Fiend Without a Face (1958)

FIEND WITHOUT A FACE

FIEND WITHOUT A FACE (1958) ****

The 1958 British independent horror production FIEND WITHOUT A FACE contains everything this science fiction and horror fiend wants from a film of that era: a square but likeable hero (Marshall Thompson), a shapely heroine (Kim Parker), a mad scientist (Kynaston Reeves), townspeople who blame everything on the wrong people, atomic fallout, and horrible, terrifying stop motion animation monsters (created by the special effects team of Flo Nordhoff and Karl-Ludwig Ruppel) that are loads of fun.

It also has an evocative title.

The final 20 minutes or so of FIEND WITHOUT A FACE are phenomenal and push this film into the stratosphere.

The fiends of the title are floating killer brains who started as one brain materialized from the thoughts of Professor R.E. Walgate, a man who specializes in telekinesis. The nearby airbase’s nuclear power radar experiments have dire consequences and the original fiend escapes from Walgate’s lab and wreaks murder and mayhem on the surrounding community. The fiends replicate themselves through attacks on humans (looting their brains and spinal cords) and they remain invisible until the final 20 or so minutes after they crank up the nuclear power to DANGER! They must be stopped!

These fiends are one helluva brainstorm, literally. They have antennae and tentacles, and one can see their influence on later creature features creatures. (The ALIEN films leap to mind. George Romero must have watched at least the last 20 minutes of FIEND WITHOUT A FACE before he made the first NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD.)

When the fiends are shot in the brain (love that concept), they naturally gush out this great-looking brain glop and I honestly wish these death scenes lasted another 20 minutes. They are so much fun, and it’s just as great when our hero breaks out an axe. The fiends (love that word) finally turn into goo after our hero blows up their great power source real good.

When the fiends are in their invisible stage, we hear slurping sounds when they strike their victims’ brains and spinal cords. Awesome, totally awesome, because it’s not happening to us, of course.

Credited director Arthur Crabtree (reports have it that star Thompson worked on the film himself after Crabtree walked off the picture because directing sci-fi proved to be too much for his fragile little mind) and his team did a fantastic job with the fiends when they’re invisible or visible. FIEND WITHOUT A FACE pulls off the nifty little trick of building up high audience expectations toward a great final act, then it delivers the goods and maybe even exceeds expectations during that final act.

Believe it or not, FIEND WITHOUT A FACE apparently caused quite a storm of controversy when it was first released in early July 1958. The British Board of Film Censors demanded cuts be made before it would be certified for release and the picture still received an ‘X.’ It’s lucky to not have met the same fate as banned-for-many-years pictures like BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN (1926-54), FREAKS (1932-63), and ISLAND OF LOST SOULS (1932-58), for example.

Legend even has it that British Parliament discussed why the censors allowed FIEND WITHOUT A FACE to be released.

Over time, I’ve come to realize that I love 1950s horror and sci-fi: THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL, THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD, HOUSE OF WAX, GODZILLA, THEM!, CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON, INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS, THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN, ATTACK OF THE CRAB MONSTERS, FIEND, THE H-MAN, THE BLOB, THE FLY, HORROR OF DRACULA, PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE, BUCKET OF BLOOD, and THE KILLER SHREWS all have made personal top 10 lists for their respective years and the decade also featured at least five of Hitchcock’s best works (STRANGERS ON A TRAIN, REAR WINDOW, THE WRONG MAN, VERTIGO, NORTH BY NORTHWEST) and other films that are horrifying in their own distinct ways, like film noir KISS ME DEADLY and war film FIRES ON THE PLAIN.

Day of the Dead (1985)

DAY 12, DAY OF THE DEAD

DAY OF THE DEAD (1985) Four stars
DAWN OF THE DEAD (1978) showed more hope for humanity than NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968).

DAY OF THE DEAD (1985), the third entry in George Romero’s zombie series, heads in the opposite direction and it’s the bleakest installment of the entire run of films (six in total) as we see only just a sliver of hope for the human race. Honestly, we see more potential in the evolution of zombies throughout DAY OF THE DEAD than we do in mankind. Fans were blindsided after the more humorous DAWN OF THE DEAD.

