwhile, you can peruse this book called the Principles of Thought Control that's sitting on my table here by our e Walgate, who again is our our our, our, our our brain expert that we'll be getting to in a minute. Right. So wal we find out that Barbara works for Walgate. She like transcribes all of his notes and helps him write his books. Oh. Also this very same scene, so like she leaves the

room for a minute, he's looking at these books. She comes back having put a row open everything on and uh, and they're like being very flirty and then he I think he's leaning into to kiss her, but then some guy barges in and it's this guy, Constable Gibbons or Gibson, and this is the guy with the the baffling accent, and he's a little bit Scottish sounding, yeah, a little bit yeah, And he's immediately totally hostile to this guy. Um, he's like, have you found that g I killer yet? Uh?

You know it was probably one of you guys, probably some some wacko from this base. Oh, and then they immediately start punching each other. Now, eventually Gibbons ends up leading like a posse to go find the He again thinks it is a g I from the U. S Air base that has gone rogue, and so they're like looking for him in the woods with the posse. Uh,

so they're on the hunt. And then Gibbons disappears from the hunt, and then later he returns stumbling into a town meeting, apparently having had his brain and partially sucked out. He's just like vacant died and like, oh yeah, just kind of stammering. It's it's actually kind of a disturbing scene because it's just like, oh, this this guy. We didn't like this character particularly, I mean he was kind of violent and possessive, but now we I mean, we

didn't want to see this happen to him. Yeah. Now there's another scene where eventually I don't remember how he gets there, but uh, Major Cummings is investigating something and he ends up at the tomb of someone in town and he gets trapped inside a crypt. Yeah, he wanted to check out it's a body of one of the victims,

and he ends up going into this crypt. And so this is wonderful sequence in the film, which feels like we have accidentally trespassed into some sort of a gothic horror movie, you know, because and it's playing into the whole mental vampire thing, you know, the two wounds on the back of the neck. Because suddenly we follow him down into what seems like a perfect setting for a vampire's tomb. There is even a sarcophagus with a lidded jar, and uh, yeah, we're just we're like, okay, I guess

it's a vampire movie. Now it's vampires, and one is surely going to jump out, but no, Instead what happens is somebody locks him in the crypt, which I think actually it provides a pretty interesting I mean, I don't really buy this crypt his air tight maybe, but he starts like running out of air and it's a desperate scene where he's trying to get out. Uh he only barely makes it when his friends come and open the door up from the outside. Yeah. I really like this

sequence too. There's some great stuff with the candle. The candle is fading because it doesn't have enough oxygen, and uh, you know, that goes out there he's gonna be in this lightless, airless environment. He's going to be entombed as a corpse. But yeah, then they free him at the last second. But how do we find uh, we got to find out who locked him in the crypt. Well, eventually it is discovered to have been doctor Wallgate, and this leads into the revelation of the nature of the monsters.

So so what's basically what's the scheme, rob can you lay it out? Okay, it's he has a whole sequence where he explains that he's doing these experiments, essentially creating Tulpa's like I can if I focus my brain and I make this face, I can create this thing that goes about doing my bidding. And you know, as is often the case with things like tupas and thought projected monsters, they start getting out of hand, they get a little

too powerful. And the whole time he's doing this by sort of timing his experiments with some of the radiation based radar experiments that are going on. Like he's I don't think he's actually doing any um like capital e espionage here, but he's he's a smart dude, and so he he reads scientific journals. He's able to figure out what they're doing there and able to figure out how to time his experiments just right. So he's benefiting from

that radiation I think before. Yes, so he's trying to harness the radiation from when the reactor is at maximum capacity for their radar experiments. He's trying to use that, I think before he's creating these tulpa like things. He's just trying to do telekinesis, right, like the first time, just try some thing with his brain, Like he's trying to turn a page in a book with his brain,

which he eventually is able to do. And then he keeps ratcheting that up to bigger and bigger acts of telekinesis, and then eventually the thought escapes his head and becomes its own entity. And then it starts going around and sucking out people's brains, and then there's just brains of plenty,

their brains all over the place. Right, And so these are as we've been saying invisible for most of the film, but when made visible, which they do by cranking up the radiation, I believe, yes, they just okay, they think we can see them if we push the reactor to

even more beyond maximum capacity, so fantastic. It's such a characteristically nineteen fifties movie trope by the way, you know, it's like Charles B. Griffith saying, does it have to be atomic radiation and Corman says, yes, I guess that was the case here, So it's atomic radiation plus. Also, uh, it's it's a psychic powers thriller. It's one about the occult manifestations of human and thoughts, which I would say that sub genre is less confined to a particular time

