FIEND WITHOUT A FACE (1958)

A B-movie sci-fi classic, mostly due to the grotesque title monsters which are invisible until the last 20 minutes or so when they are unleashed in a gory (for its time) and somewhat cheesy climax. In a Canadian village near the U.S. border, people are mysteriously dropping dead with their spinal cords and brains sucked out of them. Some try to blame it on nuclear power experiments at a nearby Air Force base. Marshall Thompson is a major investigating the deaths and Kim Parker is his love interest, a local girl whose brother is gung ho against the Americans. The combination of a woodsy setting, paranoid locals, and a male-female "detective" duo gives the first part of the film an "X-Files" feel. Eventually we discover the culprit is Parker's boss, eccentric Professor Wingate (Kynaston Reeves), who is doing psychic research (we see a copy of a book called "Sibernetics" on his desk!).

It turns out that Reeves, by stealing power from the base, has created "thought creatures" which have gotten out of his control--shades of FORBIDDEN PLANET. When they're invisible, we can hear them as they wrap themselves around a victim's head and slurp away. When they become visible near the end of the film, they look like flying brains with attached spinal cords, or a little like gigantic sperm--shades of ERASERHEAD! The climax, with our heroes trapped in a house while the creatures attack, plays out like a cross between THE BIRDS and NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD. The fiends can be killed with bullets, which leads to a gorefest (albeit in black and white) of split and oozing "brains" all over the place. Terry Kilburn (Tiny Tim from MGM's 1938 CHRISTMAS CAROL) is Thompson's sidekick. The chief engineer at the plant (played, I think, by E. Kerrigan Prescott) comes off like an 80's pop star, with an amazingly flamboyant hairdo. Thompson is a bit wooden, but not bad, and even a little sexy in his scenes with the even more wooden Parker. Nowadays, not all that scary or gory, but interesting as a pre-splatter era relic, and perhaps as an influence on a number of later films.