The human characters in DAY OF THE DEAD mostly scream and shout at each other, they don’t listen to one another, and they’re just plain nasty and mean on a regular basis. You would think in a zombie apocalypse that they could put aside their differences and unite and fight toward a common goal, their survival. You would think they could get past their petty differences, their hostility for others who don’t fit their preconceived notions, their political and religious beliefs and prejudices, et cetera, but they are only human after all.

The action centers on an underground bunker where scientists are working on a solution to the zombie pandemic, while being protected from the hordes of zombies (who outnumber humans by 400,000 to 1) above by soldiers. Keep in mind that zombies, of course, are the test subjects and the soldiers are responsible for procuring more specimens. Whatever natural tensions exist between scientists and military professionals are only exacerbated by dwindling supplies, communication breakdowns, and not enough results from the scientists in the eyes of the soldiers.

Of course, we like some characters more than others and it’s quite obvious from the getgo that we are to be more sympathetic toward female scientist Dr. Sarah Bowman (Lori Cardille), black helicopter pilot John (Terry Alexander), and booze hound radio operator McDermott (Jarlath Conroy) than screw loose martinet Captain Henry Rhodes (Joseph Pilato) and mad scientist Dr. Matthew “Frankenstein” Logan (Richard Liberty).

That Romero always loved to mess with audience expectations.

Bowman’s an even stronger female character than Francine Parker in DAWN OF THE DEAD and it’s a joy watching her go toe-to-toe with Captain Rhodes and the boys.

Pilato makes for a great human antagonist and his demise provides us one of the great death scenes in any zombie movie.

Roger Ebert criticized the actors in DAY OF THE DEAD for overacting. Yes, these performances fit the definition of overacting with their exaggerated manner, but this overacting is for a very good reason. It demonstrates how much the human characters have lost the plot and degenerated into worse monsters than the zombies.

That’s apparent throughout by not only the behavior of the human characters but the behavior of the domesticated zombie Bub (Richard Sherman). Bub learns more than any of the characters in DAY OF THE DEAD and that’s a painful lesson for humanity.

DAY OF THE DEAD works today even more than when it was originally released on July 3, 1985.

Just go online and look at the comments section on especially a political story. Bask in relentless name-calling, abusive language, and hostility that only continue to get worse over time. You will probably come across words like “snowflake” and “libtard” (both especially popular since the 2016 Election) and other phrases from the main two sides of the political divide that show our increasing inability to have civil discussions about politics and religion. It should be alright to agree to disagree.

Reading an Oxford Dictionaries article from 2014 on the most common American political insults, it started with a quote from a Pew Research Center report conclusion, “Republicans and Democrats are more divided along ideological lines—and partisan antipathy is deeper and more extensive—than at any point in the last two decades.”

The article continued, “The lack of civility in our political discourse shines through in the frequency of taunts suggesting stupidity and irrationality. Such terms were brandished on both sides, but liberals were more likely to be called morons, fools, and loons, whereas conservatives were most often derided as nutjobs, nuts, and lunatics. Idiot was a favorite on both sides of the aisle.

“The type of adjective favored in insulting phrases varied by partisan affiliation as well. People insulting conservatives favored the adjective right-wing, which was more than twice as common as Republican and nearly four times more common than conservative. In contrast, the dominant adjective in negative epiphets for liberals was—liberal. Liberal was used more than four times as often as left-wing, and Democrat and Democratic accounted for only a fraction of the insults for liberals, with the former used twice as often as the latter.”

It concluded, “But there may be a ray of hope: partisans on both sides of the aisle accuse each other of being racists and bigots, demonstrating a consensus that intolerance and discrimination are universally reprehensible. And while there may not be much common ground between Democrats and Republicans, at least we can all agree on calling each other ‘idiots.'”

During a summer vacation in 2013, several months after the presidential election, a downtown Omaha, Nebraska artist displayed two posters combining both major parties’ candidates with silent movie classics, creating “Obamaratu” and “Mittropolis.” Of course, I bought both posters, because I love both NOSFERATU and METROPOLIS and I hated the 2012 Election. And the 2016 Election was amazingly even worse, a nonstop spitting contest between two jerks that brought thought and discourse to a new low. We’re being taken on a toboggan slide down the slopes of stupidity.

