First released in 1958, Fiend Without A Face takes place around an American Air Force base in rural Canada.

The base is home to several nuclear experiments, which have left the local residents uneasy.  They grew even more uneasy when people start to turn up dead.  Local farmers are found deceased, missing their brains and spinal columns.  Two puncture marks are found at the base of each skull.  Air Force Major Jeff Cummings (Marshall Thompson) is investigating the deaths, determined to prove to the locals that American nuclear energy is not to blame.  Cummings suspects that Prof. R.E. Walgate (Kynaston Reeves) might be involved.  Walgate claims to have telekinetic powers and has made a name for himself through his psychic experiments.  Cummings has recently become a big believer in the idea of thought projection.  Could Walgate’s psychic powers, combined with nuclear power, be at the heart of the mystery?

Of course, they are!  Who is responsible for the murders?  It turns out that there’s more than enough blame to go around.  Yes, Walgate’s psychic experiments have indeed backfired and now, there’s an invisible monster stalking the Canadian countryside.  Whoops!  Sorry, Canada!  And, at the same time, all of the nuclear energy has made that monster far more powerful than it would be under normal circumstances.  Whoops!  Sorry again, Canada!

(Actually, I guess we should be happy that this happened in Manitoba as opposed to a place that people actually care about, like North Dakota.)

To understand why this is all happening at an American base that happens to be located in Canada, it’s important to know that Fiend Without A Face was a British film that hoped to appeal to both Brits and Americans.  As a result, the film may have been shot in England but it needed to be set somewhere closer to America.  At the same time, if the film actually did take place in North Dakota, British audiences would have said, “Bloody yanks,” and failed to show up at the theater.  Canada was the logical compromise.  That’s one thing I love about B-movies.  They’ll shamelessly twist the plot any which way that may be necessary in order to appeal to the biggest possible audience.

Speaking of loving B-movies, I absolutely love Fiend Without A Face.  The film not only has a morbid streak that one doesn’t necessarily expect to find in a low-budget production from 1958 but it also features the sight of brains (with their spinal column trailing behind them) attacking humans and crawling through the base.  Because the effect was achieved with stop-motion animation, the brains move in a somewhat herky-jerky fashion, which just makes them all the more frightening.  The brains spend the majority of the film in a state of invisibility.  When they are suddenly revealed, it’s a great moment.  It’s what Lucio Fulci used to call “pure cinema.”

Clocking in at only 77 minutes and featuring a lot of stock Air Force footage to go along with the moving brains, Fiend Without A Face is a gloriously ludicrous movie that also happens to be one of the best B-pictures of the 1950s.