Fiend Without A Face

Just knocked Fiend Without A Face out of my pile of Netflix movies. It's a rather campy and low-budget 50's sci-fi/horror movie. Despite the plodding pace, cliché characters, and laughable (by today's standards) special effects, the movie manages to work. Looking beyond the special effects and imagining what the author had in mind, you get a pretty cool end sequence where a group of people have barricaded themselves into a house to hopefully survive an infestation of tentacled brain-sucking brains (yeah, you read that right).

At first, the brain-sucking brains are gross-looking, but by the end of the movie, well, they're kinda cute. The jerky stop-motion animation is charming, and the way they sit up on their tentacles and look at you has a distinct puppy-dog quality to it. (More's the shame when our heros blast them with their sidearms.)

Filled with 1950's atomic power skittishness and sporting a genuine mad scientist who creates monsters, Fiend Without A Face is one of those movies that I wouldn't mind seeing Hollywood update. It's not good enough to get upset over Hollywood "ruining" it, but it has enough potential to make for some great eye candy. Thumbs up on this one, if you enjoy campy 50's sci-fi.