Every time I watch DAY OF THE DEAD, the shouting matches painfully recall so much of what life in 21st Century America has become. Increasingly strident, unpleasant, hateful negativity that’s become far less escapable with the social media boom providing us more convenient and diverse ways to hate. It’s so easy to be an asshole with the safe distance that social media entails. There’s very likely to be absolutely no repercussions for running one’s mouth online, especially when there’s an opportunity to hide behind the cloak of anonymity. Now, if we can develop the means to reach through our side of the screen and punch or kick the other person, we might actually get somewhere on the civility front. It would take just one legitimate punch in the mouth or kick in the crotch to curtail the snarkiness, and that goes for each party.

Being a sports writer by trade, I’ve found it bitterly ironic that over the nearly eight years in the sports writing business politics have become more “sports” than sports. Winning or losing and nothing else in between with much bellyaching, boohooing and bragging depending on which side of the outcome you’re on and increasingly partisan with passionate fans who can be fired up apparently so easily at rallies with platitudes and slogans mostly based on hating the other team. GO! FIGHT! HATE! TEAM!

Unfortunately, though, unlike sports, American politics gives us two basic teams, Democrats and Republicans. Why only two sides of the same coin? Should we not have far more diversity in thought or, if nothing else, evils? Pretend for a moment if the only NFL teams were the New England Patriots and the Dallas Cowboys or the only MLB teams were the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox.

One of my favorite concepts in George Orwell’s 1984 is the Two Minutes Hate. Absolutely brilliant. Every day in Oceania, Party members must watch a film depicting the Party’s enemies (namely the traitor Goldstein) and express nothing but their hatred for two minutes. It’s also a memorable scene in Michael Radford’s film adaptation.

In our rather informal way, how many minutes of hate do some of us get in? Bet we don’t limit it to two minutes every day. I’ll be honest, I am guilty of it too, I react violently to certain stimuli like a true automaton. There seems to be only two ways to react to Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Kanye West, Colin Kaepernick, and LeBron James, using the most prominent examples.

“The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in,” Orwell wrote. “Within thirty seconds any pretense was absolutely unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one subject to another like the flame of a blowlamp.”

I generally avoid making explicitly political posts on Facebook, mainly because I do not want to contribute any more to the quagmire. This especially holds true after every mass shooting or the latest national anthem controversy, for example. Sure, I have my own beliefs and my own opinions, but a few years back I learned not to blurt them out because it doesn’t do any damn bit of good beyond possibly making me feel good.

Now we can generate memes that encapsulate our beliefs, our prejudices, and our thoughts in a most catchy (and generally rude) fashion, of course packaged together by somebody else. Orwell was clearly ahead of his time and one of the true meme pioneers before anybody even knew what the hell memes were. You might remember his greatest hits “Big Brother is Watching You” and “War is Peace / Freedom is Slavery / Ignorance is Strength.” Package them together with great images normally painting the target in a most unsavory light and why the Internet Wars are won.

Sometimes I’ll laugh at memes, sometimes I’ll look at them rather unamused, and sometimes I lose a smidgen of faith in intelligent thought, one bad meme at a time.

That said, I haven’t blocked or unfriended anybody on Facebook just because their political or religious beliefs are different than mine.

Dawn of the Dead (1978)

DAY 10, DAWN OF THE DEAD

DAWN OF THE DEAD (1978): Four stars
In a 2014 NPR interview, the late director George Romero (1940-2017) answered the question about how zombies were a vessel for commentary.

“I’ve sort of been able to bring them out of the closet whenever I need them,” he said. “They are multi-purpose, you can’t really get angry at them, they have no hidden agenda, they are what they are. I sympathize with them. My stories have always been more about the humans and the mistakes that they’ve made and the zombies are just sort of out there. … They’re the disaster that everyone is facing, but my stories are more about the humans.”

None of Romero’s zombie movies have been more about the humans than DAWN OF THE DEAD.