and place in history. It's less the nineteen fifties thing. You know, there's always horror about the idea of what if thoughts were more powerful than we imagined? Yeah, and these when made visible, these again look like squirming brains with the spinal column is like like a worm's body or something. And it has added tentacles and kind of antenna on top of it. It's a fabulous stop motion creature and it does like true I joked about the the the elevator pitch being your your brain is gross, um,

but it is kind of that. It's kind of this this monster design that's just like, look at the brain and this attached spinal cord. Look at this. This anatomic illustration. This is disgusting. Uh, and this is apparently what we are. We are this brain. What if that brain was just crawling around, uh, trying to break through shutters and leaping onto women, the back of women's necks and wrapping their spinal cord around their neck. X wouldn't that be horrifying?

Oh it's like the face hugger an alien, except it's going for the back of your head instead of the front. I didn't think about that connection. I wonder if you know, there are all sorts of papers talking about just how the design of the xeno morse varying forms come into being, and you know, and you know, of course they're very key individuals involved in that process, including the late h rug Eager. But I wonder, I don't remember anyone ever pointing to fiend without a face. But yeah, the face

huggers and the fiends have a lot in common. But yeah, basically this this scene turns into a Night of the Living Dead style siege on a house where all the human characters barricade themselves inside and the brains are attacking from every from every angle, trying to get through the windows. I think at one point they come down the chimney

um uh and uh. And this leads into that great line from that clip you shared for me where the movie it came from Hollywood, where dan Ackroyd shows a clip from this movie and says, we just sprayed for brains last week. Yeah, that that was the first place

I saw any of these sequences that was in. It came from Hollywood, where there's a There are different sections in that film about different types of old movies, and one of them that probably my favorite, is the brains section where dan Ackroyd plays this mad scientist character kind of like hosting this segment and it's just a super um, just a super intense performance. But then he sets up all these wonderful clips of brains and brain monsters from movies.

So yeah, again, these brains just run a muck. They're trying to break into the cabin. They're breaking into the cabin, they're attacking people, They're they're murdering people. Meanwhile, they're trying to get over there to shut the radiation off. Right, isn't that the idea? Well shut it? I think this movie has a very poor understanding of how atomic reactors work.

So I think their idea is if we blow up the control station of the nuclear reactor, then it will stop going and the power will stop, and these things will lose their their power because they're being fed by the radiation somehow. I'm not a nuclear engineer, so you know, if I'm wrong about this, right in and let me know. But I I'm pretty sure that destroying the control station

of a nuclear reactor would have the opposite consequences. It would be more likely that the reactor would like continue, would go out of control and melt down, rather than it would like stop running, and then they would be even more visible and more powerful. But of course you know what's gonna happen ultimately, Yeah, they do get to blow up the reactor or whatever shuts it all down, the brains will really lose their power, and they don't just fall to the ground lifeless, and you know, then

somebody has to come around and collect the brains. No, they melt away into basically just greasy spots on the floor. And it's a stop motion effect. And it's wonderful, wonderful stop motion sequence. And I think it's saying something because sometimes these transition effects and stop motion even in much later films can look a little awkward, but I thought these look tremendous. Oh yeah, yeah, I totally agree. The dissolving is it looks so gross. So there you have it,

fiend without a face. Uh yeah, it's a fun flick. It's worth worth checking out. Uh. And like I said, it's Criterion Collection. Um, there's so there have been a number of DVDs of this put out over the years, but the two thousand ten Criterion Collection Edition is as

I think definitely want to pick up. It's not out on Blu Ray, but the the Criterion Collection Edition is also available to rent or buy digitally, and I watched the Criterion Collection version as part of the AMC Plus subscription on Prime at least here in the States as

of this recording. Uh. You can also stream it on the Criterion channel, which I mentioned earlier, which I have subscribed to in the past, and I highly recommend if you want to dive into a lot of films again, Samurai Pictures, Felini Pictures, but then also all sorts of

weird and wonderful things you didn't even know existed. So we're gonna go ahead and close it out here, but we'd love to hear from everyone out there if you have thoughts on fiend without a Face, brain, monsters in general, any of the people or things we mentioned in this episode right in we would love to hear from you. Reminder that Weird How Cinema publishes every Friday in the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed were primarily a science podcast, but this is our data set aside most

serious concerns and just talk about a weird film. I blog about these motion pictures at Samooda Music dot com. You can also go to Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com and go to the store tab and you can check out the stuff to Blow your Mind merch section, which also has some Weird How Cinema merching there, including the new rub the Fur key shirt or like rub the fur toe bag. Whatever you want to put rub the fur on, you can do it. Hich Thanks as

always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.