It gives us four characters that we grow to care about, Stephen (David Emge) and his girlfriend Francine (Gaylen Ross) and Peter (Ken Foree) and Roger (Scott H. Reiniger). Stephen’s a traffic reporter (light on traffic, heavy on zombies in this flick) and our four protagonists load up into his traffic helicopter and eventually take refuge and lock themselves within a secluded shopping mall (Monroeville Mall located in Monroeville, Pennsylvania, east of Pittsburgh). They kill all the zombies inside and literally clean up, with an endless array of consumer goods at their disposal. They’re like four big kids in a candy store. They become complacent fat cats in a sense, fattened up by self-indulgence, until a motorcycle gang descends upon the mall and these rough biker dudes have the unmitigated gall to go for the kingdom. Of course, our two remaining male protagonists take on the motorcycle gang to the bloody end.

These characters are much better than what Romero and fellow script writer John Russo gave us in the 1968 classic NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD.

First and foremost, Francine seems at one crucial point early on like she might be headed for the Judith O’Dea Barbra character in the first movie, a real drag of a helpless female who’s either in panic mode or a catatonic state throughout. Granted, Francine gave us other early signs that she would break the helpless female mode. Sure enough, Francine does break that stereotype and DAWN OF THE DEAD is all the better for it.

Not counting Russell Streiner’s indelible Johnny, who’s only in the movie for a few minutes, Duane Jones’ Ben was the best character in NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD. Likewise, Foree gives us another strong black male protagonist and Peter’s the best character here. In fact, Peter’s even stronger than Ben. He’s a Superfly T.N.T. bad ass mofo zombie killin’ action hero, he says all the great lines including “When there’s no more room in Hell, the dead will walk the Earth,” and he’s also far more upbeat than Ben. We end the flick happy little consumers when Peter decides that he will continue to fight rather than pull his trigger and end it all. Two downbeat endings in a row would have been truly horrible.

Romero told Rolling Stone in 1978, “Monsters do exist: in us, and among us.”

Through Stephen, Francine, Peter, and Roger, I think we can see the monster that’s inside us, especially after they become fat cats inside the mall. It’s because these characters all develop within our hearts and minds until they’re not just standard issue, interchangeable horror movie victims like characters in lesser movies. We understand them when they indulge themselves at the mall; they’re living out many people’s consumerist fantasies. We truly feel it when zombies happen to them. We’re there with them every step of the way during their incredible journey.

Not only are the human characters an improvement from Romero’s first zombie try, but the zombies truly come alive in DAWN OF THE DEAD.

At times, they are sinister and relentlessly terrifying. Other times, they are sad or they are funny at other junctures. Romero uses them like characters from different silent movie genres, for slapstick, for sentiment, and to scare us, and they also remind us of the Monster in BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN. The director said that he sympathized with his zombies and that’s apparent throughout DAWN OF THE DEAD. Like the four main protagonists, the main antagonists are not standard issue, interchangeable zombies. Anyway, they still just want to go shopping too, just like us.

Now, let’s talk about the gore.

Like the later EVIL DEAD movies and RE-ANIMATOR, the gore in DAWN OF THE DEAD passes through queasy to surreal and quite enjoyable.

On the other hand, in April 1979, former New York Times film critic Janet Maslin walked away from DAWN OF THE DEAD. Here’s the opening paragraph of her review:

“Some people hate musicals, and some dislike westerns, and I have a pet peeve about flesh-eating zombies who never stop snacking. Accordingly, I was able to sit through only the first 15 minutes of ‘Dawn of the Dead,’ George Romero’s follow-up to ‘Night of the Living Dead,’ which Mr. Romero directed in black and white in 1968. Since then, he has discovered color. Perhaps horror-movie buffs will consider this an improvement.”

No, I don’t view the color in DAWN OF THE DEAD an improvement over the B & W in NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, but I do believe the 1978 movie improves on the earlier film in just about every single possible way. Better human characters and better zombies (who are still not all that different from us, despite their preference in food and their makeovers) especially make this a rare sequel that outdoes the original. Not to mention Romero’s biting satire on consumerism.

I mentioned DAWN OF THE DEAD in the review of THE FLY and it’s a fitting way to end this review.

“For example, George Romero’s DAWN OF THE DEAD (1978), a horror movie or a zombie picture that also passes through action and adventure, black comedy, silent and slapstick comedy, drama, gore galore, cinematic and social satire, surrealism, survivalism, and melodrama in addition to being great at the basic level of being a horror movie. All those extra traits put DAWN OF THE DEAD in the upper echelon.”